Donald Rumsfeld on faculty hiring

With a hat tip to Phil Frickey, one of my oldest and best friends in this business:

Whatever else can be said about [Donald Rumsfeld], he was exactly right in his most famous quotation, as applied to faculty hiring:

As we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns -- that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know we don't know.