Application of Moneyball Principles in Faculty Hiring

There has been a lot of blogosphere discussion recently on the application of Moneyball principles to law faculty hiring (a subject I discuss in What Law Schools Can Learn from Billy Beane and the Oakland Athletics, 82 Tex. L. Rev. 1483 (2004)).  Jim Chen (Minnesota) weighs in today with Breaking the Elitist Stranglehold: Three Modest Proposals:

I offer three modest proposals, all tempered by my recognition of their implausibility, that might begin to chip away at the elitist stranglehold on law faculty hiring:

1. Use prior publication as a threshold qualification and stick to it.
2. Develop more rigorous quantitive measures of academic performance.
3. Develop a short-form way of allowing candidates to describe themselves to their recruiters.