American Universities: Everything Has Pros and Cons

Well, after having taught for seven years at North American universities, I think I’ve come to understand how certain things work. There is no doubt that there generally exists more meritocracy here than in Italy. But this certainly does not mean that in Canada or the U.S. that the most worthy person is always hired. Favoritism, political patronage, the decisions of little men which often, if not always, come back to haunt the department that does not hire the best professors on the grounds that candidates lack international fame, research skills and cannot attract the most brilliant students. These problems exist everywhere.

OK, not as much as they do in Italy. We shall restrict the discussion to Italian studies departments. It is unfortunately true that in some of these, there is the tendency to recreate a “little Italy” concerning negative recommendations, a silent conspiracy and those famous parasitical “cliques” that one of the protagonists of the beautiful film “Caterina in the Big City’” talks about.

What are negative recommendations? The Anglo-Saxon system is normally positive and out in the open: The professors that have worked with you — it doesn’t matter if you are only a Ph.D. candidate or if you already have the title — are constantly asked to express their support for your job application for a new university by writing a reference letter. Usually, these letters are not accessible to the individual candidates that request them. They are mailed directly from the person who writes the reference to the university that requested it. As such, the referrer could kill the applicant’s chances by writing negatively about the applicant, amounting to fake support. Naturally, this never occurs, or at least very rarely. If you have a negative opinion about an applicant that asked you for a recommendation letter, you can invent an excuse to not write the letter. That is, if you are a good person.

Negative recommendations are often not written; rather, they are expressed orally in a manner that does not leave a trace. Let’s imagine that I am the departmental president and that I won by a few votes, perhaps against a candidate who was more prestigious on paper, and that a couple of these votes came from my graduate students. The most pressing thing for me to do — so that I don’t lose future votes — would be to make sure that my department hires the greatest number of my graduate students (as researchers or lecturers) as possible.

And this is how, magically, one of my graduate students, who does not yet have her Ph.D., could win a position over other candidates who are objectively more qualified, candidates with Ph.D.s with good academic publications and who have demonstrated teaching talent, perhaps even with very good student evaluations. The hiring committee, where I — the president — already have a voice that is not insignificant, will consider highly my oral recommendation, and perhaps that will be justified by saying that “we all know her,” “we know that she has good characteristics,” “she works hard,” et cetera. Why would we ever risk hiring a candidate who has more titles but is unknown? This is how the game is played, and the negative recommendation is the finishing touch to an already sick academic environment, in a cycle that is increasingly difficult to break: At the next elections, I, a second-rate president, will be sure to receive more internal votes than my outstanding colleague.