Recruiting

It seems common-sensical that knowledge industries of any kind shouldn't limit their hiring to local candidates. Those raised and trained elsewhere bring the benefits of training which may be different and better; they may also bring knowledge of languages and so of the bodies of knowledge available in those languages. I recently spent time at a well-endowed US university year, working under an Australian, sub-letting from an Irishman and then from a Canadian who both worked for the same institution. The more cosmopolitan the field of study, the more international the workforce: thus, among the fifty or so tenured or tenure-track staff in Economics at the same university, there's a Greek, a Canadian, an Icelander, three Germans, a Chinese woman, a Chilean, a Brazilian, four Italians, two Belarussians, three Japanese, a Frenchman, a Turk, an Argentine, a New Zealander, an Englishman, and an Indian. That university is private and blessed with hotlines to US visa offices, as I know from personal experience. As an comparative exercise, it might make more sense to look at large, publicly funded universities in second cities, like Birmingham in the UK and Montreal in Canada. Here's a link to a list of U of Birmingham Economics faculty, where you'll find a Dane, an Italian, and at least two Indians; and to a similar list for the Department of Economics at McGill University in Montreal, home to a Spaniard, a Moroccan, a Scot, an Englishman, a Japanese, five Americans, an Australian, a Dutchman, a Thai, and a Chinese man. How does this compare with the largest institution in the Catalan university system, the huge Universitat de Barcelona? To be fair, the UB has more faculty in Economics that any of the three examples in the US, the UK and Canada. For the sake of comparison, then, I've chosen the most international (in subject matter, at least) of their Economics departments, which teaches economic policy and the structure of the world economy. The staff list is here.

Notice anything? CVs are not listed (they're likewise absent from the Department's home page), so we have to go on names and surnames. That said, the list looks very local. One staff member out of forty-eight does not have two surnames. She is a visiting professor. Otherwise, it looks a lot like a closed shop.

(Not all Barcelona universities recruit quite as locally as the UB: the UPF's Economics department is fairly international in provenance and training. )

Universities are not free to hire anyone with a PhD: candidates for full, permanent posts must have been vetted by a public agency in charge of assessing academic output. The process takes six months. More about that tomorrow.