Moneyball in academia?
I watched the movie Moneyball with my family. There was a scene which reminded me of a number of conversations I have had over the years concerning hiring young faculty. The scene features in the trailer below. Billy Beane [Brad Pitt], general manager of the Oakland As major league baseball team is sitting at a table with the club scouts and they are discussing which players to recruit, particularly because they just lost a couple of star players. The scene highlights how they use arbitrary subjective criteria to endorse or dismiss particular players. ["He has an ugly girlfriend and so must lack self-confidence"!] How is this like academia? Unfortunately, the same thing can happen. People can get very emotional and subjective, like in the movie. Over the years, colleagues from a range of institutions have told me how they (or their department) desperately want to hire a particular individual and will "mortgage the farm" to do it. But, is the individual real