A minor miracle occurred here recently at the University of Not-Bielefeld. No, no. Admin is still here in all its full glory. (Changing that would require a major miracle and you would not believe the amount of paperwork involved to get miracles on that scale approved nowadays. Much, much easier a few centuries ago.) Instead, someone merely stopped to question whether or not a specific form was actually serving its stated purpose.
The form in question (or the questionable form) comes from the central Equal-Opportunties Office of the university and is designed to increase the proportion of women in the university workplace. Just how it does this by collecting statistics about the hiring process (e.g., what type of position, where it was advertised, how many male / female applicants / invitees / selectors, …) remains somewhat of a mystery. Even more mysterious, however (cf. minor miracle / thinking), was that the Equal-Opportunities Officer of the Faculty of Science decided to send round a questionnaire some months ago to ask if the form was actually doing that.
All told, the feedback from the 40-odd percent of professors in the faculty who responded was nothing short of unambiguous. (And academics don’t tend to agree about anything.) Nearly three-quarters of them said that don’t like the form and even more thought that it did nothing to improve equality within the University. The selected comments that were published echoed this view, with the consensus pretty much adapting the slogan of the NRA to say that “forms don’t hire people, people hire people.”
And, thinking about it, it’s really hard to see how this form can have any influence whatsoever on the hiring process. I already mentioned that it’s more about statistics than anything else. For another thing, it’s filled out pretty much after the entire process is finished and is part of the requisite paperwork to get the chosen person appointed. Finally, the survey revealed that the form is filled out in about one-third of all cases by secretaries who play absolutely no active role in the selection process whatsoever.
Now, despite all this and the double supermajority on the part of the profs against the form, it appears that it will remain because of a simple veto.
In publishing the results of the survey, a statement from the university’s central Equal-Opportunities Office was included indicating that it requires the form for its own statistics (surprise) together with the promise that it will also indicate later how the form does indeed promote equality at the University.
You would have thought that all this would have been done with the blessing of the central office or at least that they would have been consulted beforehand to see if it would even be worthwhile. More to the point, how complicated can the explanation possibly be that it couldn’t have been included directly in the e-mail? I’m sure that most of us could have held the extra half hour out.
As such, the whole incident was admin through and through in the end, with the survey amounting to nothing more than another useless form for us to fill out …
The Blog About Fog 