difficult choices

[Still trying to work through this one so if anyone has any comments they're more than welcome]

There is a position up for grabs in your department. Two people apply. One, let's call him "A", has studied all his life in America and now teaches at a prestigious university there. The other, let's call her "M", has lived all of her life in England and now teaches at a good university there. You can only offer one of them the place. How do we go about this?

Starters: what's irrelevant: living in a particular place, gender, etc.

Secondly, who is the "we " that decides? Let's say that you're an outsider, someone who works in a different subject matter altogether, but that you've been asked by a committee to comment as a 'neutral'.

For this to even be a difficult choice let's assume that we don't have a trivial answer. So, the English university is good by any standards and may in fact be better in some respects than the American one.

What do you say? What do you do? What procedure do you follow? To make it more complicated-and realistic-let's say that you also have the option of saying"I don't know" (i.e you may not be able to express a preference, rank the two candidates-in which case only those who know the subject matter will decide).

Let's be clear here: you may in fact find some discomfort in having to make such a difficult decision, or you may be fearful of making a wrong decision and you wish to avoid that at all costs. If that is the case, opting for "I don't know" seems like a good response to those problems. But that doesn't capture what I'm trying to get at here.

Let's say that it is possible for you to genuinely believe that you cannot rank the two candidates and if that is the case it would be wrong to pass judgement (even if you have to make the choice or express a preference one way or the other, you might still plausibly say it's unfair). But no matter what, you'd still have to do some explaining. You cannot simply say something like, well, "that's my opinion" or "that's what I feel". The committee wants to hear your reasons.

Let's say that there's a thing like 'goodness' when it comes to a good candidate but that there are many reasons for someone being a good candidate. Amongst the plausible reasons could be: teaching experience (n.o. of years, dedication etc); number of publications; quality of research-as evinced by number of citations, originality, contribution to the field etc.; clarity of thinking; ability to bring in grants/research funds.

Already we're beset with problems. Some of these things are quantifiable, others call for subjective assessment. Secondly, the way the problem is set up neither candidate dominates in every 'dimension' of goodness, and it's not clear how one should-even assuming this was possible- give weights to the different dimensions/criteria...i.e how do you 'aggregate'? Do you, for example, say that something like originality trumps every other consideration? Thirdly, since you're a reasonable person, you understand that some of the quantitative indicators may not be that helpful (A has more citations because he works in a well-known field; M's work is in a new and exciting area, even though it may have less "relevance" than A's work)

This is what you say: well, it's not my subject, but if you ask me you should look at correlations. 'A' teaches at an American university and American universities produce far better academics on average. It's clear cut.

Is that reasonable? The committee is a bit troubled by the substance of the answer, but also by the lack of equivocation. Firstly, we're not talking about American universities in general ; secondly, even if A's university produces better academics in one particular subject (in general, or on average) compared to M's university, it doesn't necessarily follow that it does so for all subjects (and in particular, for the subject area in which both the prospective applicants work). Thirdly, even if A's university does produce better academics on average (and we're assuming two things by doing this: that we have this thing called 'goodness' whose various dimensions can be aggregated for any individual and, secondly, that goodness across individuals can be compared) we might still be scpetical about following such a rule.

The committee thinks to itself: wouldn't a rule such as: 'on average American universities (or A's university) produces better academics and therefore...' only be helpful if we didn't have any other particular information, or if we didn't have any expert opinions that could help evaluate the relative merits of both candidates?

Do you think the committee has a point? If so, wouldn't it have been better, more reasonable, for you to say: "I don't know".