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> “Accepting that prestige is a good measure of excellence means that we’re not looking into the history of how things became prestigious,” Gonzales says. The f

> “Accepting that prestige is a good measure of excellence means that we’re not looking into the history of how things became prestigious,” Gonzales says. The founding of elite US universities is “intertwined with exclusion”, she adds. For instance, many institutions have a history of seizing land from Indigenous groups, or originally derived their wealth from or supported their infrastructure with the labour of enslaved Black people. These are non-sequiturs. The research question here is whether faculty are hired from those prestigious schools above and beyond the rate at which they would have been hired based on other signals of their potential as researchers, which, presumably, are related to what school they go to. I am not seeing how schools' historical relationships with marginalized peoples bears on that question. I believe it was Gary King who said that nepotism and meritocracy are very hard to distinguish in academia. You would need a clever identification strategy [0] to tease out the effects of prestige on the margin. I'm afraid this article doesn't offer much on that front. [0] https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.15.4.69 https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.15.4.69

pessimizer 4y ago
The research question isn't about whether "prestige is a good measure of excellence." That's the question that you ask after you discover that people are being hired based on prestige, if you don't automatically assume that's either a bad or a good thing. If prestige is definitely driven by quality, it's not bad that professors are being hired because of the prestige of the schools they attended. But accepting that prestige is a good measure of excellence means that we're not looking into the history of how things became prestigious.
- setgree 4y ago
  Sure, I think it’s good to both first get the data on which scholars come from which schools, and I also think unpacking the social and political construction of prestige is a great research agenda. But to assess whether prestige is a source of bias in the hiring process, you have to separate prestige from other markers of quality. Otherwise, you have a big confounding variable problem. This author, and also the quoted professor of education, don’t seem to engage with that, and in fact seem to beg the question by assuming that prestige is an independent force in hiring decisions, which, I thought, was the thing the article was trying to demonstrate.
  - cycomanic 4y ago
    Have you been on a university hiring committee? My anecdotal evidence is that yes prestige very strongly matters and coming from a very prestigious university often outweights other factors such as publication record. I haven't read the original article yet but one can easily test if e.g. the publication record of a graduate student from a non-and prestigious uni differ to the extend that is indicated by the hiring.
    - setgree 4y ago
      I have not been on a hiring committee — I actually failed my comprehensive exams partway through grad school which is how I ended up in tech :) — but your hypothesis sounds very reasonable to me. I’m just saying that we need a more careful causal identification strategy than that provided herein to say whether prestige has a meaningful effect on hiring, on average.
    - ninjin 4y ago
      I have been on multiple hiring committees and had insights into plenty of hiring processes at other “top-25” universities. My experience is that it is more complex than simply using prestigious universities, supervisors, and collaborators as markers. In fact, I have so far never heard that kind of argument raised, while I have heard diversity arguments raised more times than I can count. Rather, my experience tells me that having attended prestigious universities, as well as having had “great” supervisors and collaborators drives up other metrics for a candidate such as publications, impact, collaboration networks, etc. Success breeds success across academic generations, due to overall positive perception of people/institutions, (in particular at top American institutions) ample access to funds, etc. Note also – and this is very important – that the metrics I mentioned are considered “objective” and disconnected from prestige. Making matters even worse, the ability to make use of the opportunities that these prestigious institutions bring, is of course correlated with intrinsic attributes you want to see in a candidate (not everyone that goes to Harvard ends up being a superstar). It is very difficult for me to pick this apart. How can I possibly objectively tell whether individual A that entered a top-5 institution or individual B that entered a top-100 institution is most deserving? Given the complexity of it all, I suspect that I can not, but I also sincerely doubt that the insistence on “objective” metrics does much to alleviate an already very messy situation.
- P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
  It doesn't follow, it's a non-sequitur. There's nothing about using prestige as a proxy for excellence that has any bearing on investigating what got them there in the first place. It's akin to claiming that accepting financial success as a decent proxy for business acumen means no one is interested in knowing how they originally because financially successful. Not only does it not follow, it makes no sense as to why accepting one would even imply someone wasn't interested in the other.
- pc86 4y ago
  I think we're not looking into it because it doesn't matter in this context. We can look into it, sure. But the question of how Yale University treated certain groups of people or how they got certain plots of land doesn't have the slightest bearing on whether or not Professor Smith got her specific professorship because she went to Yale. They're both good questions but completely unrelated.
thfuran 4y ago
>These are non-sequiturs. And also probably little more than proxies for the age of the institution.
