The impossibility of the original position in real academic institutions
Rawls’ concept of the original position changes the setting for individuals deciding the principles of a just society. This is because individuals lack information of their own place within the society and thus cannot tailor the principles for self-benefit. The key here is that individuals become ignorant of their role within the society due to the removal of prior information. However, in academia (as in any real-life setting), this concept of the original position is impossible to be encountered in practice. Candidates for, say, a fellowship are required to submit a list of their past achievements in support of the application. As a result, academic institutions are never free of information about candidates that can bias the distribution of goods (i.e., conditions for the original position are never met). Even if proposals are submitted anonymously, the project proposal itself contains information about the project as well as the applicant. For instance, virtually all manuscripts and many grant proposals are written in English, which is not the first language for many applicants and consequently, imposes barriers to effective writing communication (especially in early career stages) (Hyland, 2019). These barriers can be overcome, but the solution introduces additional ecological factors that further aggravates the issues raised here. For instance, effective English writing will depend upon age at exposure to second language, access to resources and education in the second language, opportunities to write in the second language, quality of feedback received from peers that are native speakers and so on [see e.g., (Nikolov & Djigunovic, 2006; Saville-Troike & Barto, 2016; Tucker, Hamayan, & Genesee, 1976)], which are ecological factors that did and will continue to affect individuals’ careers. Overall, the original position of complete ignorance is not attainable in practice.
Despite this, previous efforts by academic institutions have attempted to make the process fair – and to some extent, recover the idea of the veil of ignorance –through for example a lottery system, which arguably removes inherent biases in decision-making in the allocation of goods (Roumbanis, 2019). A modified version of such lottery model has been adopted in New Zealand and received with reasonable acceptance, although not for all types of research grants (Liu et al., 2020). By using randomness to select amongst qualified proposals, the lottery system adopts a fair process of selection. However, this lottery system is only fair if the academic institutions enforce that the pool of candidates and proposals from which the lottery is drawn from is a pool of candidates that have had fair equality of opportunities. Otherwise, the lottery system will simply replicate the unfairness of the academic system as a whole. For example, suppose that the candidate pool in the lottery reflects gender inequalities of academia and say that this inequality has ratios of 70% male and 30% female scientists. In this context, even a fair lottery system will, on average, award 2.5 times more grants to male than to female scientists, thereby propagating the unfairness of the system even if the process of selection is fair. In other words, while the process of decision-making for the allocation of distributive shares is fair (lottery), the pool from which the process is drawing from reflects a historically unfair academic environment, ultimately leading to unfairness. To my knowledge, the system implemented in New Zealand uses anonymised project proposals during a pre-selection peer-review assessment, which helps remove some of the biases in the pre-selection process but does not necessarily control for biases in candidate pool (e.g., gender inequalities) or other information contained in the application itself (e.g., non-native writers) (Liu et al., 2020).