Thoughts on academic life (1)- The Performance of Transparency

Dear readers,

As I continue curating my unboxing series—those explorations of personal archives and forgotten memories—I find myself drawn to excavate a different kind of collection: the accumulated observations from over two decades in academic life. Like the personal artifacts I’ve been discovering, these professional experiences have layered into complex narratives that deserve careful examination.

Today, I begin a new series dedicated to these reflections. Each post will delve into the intricate landscape of academic culture, drawing on moments that have shaped my understanding of institutional life and scholarly practice.

One pattern that emerged gradually through my academic journey concerns the curious relationship between proclaimed ideals and lived practice. I’ve come to notice how often our most eloquent discussions of ethics, transparency, and intellectual integrity exist alongside behaviors that seem to contradict these very principles.

This isn’t a sweeping indictment, but rather a personal observation about the human tendency toward performative virtue. I recall colleagues who champion ethical research practices while engaging in questionable authorship decisions, or those who advocate for inclusive hiring while participating in networks that systematically exclude certain voices.

What colleagues narrated to me from a recent department meeting crystallized this dynamic for me. A colleague passionately advocated for “transparency” in filling a new faculty position, suggesting the process be discussed openly in our departmental forum. The proposal felt progressive and democratic. Yet what unfolded was a familiar academic theater: the chair announcing that a position had been created and a particular individual would be appointed to it. Our “transparency” amounted to learning about predetermined decisions a few months before their official announcement.

When I was a graduate student in the Boğaziçi University Sociology Department, my friend and I were informed by a professor that the department would be hiring a new teaching assistant. We went to the department office to obtain and complete the application form. The secretary did not even show us the form! She told us, “We ask the person whom we have already decided to hire to fill in the form”. That was the day I broke up with the department.

This moment reminded me of my earlier encounters with Scandinavian academic hiring practices, often celebrated as exemplars of openness and fairness. While these systems do implement more visible procedures than many institutions, I’ve come to understand that transparency can become its own kind of performance—elaborate processes that create the appearance of open competition while established networks and predetermined preferences still operate beneath the surface.

Michèle Lamont’s work on academic evaluation offers concrete insights into your observations about hiring practices. In How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment (2009), Lamont reveals how evaluation committees, despite formal procedures designed to ensure fairness, often rely on implicit biases and network connections that favor certain candidates while appearing to follow transparent processes.

Lamont, M. (2009). How professors think: Inside the curious world of academic judgment. Harvard University Press.

Comparative studies of academic hiring practices reveal that even systems celebrated for transparency can mask informal networks. Research by Musselin (2010) in The Market for Academics shows how Nordic countries’ formalized hiring procedures, while more visible than other systems, still operate within networks of professional relationships that significantly influence outcomes.

Musselin, C. (2009). The market for academics. Routledge.

In the name of transparency, universities began to rely on more documentation, but this rarely leads to more transparency. This obsession of documentation may be a separate topic!

Like the personal archives I’ve been exploring, these professional memories reveal not linear progress, but complex, interconnected narratives constantly being reinterpreted. Please add to the comments new topics, cases, or sources!