- setgree 4y ago
  At the very least, highly correlated :)
- ckemere 4y ago
  Stanford was essentially founded in the 20th century - much more recently than many east coast universities.
A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
It is a nice catch. I read and re-read the quote and the argument is oddly worded. If I were to try to make sense of it and try to defend it, I think I would say that the author is trying to say that how you got where you are matters. It is still a bad and poorly worded argument. Than again, 'everything is racism' clearly sells clicks today so even non-sequitur works.
bo1024 4y ago
They’re definitely sequiturs, maybe not to the issues you want to discuss. You seem focused on how much academia is a meritocracy. There is an important and different question of how diverse and accessible academia is. For example certain Olympic sports like dressage (horse jumping) are meritocracies, but very exclusionary (or at least non diverse, non accessible).
- NovemberWhiskey 4y ago
  It is certainly a non-sequitur: can we simultaneously accept, or reject, the idea that prestige is a good measure of excellence while looking at (or not looking at) the history of how things become prestigious? Yes, we can. The one has nothing to do with the other.
  - bo1024 4y ago
    Again, you're focusing on the question of meritocracy which is not the only interesting question here.
- setgree 4y ago
  The subtitle of this article is "‘Jarring’ study reveals hiring bias at US institutions." Trying to ascertain whether prestige leads to "hiring bias" is asking whether it has an independent effect on hiring. If prestige had zero effect -- if the observed correlation was actually measuring markers of researcher quality with which prestige is likely to be correlated -- then there would be zero bias. The fact that those institutions did many horrible things historically does not provide evidence on that question. That's why I called it a non-sequitur.
  - bo1024 4y ago
    The word "bias" doesn't appear in the actual research study, nor "discrimination". I don't see that it addresses anything of the sort.
- lo_zamoyski 4y ago
  > There is an important and different question of how diverse and accessible academia is. What I find troubling is the baggage of background assumptions that makes this sort of value judgement possible. You have three professors, two white, one black. The two white professors, A and B, have diverging yet compelling views. The black professor C agrees with A. Which is better? Hiring A and B, or A and C? According to prevailing views of the value of diversity, the latter is preferable because of the racial diversity rule.
throwaway0asd 4y ago
The presence of bias is purely numerical and is allowed to thrive due to the lack of controls. Prestige is an unrelated red herring masking the very human behaviors that account for social gravity in many walks of life. This is commonly referred to as implicit bias and is generally the most common cause of various forms of selection bias, including racial discrimination from both the majority and minorities alike.
- Maursault 4y ago
  > The presence of bias is purely numerical and is allowed to thrive due to the lack of controls. This statement is wonderfully self-contradictory. The study overwhelmingly proves the first part wrong. The presence of bias is numerical, certainly, but it is not purely numerical and must actually exist, which is acknowledged after the "and," in contradiction. > Prestige is an unrelated red herring masking the very human behaviors that account for social gravity in many walks of life. The study conclusively demonstrates that prestige most certainly is central to academic mobility. Also, biases are among the very human behaviors that account for social gravity. > This is commonly referred to as implicit bias Again, contradictory to immediately previous statement. If prestige is a red herring, it can't also be implicit bias unless the implicitly biased individual is intentionally misleading themselves, i.e. demonstrating cognitive dissonance. > and is generally the most common cause of various forms of selection bias, Prestige is highly unlikely to be the most common cause of selection bias. Systematic error is a far more common cause of selection bias. > including racial discrimination from both the majority and minorities alike. The surprising claim here is that prestige causes racism. But racism has many causes, the most common being that it is learned. In origin, I think it is probably caused by a combination of low intellect, lack of education, irrational fear of diversity, and narcissistic self-interest. And it should be noted that the idea of reverse racism has been employed wherever white supremacy is diminished. It is, IMO, neither legitimate nor valid conceptually and fundamentally a tu quoque fallacy.
