No feedback

If you look even a cursory bit into the academic social media space, you’ll notice a pattern. Rejection with no feedback is exceptionally common—from jobs to grants to papers, academics complain a lot about not getting feedback on how to improve. Indeed, feedback is also a major factor in the undergraduate experience (it’s a whole section of the UK national student survey) and the heterogeneity of feedback on graduate student drafts is a perennial issue.

So, why is it so hard for academics to give good, clear feedback on how to improve?

I’ve reflected on this for a long time—as I keep encountering this problem of feedback, I think it fundamentally arises because academic prestige has been built in part from “whom it excludes, rather than whom it includes”.. After being exposed to this idea as an undegraduate research assistant with Will on new New American University book, I can’t help but see how it underlies so much about how academics decide on the relative ``value’’ of different organisations, regardless of the organisation’s role or function.

Good journals and colleges/universities have extremely low acceptance rates for papers/people, and are ranked in part (but a very large part!) on their acceptance rates. Major individual academic fellowships (like NSF CAREER, ERC Starting Grants, and UKRI Future Leaders Fellowships) have extremely low acceptance rates. Good conferences get more applicants than they have speaking time. The classes that really helped, in many academics’ self-myths, were those where they just managed to scrape by. And, I’ve heard from many a hiring board that their great, deep, and highly-qualified list of runners-up indicates the organisation’s great status in its field.

Any competitive selection process will have more applicants than things to select. And, it’s reasonable that something ``good,’’ like a journal paper with high visibility, a job at a good organisation with good terms & benefits, or a large grant program, will have many applicants. Fine, this makes sense—lucrative opportunities with limited space will generally be desirable to many people.

But, over time, these become prestigious in part because they have threshing value. Like membership in elite clubs, these processes derive value from the labor of sifting, shortlisting, and selecting. Yes, the thing being awarded has value itself, but the labor involved in the process of awarding also creates value for the awarding organisation. As there is value in the threshing of wheat into chaff, academic organisations across the spectrum derive part of their value from the threshing of candidates into .

This kind of threshing value is core to organisational self- and peer-esteem for pretty much any academic organisation. And, it’s why we have such bad feedback, and so little of it in higher education.