How Not to Dismantle the Old-Boy Network

Back in 1962, when I was a graduate student at Yale, I stopped at the English department office to pick up my mail after having played basketball. The department secretary said to me, “Mr. Fish, the chairman wants to speak with you.” I found this odd because I hadn’t ever met the chairman and didn’t think I should present myself at a first meeting dressed in shorts, sneakers, and a sweaty T-shirt, but I acquiesced and stepped into his office. He looked up at me and said, “Ronald Paulson is leaving the University of Illinois and going to Rice.” I wondered, why is he telling me this? I didn’t know Ronald Paulson from Adam (or from Hecuba); the chair’s laconic pronouncement seemed to me to be coming from some mysterious country. The mystery was solved with his next, rather amazing, statement. “We have been talking about it, and we think that you might be a good person to occupy our slot in Urbana.”

What I was being told was that the Yale English department, like an imperial state, had title to various positions (slots) in what amounted to the colonies of the American academy. While there might be interviews and dossiers and, down the line, votes, the real work was being done in some room in New Haven (perhaps in Mory’s), where it was determined to what outpost the bright young men and women soon to receive Yale Ph.Ds would be sent. That’s the way things were done. (In this case, it never happened, because my wife more than hinted that if I went to Urbana, I’d go alone.)

Well, it’s still being done that way, although not so openly, according to Andrew Piper and Chad Wellmon. Despite the emergence of blind submission and other strategies designed to produce “rational” processes of selection, they argue, “the university remains deeply marked by patterns of patronage and patrimony, and by the tight circulation of cultural capital.” For example, their data show that the authors of more than half of published scholarly articles earned their Ph.D.s from just 10 elite universities.

Three questions: Is any one surprised by this? What exactly is it that should be corrected? According to what measure or standard would the correction be attempted?

Of course, no one is surprised to learn that graduates of Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Chicago, Princeton, et al. are more successful in placing their work in high-profile venues than are graduates of other institutions. Just think of the members of the editorial boards of university presses and learned journals. Where did they get their degrees? That’s just the trouble, say Piper and Wellmon: Our supposedly neutral standards of equality and excellence are actually controlled by “networks of influence and patronage,” whose controlling presence is not openly acknowledged.

Are Piper and Wellmon saying that the filters responsible for the disproportions their data reveal should be replaced by better ones? It seems so when they declare that “we need alternative systems of searching, discovering, and cultivating intellectual difference.” But this last phrase — “intellectual difference” — suggests another project, not the academic one of winnowing the wheat from the chaff, but a political one: Let’s get more voices into the mix without worrying too much at the outset about where they come from or what they have to say; time will sort it out. That’s a democratic or democratizing imperative (akin to the fabled marketplace of ideas) that puts a higher premium on participation than on the identification of those worthy and unworthy to participate.

One can argue that the two projects go together: The more voices you let into the conversation, the more likely it is that good results will follow, including the result of having the better ideas emerge without the intervening and corrupting mediation of networks of privilege. If you sign on to that proposition, what you are committed to is not the replacement of contaminated filters with purer ones but the elimination of filters altogether, on the reasoning that in the absence of artificial restraints, good judgments and good outcomes will just naturally emerge.

To be sure, Piper and Wellmon do not advocate going without filters (which they know is impossible); they advocate multiplying them, but that amounts to the same thing. The more filters there are, the less any one of them can claim to be authoritative; what one excludes, some other will include, and in combination they will function not to keep things out, but to let more and more things come in. (A capacious basket of filters un-unified by an overriding value will operate like a sieve, not like a strainer.)

The direction in which Piper and Wellmon want to move is made clear when they urge us to forget about citation rankings (which merely reflect current structures of power) and instead “imagine filtering by institutional diversity, citational novelty, matters of public concern.” Note how sideways this list of criteria is to the academic (normative) value of getting things right. If you filter by institutional diversity, you’re establishing a regime of academic affirmative action: Because such and such university or college is not represented on our faculties or publications, we should take care to make a place for its graduates simply because they do not now have one; failure credentializes you.

If you filter by citational novelty, not having been cited by anyone becomes an indication of merit; because no one’s heard of you, your voice must be included. If you filter by “matters of public concern,” you are putting to the front of the line concerns that happened to have caught the public’s attention, and that, one shouldn’t have to say, is to substitute a political criterion for an academic one. The fact that the public is interested in something does not make that something a candidate for academic study. (Of course, the fact of public interest is not disqualifying when it comes to academic attention; it is just that it cannot stand alone as a reason for meriting it.)

We see just where this is all going when Piper and Wellmon make their final recommendation: “It is time we built a scholarly infrastructure that is more inclusive and more responsive to a broader range of voices, including those outside the academy.” Voices outside the academy are voices emanating from persons who have not had academic training or academic experience. But how can that be a good thing when it comes to making decisions or rendering judgments? The answer is that outside voices are as good as (or better than) inside voices if knowledge is conceived as bits of information with which one can, and should, have immediate — not filtered — contact. In this conception of knowledge, professional know-how is a liability; it gets between you and the data. What you want, ideally, is just the data and you, what Piper and Wellmon call “algorithmic openness,” an openness that is able to undo “longstanding disparities of institutional concentration.”

It is this techno-utopian vision that Piper and Wellmon are peddling; and like all lefty versions of technological salvation, it promises liberation from confining structures like states, universities, disciplines, departments, canons — in short, from the academy. At the moment of liberation, opacity, patrimony, favoritism, patronage, hegemony and all those bad things will have been cast off like shadows and veils and succeeded by the blessed condition of transparency. (I should add that transparency is both an impossible and an unworthy goal.)

In their final paragraph, Piper and Wellmon invoke “intellectual openness,” the state of being open to everything and therefore incapable of validating anything. The now familiar slogan (at once puerile and pompous) is that “information wants to be free.” Free information, information unattached to some angled project but just floating there, is meaningless information; it acquires meaning, becomes information rather than mere noise, when it appears against the background — confining and yet enabling, enabling because confining — of the very institutional norms and practices that Piper and Wellmon would rescue us from. Give me the old-boy network any day.

Stanley Fish is a professor of law at Florida International University and a visiting professor of law at Cardozo Law School of Yeshiva University.