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).