Misconceiving Merit: Paradoxes of Excellence and Devotion in Academic Science and Engineering by Mary Blair-Loy and Erin Cech

Abstract

Reviewed by: Misconceiving Merit: Paradoxes of Excellence and Devotion in Academic Science and Engineering by Mary Blair-Loy and Erin Cech Julie R. Posselt and Gloria C. Anglón Mary Blair-Loy and Erin Cech. Misconceiving Merit: Paradoxes of Excellence and Devotion in Academic Science and Engineering. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022. 232 pp. $27.50. ISBN 9780226820156. Yale professor Nicholas Christakis recently sparked a flare up on social media by challenging the rights of graduate students to unionize, tweeting, "Graduate students are primarily students and trainees, not ordinary workers. Academia is a calling." Although the view of scholarly life as a calling may be contested viz a viz unionization, sociologists Mary Blair-Loy and Erin Cech document in Misconceiving Merit: Paradoxes of Excellence and Devotion that there is indeed a widespread expectation that scholars should single-mindedly dedicate themselves to their work as if it is a vocation or spiritual calling. Even more insidious than the belief that academia is a calling is the belief that scientific excellence following from unbounded devotion to one's [End Page 410] work is pure, unbiased, and unpoliticized. These beliefs work in tandem; many assume academia is a meritocratic profession in which the most hardworking scientists are rewarded for their excellent contributions. Yet, decades of research reveal otherwise. Opportunities, rewards, and penalties vary by social identities; people are neither equally rewarded for similar efforts nor similarly penalized for deviations from devotion and excellence. The result? STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) professionals do not mirror the race, ethnicity, and gender demographics represented in the United States. U.S. white and Asian men represent 63% of the tenured or tenure-track science and engineering (S&E) positions at 4-year colleges; 18% of S&E doctoral students; 18% of S&E master's students; and 28% of full-time S&E undergraduates at 4-year colleges. In this volume, the authors pose the question, "How can a set of professions that so highly values objectivity and fairness in assessments of merit reproduce these unfair outcomes?" (p. 22). Their answer is that STEM faculty's misplaced adherence to meritocracy is filtered through two schemas (i.e., widely held, hegemonic beliefs): The work devotion schema is "a cultural mandate that defines work as a calling deserving of undivided allegiance" (p 3), while the scientific excellence schema is "a cultural yardstick that STEM academics use to measure the competence and worthiness of their colleagues" (p. 4). These schemas are "anchors of the cultural definition of merit in STEM" (p. 19), shaping the professional culture of science. STEM faculty dutifully uphold–even embrace– these beliefs. Scientists live their own lives according to unrealistic expectations around devotion to work and norms for excellence. And, importantly for the opportunity structure and inequalities within it, they judge themselves and their colleagues through these schemas, despite evidence that they uphold gender, racial/ethnic, and LGBTQ inequalities in science. Specifically, white and Asian cis-gender men are rewarded more than marginalized groups, including white women, and black and Latino men and women, for similar work. Blair-Loy and Cech arrived at these conclusions with a case-oriented methodology. They collected data in 2012 from STEM faculty at one U.S. research university, including over 500 university personnel records, surveys from approximately 250 of the people from whom they had records, and semi-structured interviews with 86 faculty who completed the survey. The authors also constructed a Scholarly Productivity Indices database of all participants by tracking the number of publications from a SCOPUS bibliographic database, as well as the number of grants awarded, dollars, and PI (principal investigator) or Co-PI designations based on university records. The authors used the survey responses to develop scales of how faculty view themselves and an idealized successful person (self-conceptions) on assertiveness, relational, and diversity promotion. The heart of the book documents the existence of these schemas and offers evidence that professionals use them to "explain away underrepresentation and divert blame for its resolution from STEM faculty and institutions" (p. 123). Critical to this argument is evidence that the schemas, while widely held, intersect with patterns of discrimination in the real world to reproduce inequalities. For...