Meritocracy

Does academia matter?

For mine, this question needs to be first addressed before any issue of re-balancing in the sector can be tackled.

On one hand, academics teach our tertiary students and that would seem, on the face of it, a very important task.

And yet, probably two thirds of our tertiary students would be better off learning their trades in apprenticeships rather than universities, if such things still existed.

But still, that leaves the third of occupations and disciplines for which a university degree is the most efficient form of training.

In Australia, about half of the residual third can only find jobs in the discipline of training if they either (1) leave the country, or (2) become academics.

So that leaves one-sixth of the student population as a mission-critical education project.

In this one sixth, who are the educators?

Are they failed or exhausted practitioners? Generally not, they tend to be recycled post-graduates with very little other-world experience.

And even more oddly, their promotion is based upon research outcomes rather than educational performances.

This is based on an old notion of unknown origin that a good researcher will automatically be a good educator.

My own experience would suggest there is a non-correlation on the matter.

So, to the matter of re-balancing in the academic system…

Should we focus on gender re-balancing? Or balancing based on socio-economic status, race, religion, sexual orientation or other?

My suggestion is that in the 5/6th of academic jobs that barely matter, in the interest of fairness, each randomly selected 1/6th of the academic population be sent to the chopping board for re-balancing based on one of gender, socio-economic status, race, religion, and sexual orientation (noting that, mathematically speaking, we can’t re-balance all of them at the same time).

For the 1/6th of academics that do matter a little, how about we just choose them on merit? Whatever the hell that is. I don’t pretend to know but I do know that we can measure the quality of their graduates and then introduce a reward scheme for the educators (e.g. bonuses) based on these measurements.

I also note that, once all the re-balancing is done, as sure as night follows the days there will be a popular movement calling for merit equality, otherwise known as a meritocracy.

This old-world concept will confuse Gen-X’s and Gen-Y’s, tabloid news readers, politicians, real estate agents, soft toys, and any female in the professional services that has also had a baby or two.

We will have to send them all back to university as night students to learn all about this odd Aristotelian conception. It will have to be a complete year of night study because first they will have to learn about logic and rational deduction and a few other things.