Russo’s book exemplifies how our goal to make a meritocracy out of all aspects of society has in many respects failed. Russo describes a situation in which a man (Hank Devereaux) has been elected to very important position in which he decides the fate of many people’s jobs. However, he doesn’t take his role seriously, doing very little to ensure that his colleagues will have jobs in the future. He is truly unqualified for this position, yet his humorous personality combined with other people’s belief that he would be easy on them ensured that he would be elected.
This situation draws parallel with many real world events and is more common today than I wish it were. How could Hank Devereaux acquire such a position while being so unqualified? How could a C student in college become the world’s most powerful man for 8 years? Personality plays too important a role when judging these situations. Do people get carried away with emotion and vote for the nicer or funnier candidate, or are people uninformed that this candidate is in fact unqualified? Either way, our society seems to be quite far away from being a meritocracy.
Yes, character and emotions do have a certain impact on decisions. For example, when applying for a job the employer reads the objective criteria from applicants in the resume. From here he or she filters some of the applicants based on their merit (or at least that is what the employer is supposed to do). Out of those applicants that have been filtered the employer chooses to ask the applicants to interview with him or her. Now at this time all applicants should have something that makes them merit the job. While the applicant might have stellar objective criteria, the employer might see some flaw with the applicant based on the interview. Perhaps he or she did not communicate well or he or she was rude. Perhaps this person will not get the job, although in paper he or she had the best objective criteria. This is when decisions based on emotion come to play. This is not to say that even if the applicant has the best stats but can't even communicate orally he should get the job. Instead, having too much charisma than needed for the job while not having the objective qualifications is when emotional decisions come into play.
ReplyDeleteThere is some tendency to associate charisma and emotional intelligence with the qualifications for a job. For example, while President Obama has fantastic qualifications (Harvard Law School among others), people associated his great speech abilities and charisma with his ability to govern. While it is too soon to determine if he is in fact a great president or a terrible one the expectations for the Obama Presidency were and still are extremely high. Perhaps charisma and emotional intelligence do qualify for merit and should be rewarded. However to assume that simply because a person is charismatic, regardless of his or her qualification, then he or she is well qualified for the job is terrible reasoning. This was the case for Deveraux who as Philippe mentioned "his humorous personality combined with other people's belief that he would be easy on them ensured that he would be elected."
Although it seems a bit unrealistic that such an unresponsible person could assigned in such an important duty, it may happen in real life. Being the chair of a university department is a duty that requires both innate and learnt skills and a lot of experience,having a good reputation and a proper character and being an expert in your field of knowledge. Hank devereaux does not possess any of these qualities and qualifications. He does not have a Ph.D or even a good college GPA, and the professors of his department are even worse. He has been chosen as the chair of department not because he is suitable for it, but because he will not hold the other professors responsible and they can do whatever they want. This is a real calamity for that department's students. They can not learn anything from them. Another surprising fact is that there is a total lack of controll to this department by the university's administration. Because just seeing his personal life is enough to decide that he should be fired. His private life is completely immoral and we can say that he is just the slave of his carnal soul and acts according to it. He even gets in trouble because of this weakness. I find it possible for this to happen only at a state-run university because there is less responsibility and they would not care much about the government. But at a private university this is hard to happen because the administration would do their best to have a good reputation so that they can run over their business for long and maximize profit. There is only a small probability that it may happen if the department is independent. gemerally they are very strict when they choose their professors and especially the chairs of departments. Under such pressure the professors would do their best so that the students succeed. The personal life of a professor is important but not as much as his qualification in his field of knowledge. If someone has finished a Ph.D in a department it means that they have some good opinions and feelings about their major. Surely they should not be just "nerds" but also people who are able to interact and use their knowledge in the best way possible. So they should have also a good character that will help them perform their tasks better.
ReplyDeleteI think that in some ways, charisma is not necessarily what gets Devereaux the job; rather, it's that he is apolitical and is therefore the best compromise-candidate in a department that is wholly divided against itself. Some of his colleagues find his lack of seriousness charming--though certainly not as many as who find it utterly frustrating--but really, its his strange lack of leanings toward any specific agenda that garners him the position of department chair. It's only when Devereaux shows that he cannot commit politically to any issue, such as the job security of his fellow faculty, that he is recalled.
ReplyDeleteI'd be careful of saying that one's morality is part of qualifying a person for any kind of job. After all, who one loves (or does not love) or what one does in the privacy of one's home does not necessarily have any weight (nor should it) in hiring or tenuring decisions. It's only when specific individual qualities that cause one's teaching portfolio, research agenda, or service history to be compromised that such issues can be taken into account. To argue otherwise might jeopardize the notion of academic freedom (and civil liberties) that we value so dearly in the U.S.