University professor is a job. Not an award.

Don Rubin said once that a problem with university hiring committees is that they think that they’re giving an award rather than finding someone to do a job.

I was thinking about this recently in the case of the recent Cambridge University fraud scandal. As is often the case in such stories, the real scandal was not so much the perpetrator of this fraud (in this case, an emotionally-troubled pathological liar who killed himself after his fabrications unraveled in public) but rather his employer, which had in place a crazy system that involved:

1. Hiring as a professor a pathological liar and research fabricator who, even had his claims been true, would have been manifestly unqualified for the position.

2. Studiously looking away when the problems were pointed out—I guess that counts as an example of “the sunk cost fallacy.”

3. When a journalistic outlet tried to do their job for them, hiring an expensive and evil law firm to suppress the story—I guess they were following the strategy of “the best defense is a good offense.”

4. Letting their hapless public relations officers twist slowly in the wind by instructing them to flat-out lie by saying that the professor in question was a “victim of a vile campaign to undermine his credibility” and that he had been cleared of “allegations of plagiarism regarding his thesis and journal publications.”

Any one of these four steps could arguably be a firing offense—not for the professor who was mistakenly hired, but for the university executives who made those decisions.

Ha ha, just kidding—executives who make immoral and disastrous decisions don’t get fired, they either stay on and ascend to higher positions or are allowed to leave on their own terms, perhaps to take a post at some other institution. But, yeah, I’d call them firing offenses, just as I think it should be a firing offense for whoever conducted, ordered, and accepted Columbia University’s fake U.S. News numbers.

Also, promulgators of research misconduct often don’t get fired either—just look at the University of California sleep liar, the University of Southern California giraffe liar, the Duke University promoter of a possibly-nonexistent data shredder, the Harvard and Yale plagiarists, the Harvard business school dude . . . ok, we could go on forever here! It seems pretty clear that Cambridge University wouldn’t have fired their fraudster had there not been overwhelming media pressure. Similarly with other notorious examples such as the Cornell food researcher, the Harvard monkey man, and the Dean of Engineering at the University of Nevada: these guys would probably still all be in their jobs had it not been for the embarrassing publicity.

But, back to the Cambridge fraudster. People talk about the consequences for him personally and for the reputation of the university, but what about the students who’d be stuck taking classes from this guy—or, to consider the opportunity cost, not taking classes from someone who was actually qualified to teach the material. What about the taxpayers who are not getting the education research they were paying for? (I speak here as an ongoing recipient of government funding for education research.)

And this brings us back back to Rubin’s point that being a professor at a university should not be considered an award bestowed upon someone to celebrate their specialness; it’s a job. It’s a job that involves teaching, research, and service, and the point is to hire someone who can do some good mix of those three things.

And if you go back to look at what the university committees and executives were doing, it looks like they weren’t thinking about this. To them, the Cambridge professorship was not a job, something that you hire someone to do because work needs to be done; rather it was a reward to be bestowed upon some amazingly deserving individual. And I think this helps to explain why they felt they couldn’t back down and step away from their mistake. Because this wouldn’t just be admitting they screwed up in their hiring process; it would imply that the person they gave this award did not deserve it. They were committed to a false picture of who this person was, a picture that was created by the endless series of lies that led to all the later problems.