Academic Selection Panels

Extract from  Arnold V.I., What Is Mathematics?, Moscow, 2002

(translated  from Russian).

Part of my academic duties is to participate in university academic selection  panels, e.g. in Paris,  whose task is to select the right candidate out of hundreds applicants. I noticed that the fair and  democratic voting process always resulted in that I voted with the minority, who preferred  the strongest candidate, while the majority of votes always went to an applicant who was  far from the best (in fact, frequently  it was the weakest applicant for the advertised position).

My colleagues gave me the following explanation of this phenomenon. “We clearly see who is the strongest candidate, but we select the weakest simply out of the need for our own survival – otherwise in two or more years, a strong candidate will be competing with us for promotion opportunities, which means that it is better for us to choose someone who is not too brilliant.  Besides, if we did as you do and considered only scientific achievements and scientific potential of the applicants, then we would have to fill all available positions with Russians, because we can clearly see that they are prepared much better than others.”

There had not been a single Russian among the applicants on this particular occasion, but, generally, I agree with this high estimate of the level of the Russian scientists.  The reason behind it is that the standards of scientific education are continuously falling all over the world, but, as in almost everything else, Russia is behind most countries. For example, our primary school students still can easily add fractions, while the American college students for already quite a while believe that 1/ 2 + 1/ 3 = 2/ 5. A committee led by the Nobel Prize winner Prof. Glen Sikorsly in  California had recently made it a requirement that all  students entering universities were able to demonstrate their ability to divide 111 by 3 without a calculator – something that most of them simply don’t know.. This requirement was later contested in High Court as anti-constitutional.

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from zed244 – In case you don’t know who Vladimir Arnold is, search web – or /and read his 1997 popular  paper “On teaching Mathematics” eg. here http://pauli.uni-muenster.de/~munsteg/arnold.html   or  the  interview wth him  at  www.ams.org/notices/199704/arnold.pdf