Tenure-Track Draft Picks

A postdoc and blogger at Candid Engineer in Academia suggests that "if assistant professors were drafted the same way as players in the NFL," tenure-track candidates could be evaluated by "some kind of ranking, and difficult-to-decipher stats," like their h-index, or an algorithm to determine their overall efficiency. Institutions vying for top candidates in "the TT draft" would devise slick strategies, and scouting reports would surface, such as "should we go with the cell biologist? Maybe it'd be wise to go with someone a little taller. You never know when the NIH might enact height requirements," the blogger jokes.