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Where professors come from

Brian Leiter

An article in Nature a few months ago documented where professors across all fields got their PhDs; the study found:

Overall, 80% of all domestically trained faculty in our data were trained at just 20.4% of universities. Moreover, the five most common doctoral training universities—UC Berkeley, Harvard, University of Michigan, University of Wisconsin-Madison and Stanford—account for just over one in eight domestically trained faculty (13.8%; Fig. 2a and Extended Data Table 3). Even when disaggregated into domains of study, 80% of faculty were trained at only 19–28% of universities (Fig. 2b).

A couple of observations.  The fields studied were the humanities, social sciences, applied sciences, natural sciences, mathematics & computing, medicine & health, engineering, and education.  While the "big five" producers (above) are all excellent research universities they are also distinguished by being comprehensive in a way that, e.g., Princeton or MIT are not (the latter, for example, do not offer PhDs in education, or medicine; and MIT does not offer PhDs in all the social sciences and humanities).   

The authors of the study have also not thought carefully about their results.  They declare that, "Our analyses show universal inequalities in which a small minority of universities supply a large majority of faculty across fields, exacerbated by patterns of attrition and reflecting steep hierarchies of prestige."   If they are using "inequality" purely descriptively, then I guess that is true, but the whole tenor of the piece is that there is something wrong with this pattern.  But where is the evidence that this "inequality" is in any way pernicious or damaging to the academy?  The "big five" are, as just noted, not only leading research universities but deep and broad in the PhD fields they cover.  Is that not exactly where one would hope the next generation of academic researchers and teachers are trained?   (Of course, similar patterns obtain in philosophy, except because of the PGR, the "top producers" of faculty are not quite the same as in the above study across all fields.)

Thoughts from readers on the Nature study?

 

 

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7 responses to “Where professors come from”

  1. Steven Hales

    Related to your comments are base-rate concerns. For example, by my count Brown has 17 tenure-track philosophy faculty and Notre Dame has 44. Ceteris paribus, and assuming the number of grad students is commensurate with the number of faculty, we should expect Notre Dame to be adding 2.5 times as many faculty to the professoriate. I don't see how that is some kind of pernicious inequality.

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  2. oldster

    The distribution of outputs and inputs here is a shock, since in most situations I would assume that the output to input ratio would be predicted by the Pareto Principle, which suggests that something like 80% of the PhDs should be produced by something like 20% of the universities. Yes, this is a deeply disturbing finding.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle

    I mean, honestly, the only disturbing part is how closely the prediction is verified by the actual numbers!

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  3. Ian

    While the points that Brian and Steven make are valid, I think we’re missing some important context here. Even if we take into account the concentration of preeminent academics at certain elite universities, and even if we note that some of those universities are quite large and comprehensive in the disciplines in which they offer graduate degrees, we can look to recent history, to economic factors and the changing of American higher ed (i.e. the rise in contingent academic labor), the current nature of secondary education in the U.S., and of course prestige bias as pointing to a system of academic hiring that is troubling.

    1) After WWII and the GI Bill(s), American higher ed expanded greatly. We might call this the golden age of academic hiring as the demand outpaced supply. Access to higher ed was by and large class-based (and thus race) prior to these advances, very much limiting the pool of persons from which the professoriate was drawn.

    As higher ed expands in the post-WWII era, supply of qualified professors increases. Graduate training begins to take place more and more outside of the traditional institutions (Ivy and Ivy-esque private universities on the whole), it begins to bring in people who because of class or geographic reasons (sadly, not often race or gender) were not necessarily bound for graduate school before. I think we can agree that this was probably for the good, not only in terms of social justice but in terms of opening academic work (particularly humanities) to perspectives that were often simply ignored.

    A rising tide, they say, lifts all boats. Increasingly, regional state and private universities/colleges away from the coasts were at least capable of investing (or lucking into) innovative and/or productive scholars that were not always beholden to the same small group of established scholars at Harvard or Yale. We often complain that there is too much scholarly work done today and much of it is of too little quality. But surely the history of American academia in the mid-twentieth century shows us that good work can come from all over, from non-elite schools, from “backwaters” and flyover countries. I want to say look at the rise of the “Big Ten” midwestern schools as just one example.

    2. The study linked looks at tenure-track faculty, and of course these are the folks teaching the next wave of grad students. But tenured or tenure-tracked employment has only recently started to be seen as focusing in a central way on training new scholars. Indeed, for the most part higher ed’s purpose is to train undergrads who may or may not go on to become scholars or academics. Those undergrads are, more and more, being taught primarily not by the tenured or tracked, but by PhD-holding contingent workers from—let us say—less elite schools (I’d go so far as to say anything below a top ten ranking in a given humanities discipline equates to a very, very low chance of getting a TT job these days). These contingent workers are apparently expert enough to teach undergrads (including upper div, in major classes), but not “worth” hiring on a tenured track and they often teach far more classes than a tenured person would even consider.

    At the very least, we should ask to what degree having stable employment is a predictor of scholarly production. I will tell you from personal experience that if one teaches well, well over a 3/3 or 4/4 load, one does not have a lot of time to do research. There are of course new PhDs who have ambition and training and skill and talent who produce strong work and plenty of it from the get-go and these are attractive to hiring committees, for good reason. But, and I think again history bears this out, a great deal of strong work comes through research and in-depth teaching that contingents often just can’t do. For most of us, thought takes time and time takes stability. So what do we lose by having X number of trained but underemployed and overworked scholars (in the humanities)? They simply aren’t going to become doyens if the talent, intellect, and training is there.

