How to find the right professor

It’s the university management that decides on awarding professorships. Students, on the other hand, are expected not to make decisions, but to listen. | Image: Martin Ruetschi / Keystone

Swiss universities are no strangers to controversy when it comes to appointing new professors. Back in 2014, it emerged that the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) had granted the multinational food company Nestlé a seat on its hiring committee and a veto over the appointment of successful candidates for two new professorships it was sponsoring. This came a year after the process to fill a vacant chair at the University of Basel’s theology faculty had been re-started following complaints about a lack of women on the original shortlist and differences over the chair’s ideological direction.

According to the Egyptologist Antonio Loprieno, a former rector of the University of Basel, these and other episodes reveal “an inherent tension” between the ‘bottom-up’ wishes of academics and the more strategic ‘top-down’ imperatives of university leaders. The former, he says, tend to favour purely academic accomplishments when selecting candidates for new positions, whereas the latter consider a broader range of criteria, including public engagement, commercialisation of research and the thorny issue of equal opportunities.

Despite this tension, Loprieno maintains that Swiss universities usually manage to hire highly qualified individuals. Nevertheless, he acknowledges that the recruitment process frequently involves striking a balance between academic and non-academic criteria. “The ideal person is both an excellent scholar and is also involved in society”, he says. “You won’t often find that”.

Faculty vs. management

In decades past, explains Loprieno, professors in Switzerland negotiated their budgets directly with the cantonal government and had little in the way of paperwork to worry about. But that changed in about the year 2000, he says, as universities as a whole gained autonomy and acquired large, global budgets. The upshot has been the rise of what he describes as efficient university administrations and greater control from the rector’s office – which in turn has changed the way that academics are hired.

Recruiting new professors from outside the university generally involves the faculty or department in question setting up a hiring committee. Numbering roughly 10 to 15, the committee members typically comprise a few academics – some in-house and some from other faculties or universities – as well as representatives from the student body and even from external industry. Their tasks include establishing the criteria for the new appointee, publishing job advertisements, reviewing the applications, drawing up a short list of candidates, interviewing those candidates and then putting forward the top names from the list.

By setting up the committee and in some universities also voting on the candidates, faculty members play a central role in the hiring process. But their decisions are constrained by the university presidency and board, who set the guidelines stipulating the hiring process, review the composition of the committee, review or in some cases add external experts to the committee, and then approve or otherwise the committee’s preferred candidate.

More than publications

When choosing the best person for the job, hiring committees have to weigh up multiple factors. Beyond a candidate’s research and teaching skills, these include the ability to manage people and raise funds, and also how that person’s particular research interests dovetail with those of other professors or departments. In addition, there is the candidate’s potential for commercialising research, although as pointed out by Matteo Galli, the director of faculty affairs at EPFL, this tends to be more relevant when appointing senior academics and those in fields closer to industry.

These broader qualities are becoming ever more prominent, with Swiss universities having signed an international initiative known as the Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) that seeks to move away from quantitative metrics such as paper and citation counts. Loprieno says more weight is now being placed on criteria such as time devoted to talking at conferences or to journalists, for example. “This is already expected of younger scientists”, he says.

Quality before gender

Aside from promoting these skills, there is also a widespread move to increase the number of academics who are women. Universities generally have fewer female academics than male, in particular at the highest levels. At ETH Zurich, for example, just 18 percent of full and associate professorships were held by women in 2023 (though 39 percent of assistant professors and 34 percent of bachelor students were women - Ed.). This is why ETH set itself a goal several years ago of assigning 40 percent of new chairs to women. That threshold has meanwhile been surpassed comfortably – reaching 67 percent in 2023, according to press releases.

The University of Basel, in contrast, is working to increase the share of female professors without university-wide targets, according to its secretary general Stefano Nigsch. Nigsch explains that the university does stipulate that if a male and female candidate are judged by the hiring committee to be equally strong, then the woman should be offered the job first. But he says that gender is not a selection criterion “in itself”.

Galli says the same is true at EPFL, where a candidate’s qualities “are above gender”, but where a preference is given to a female candidate in the unusual event of a tie. Moreover, he adds that professors on the committee communicate to their contacts in other universities that the position is open. “This is one way to get more quality candidates in general”, he says, “and also to get more women to apply”.

Such political or strategic considerations are generally less important when it comes to promotions, according to Loprieno. Deciding whether or not an assistant professor is made an associate professor – a permanent position – after around five years also involves setting up a committee. But that committee’s make-up and decisions are unlikely to be changed from above. “I don’t know of a case where faculty has recommended someone and the university leadership has said no”, says Loprieno.

However, even in the case of external appointments, university management tends to limit its interventions. At Basel, Nigsch says that the president’s board checks that hiring committees avoid conflicts of interest, include student opinions and following diversity regulations, for example. But he says it is quite rare that any committee members are changed as a result, just as it is unusual for the board to veto the faculty’s preferred choice of candidate. “It is a very field-specific job to choose the right person for the professorship, and the competence is in the faculty”, he says.

The situation is similar at EPFL, according to Galli, who says that the vice-president (the provost) approves the composition of committees as long as guidelines have been followed. And while not having precise figures at hand, he estimates that presidential vetoes of candidates occur just “once a year on average”. Besides shaping the usual competitive hiring process, university management can also work together with faculties in appointing accomplished senior professors directly. Such appointments tend to be fairly few and far between, with Galli estimating that EPFL has used it to hire just three new professors out of a total of 68 since 2021, one of whom was the mathematician and Fields Medal winner Martin Hairer. Loprieno adds that this mechanism tends to be used in the more globalised natural and life sciences, rather than in the more conservative humanities and social sciences.

But given hiring is quite complex and multifaceted, does it not risk becoming opaque and therefore suspect? Loprieno doesn’t think so. He argues it is important that universities are candid about the process they use, not the specifics of individual cases. He maintains that “transparency is often a word used by those unhappy with the results, not the procedures”, and that the quality of new professors has in any case remained high in recent years. “They might not be the person who would have been appointed 25 years ago based purely on a list of publications”, he says, “but an ignoramus? I don’t think so”.