At what point is someone considered too old (in terms of experience) for an Assistant Professor position?

Question

I competed for an Assist. Prof. in Greece with someone with 12+ years experience since PhD. Suffice it to say that it did not turn out well for me (4 years of experience) or other interviewees for that matter, even though many of us had the better* research output in terms of quality, ranked venues, and achievements (3rd party grants and so on), but clearly not as many citations as we do not exist long enough in the field.

It also did not help that the committee favorite had their BSc, MSc, and PhD in that same university, and 12+ of postdoc in a partner lab in the vicinity.

But, anyway, I asked the committee the following question, which I also pose here: At which point (if there is such a point) is someone considered too old (in terms of experience) for an Assist. Prof. position?

They told me that the favorite had a higher citation count, so even if they were 60 years in the field they would still rank them first because of that. In my opinion, even though that might well be legal, it does not seem very ethical to me.

I am under the impression that an Assist. Prof. position is an entry level position where you are supposed to form your own lab, attract early-career grants to help you with that (which have experience-age restrictions), and work towards becoming a professor.

*As an example, I will simply say that the position was on AI with a focus on Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, and the committee favorite had 0 articles in IJCAI, AAAI, KR, AIJ, or JAIR, whereas I had 6.

Answer 1

No sane committee is ever going to turn down a candidate solely for being 'too experienced', and it is rarely meaningful to reduce someone's CV and accumulated experience to just a few numbers. However, this comes with some qualifications:

• If someone is reaching career milestones (e.g. first Asst. Prof. job) much later than the norm, a committee might question why, and whether this is a sign that future development will be slow.
• If someone is applying for a job that is 'too junior' for them, committees might be concerned that either (i) they're not really a serious applicant, or (ii) that they'll quit as soon as something better comes along.
• By definition, if someone has more experience, then the committee has more information on which to base a decision. Junior candidates often have to be assessed in terms of 'potential for success' rather than 'evidence of success'. This can count for or against the more experienced applicant: some committees may prefer to gamble on a rising star, others may prefer the security of an established candidate.
• Hiring decisions (just as everything else) are influenced by many external factors. Everything from financial considerations (experienced candidate may cost more) through to government policy (how candidate's metrics would influence the university's ranking and hence income) may help sway a decision for or against a particular candidate.

Answer 2

When an employer hires someone to do a job, in academia or anywhere else, their goal is to hire the best person to do that job, according to some notion that the people in charge of hiring have of what “best” means.

Now, you can reasonably disagree with someone else’s idea of what “best” means and think that they’d be making a mistake to hire person X over person Y. You may well even turn out to be right about that. But if they are operating in good faith and their definition of “best” is free of biases related to characteristics of the job candidate that have no effect on the candidate’s ability to do the job, you cannot claim that the action of hiring X over Y is unethical.

By this logic, your view expressed in the comments that “there should be a preference for people with less years of experience [...] because the position is entry-level” makes no sense. The only type of preference an employer should legitimately have is to hire better people. And it may be that “academic age” (time since PhD) can factor into the evaluation of who is “better” in such a way that the person with a smaller academic age comes out on top — for example some employers might quite reasonably prefer a candidate with academic age N and M published papers to a candidate with academic age 2N and M+1 papers, since while the latter has more papers, the former has a higher rate of publication. But the idea that a candidate should be automatically given preference just because of having a smaller academic age does not make any sense as a notion of “betterness”.

The bottom line is: it’s possible that there was some corruption or bad faith involved in this hiring decision; we cannot rule that out (or in) based on the information you provided. But the mere fact that a person with 12 years of post-PhD experience was hired for an assistant professor position is not by itself evidence of any wrongdoing or unethical behavior.

In other words, the answer to your question is “never”.

Disclaimer: I don’t know anything about hiring for academic jobs in Greece specifically. But I believe that the reasoning above will apply to most Western countries with healthy employment laws and practices comparable to places like the United States, UK, Canada etc.

Answer 3

At which point (if there is such a point) is someone considered too old (in terms of experience) for an Assist. Prof. position?

I don't think there's a common answer to this question. All else being equal, the only real downside in hiring someone older for a Asst. Prof position is that they have a shorter time before retirement at that institution. Practically speaking, most individuals with years of experience are either near the Associate Prof. level already, or have other reasons (e.g. lack of research) that have made them un-hireable thus far and would continue to affect their hireability.

It also did not help that the committee favorite had their BSc, MSc, and PhD in that same university, and 12+ of postdoc in a partner lab in the vicinity.

For your situation, I doubt having too much experience is relevant. It sounds like they were very familiar with the person they hired already. Many departments are required to conduct faculty searches, with an official job posting and multiple interviews, even if they already know who they want to hire.

They told me that the favorite had a higher citation count, so even if they were 60 years in the field they would still rank them first because of that.

This sounds more like them trying to rationalize their preferred candidate rather than being official department policy. Alternatively, there are some countries where quantifiable metrics such as citation counts or number of publications are prioritized over quality.

Answer 4

Many years ago a friend of mine went back to school after a bit of a detour and wrapped up his PhD at the ripe old age of 31, then started applying to academic positions. One response, from a highly-regarded east coast school, was a rejection stating "we're looking for younger candidates, thank you for your interest." No doubt an outlier, but it tells you that sort of thing is out there, or at least was. This was back when one would send a letter and CV to the selection committee through the mail. Last time I visited him he still had that rejection letter hanging framed on his study wall.

Answer 5

Let's suppose that we grant you your premise that a person with less experience in the requisite job skills should be preferred for an "entry level" position. You do not give any justification for this in your question, but let's surmise that you take the view that it is desirable to give people with less experience a chance at entry, specifically due to the fact that they have a less competitive application than someone with more experience.

In view of that premise, why stop with hiring the PhD graduate who has a low number of years of service? Surely someone without a PhD at all has even less experience in the field, and so is in even more need of assistance in gaining entry. Come to think of it, an adolescent who has not yet graduated high-school has even less experience again (lacking experience even as a tertiary student learning the field), so surely they require even more assistance to gain entry. Young children who have not yet learned to count have even less experience in any preliminary skill in the field than a high-schooler, a fortiori for newborn babies who have not yet learned to hold their own heads up unaided. One observes here a reductio ad absurdum --- if less experience is preferrable, notwithstanding that it reduces the ability to do the job better, then what is the logical stopping point for this principle?