    3. It seems clear enough that access to elite PhD programs is at the very least enabled by access to elite undergraduate institutions, which in turn is enable by access to strong secondary education. But strong secondary education is in short supply in poor, rural, “inner city,” and primarily non-white areas. Because the strength of public secondary education is so dependent on the wealth of its surrounding district(s), public high schools of quality are harder to find and harder to get into unless one can afford to move one’s family into an often prohibitively expensive area.

    The other strong option for secondary ed is of course private high school, which will again typically be difficult to access for those who are not wealthy. In addition, beyond the issue of quality, private school education will more often lead to good outcomes due to “connections” (read nepotism) than will a public high school of average strength, reinforcing the already strong class divide between public and private secondary ed in the US.

    4. It seems to me to clear that prestige bias, and its less than salutary effects, are quite common in academic hiring. I find it interesting that even established, tenured profs with doctorates from elite private universities will somehow find a way to mention the name of that university within five minutes of engaging them in conversation, regardless of topic. Certainly, in the humanities where we are often starved for undergrad majors having someone with a Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Duke, etc. doctorate is going to look better to undergrads than having someone with a doctorate from Indiana or UWashington Seattle. In addition, hiring committees overwhelmed with candidates to vet can be forgiven for taking the shortcut of “this candidate has a doctorate from Yale and a letter from X famous person, so they must be good” (whether or not the candidate actually worked with X in any close way). The winnowing must occur, and if we’re looking to cut our time investment it would seem that being a student (however nominally) of famous person X at famous school Y would indicate that the candidate is stronger than another candidate from Champagne-Urbana whose dissertation advisor’s work might not be familiar to the committee member.

    Further, even if a doctorate from a prestigious university and training with and from well-established figures in a given field were to strongly correlate to a job candidate’s potential to be a major scholar, and I’m not sure it does, it must be said that filling PhD-granting institutions with faculty who have all trained with the same 40 people is not the way we produce pathbreaking work (see point 1 above). Look at the dominance of neo-Kantianism in the German university in the late 19th and early 20th century—when intellectual movements produce a stranglehold, we simply run in circles until that movement collapses or until subsequent thinkers (often from the provinces!) call it in to question. Or more currently in English literary studies. A doyen of that discipline is Stephen Greenblatt (formerly of UC Berkley, now of Harvard), the grand poohbah of “the new historicism.” He is, last time I checked anyway, the editor of the Norton Anthology of English Literature. No doubt having trained with him is attractive to hiring committees. But because of the dominance of his approach in literary studies, one could at least argue that having more of his students in the discipline would more likely lead to simply reiterating that approach ad nauseum (which, and I don’t blame S.G. personally for this, has in fact happened). The point being that training with the doyens is no guarantee of innovative thought, and might in fact be an indicator of a tendency to adhere to standing paradigms rather than interrogate them.

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  4. Gregory C. Mayer

    Biologist Jerry Coyne (U Chicago) discussed this Nature article at Why Evolution Is True, including how faculty are hired in biology; commenters brought up the Pareto Principle. https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2022/09/26/nature-many-ph-d-s-produced-from-few-universities-ergo-elitism-and-bias/

    Reply
  5. Michel Xhignesse

    Back in 2015, I did a quick count of this for philosophy (nothing fancy, just basic counting of where T/TT faculty in PhD-producing programs earned their PhDs.

    For the international T50 of the PGR at the time (actually 53 departments), I found that the five highest placers–Oxford, Princeton, Harvard, Pittsburgh, and MIT–accounted for 34% of all PhDs at ranked institutions.

    When I checked Canada's PhD- and MA-granting institutions, I found that six accounted for 34%–Toronto, Oxford, Western, Pittsburgh, Princeton, and the Sorbonne (almost entirely at Francophone institutions). Toronto had 63 placements to Oxford's 27.

    In both cases, the dropoff in placements between groups of departments is quite steep, with the result that many of the departments with ten or fewer placements (or, indeed, just one) are no slouches in terms of philosophical quality.

    I do think such concentrations have a significant effect on the kind of research that gets done–subfields not represented in these departments find themselves pushed further to the research margins, and perhaps even the teaching margins (depending on what the makeup of UG-only programs is like).

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  6. V. Alan White

    FWIW as a datum one memory seared in my brain was being introduced to a highly-ranked-school big-named "colleague" at an APA smoker in the 90s and being asked first off where I got my PhD. "Tennessee." The reply? "Oh–a jock school." Can you imagine how mortified I was? One person, yes, but an indication of what must at least then have been a pervasive mind-set to generate such an off-the-cuff remark to a stranger.

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  7. Commentator

    I suspect that this data underplays the dominance of Oxford, an issue which relates to some of the concerns about intellectual diversity suggested above.

    When you look, even faculty who took their PhD elsewhere often spent time at Oxford doing the BPhil. That makes a lot of sense: if you are a motivated student, it's obvious to want to go spend time in a place which has so many excellent philosophers. There is a very distinctive style associated with Oxford philosophy, drilled into students right through from the "crib sheets" tutors provide undergrads preparing for finals to PhD-level supervision: terse Introductions which start with "X is the view that…; Y is the view that…", assuming the last fifty years of philosophical research provides a list of the main options for thinking about topics; lots of "toy examples", not taken directly from real life; a statement of the thesis followed by an "objections and replies" section; etc. In turn, this style has come to dominate recent philosophical writing in "top" places, across a wide range of disciplines from political philosophy to philosophy of language. Note this is very much about style rather than substance: my claim isn't that Oxford encourages everyone to believe the same substantive theses (the sheer size of the faculty ensures that can't happen). Rather, the concern is more that a large number of students end up believing the same topics matter, and approach those topics in the same way.

    This kind of lack of diversity isn't anyone's fault. It may, in fact, be a good thing; perhaps that approach just is the best way to do philosophy. Or, even if more diversity would be good, there may be reasons to prefer our situation to an alternative. Still, it's worth noting

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