  - throwaway0asd 4y ago
    No, the study proves that bias, in this one case, demonstrates the Pareto Principle which is a purely numerical thing. Alignment to bias is essential to mobility anywhere that bias prevails irrespective of prestige. Prestige is the effect not the cause. The rest of your comment is built upon that cause/effect confusion.
drewcoo 4y ago
> non-sequiturs if prestige is a good measure -> how did it get that way? -> exclusion -> examples of exclusion You might claim the point is not germane for other reasons but clearly this shows a clear sequence of thought so the claim "non-sequitur" doesn't hold. "It's too hard to measure" also doesn't mean "not germane," though.
lapcat 4y ago
> The research question here is whether faculty are hired from those prestigious schools above and beyond the rate at which they would have been hired based on other signals of their potential as researchers It's interesting that you use the word "potential". Tenure-track positions are very hard to get, and most newly minded PhDs have very little track record. If they're lucky, they have a publication or two in a journal, but many will have only their dissertation. So I think the question is whether PhDs coming from prestigious schools are judged to have more "research potential" based on where they come from rather than their limited record. The "potential" problem is even worse when it comes to admitting undergraduates into graduate programs. If you don't get a tenure-track position right out of grad school, it can be difficult to ever work your way up to one, because you'll probably have to take a job at a school with a greater teaching load than a typical research university, which leaves little time for you to do your research and prove yourself. In a sense, the "potential" becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy.
- peteradio 4y ago
  Many fields you'd have many more papers than just your dissertation (not that I did, looks at ground).
- humanistbot 4y ago
  This is why it has become normal to do 3-7 years of postdoc research positions before being considered for a tenure-track faculty position, even for those from elite universities.
  - barry-cotter 4y ago
    Only in fields where there’s no demand for their skills outside academia, like English literature or History, or vastly more supply than demand, like most of the sciences. Fields like Economics or Computer Science have post docs but they’re not normative. Most people who end up with tenure track jobs never do one.
    - mod50ack 4y ago
mrxd 4y ago
What’s being implied here is that the endowments of these elite institutions were created through historical crimes, but activists won’t make an issue of that if the universities support diverse hiring initiatives.
cma 4y ago
> I am not seeing how schools' historical relationships with marginalized peoples bears on that question. Though it wasn't one of their examples, alumni preference in admissions means that schools that formerly excluded based on race still have an element of that today. And it means that older SATs that had stronger cultural bias in the reading comprehension parts etc. are still affecting admissions today, through the chain of alumni preference.
derbOac 4y ago
Totally anecdotal, but I've been in a number of tenure-track hiring meetings at multiple universities and someone always brings up the idea of "pedigree". As in, "X has a good pedigree" etc., as if that's an argument for hiring the person above and beyond their track record. So at least in my personal experience, these things do enter into the process. Of course, the process involves a lot of other variables too; there are plenty who don't talk about pedigree, but there's often someone who will point to it as a rationale. I hear similar whispers about federal grant receipts, etc., in that people who get stamped with approval in the form of training fellowships, predoctoral NSF awards, etc. are seen as sort of "understanding the system" etc. As I think of it, I can think of lots of other "in-group signaling" in various domains, so maybe it's not unique to academics. But that cuts both ways when you're talking about exclusivity and "old-boy" networks.
- OJFord 4y ago
  But is that entirely wrong? Isn't 'good pedigree' saying 'we can trust the unknown here more than in other cases'?
  - derbOac 4y ago
    Maybe? I think that's where this gets murky. What are you basing that trust on?
    - fny 4y ago
      The individual has been "vetted" in a more rigorous setting. For example, is someone who graduates with a 3.5GPA Math BA from the University of Central Florida trained as well as someone who graduates with 3.5 from the University of Maryland? What about UNC? What about MIT? If pedigree was a useless signal, it wouldn't be used. Mind you, I've seen this used against people as well. For example... "The last few MIT grads we hired were full of themselves and way too combative." These are real words from a hiring manager.
      - SantalBlush 4y ago
throwawaymaths 4y ago
I am unsure about training (access to, and performance at prestigious phd programs is easy even if you come from a third-tier undergrad), but I don't believe that professors at lower tier research institutes are necessarily less productive. Probably the most productive synthetic biologist is one at Michigan state: John Frost... with a lab of about six, he's produced in microorganisms within the span of ten-ish years: - rocket fuel precursor (butanetriol for BTTN), both stereoisomers - BPA replacement (phloroglucinol) - precursor to tamiflu (shikimate) - nylon-6 precursor (caprolactam) And probably some others that I don't remember off the top of my head. More famous synthetic biologists have done less with labs of hundreds.
- tacomonstrous 4y ago
  Michigan State is lower tier than the likes of Harvard maybe, but it's still a premier research institution by global standards.
  - throwawaymaths 4y ago
    I did not mean this as a dig against Michigan state by any means.
PolygonSheep 4y ago
> many institutions have a history of seizing land from Indigenous groups The institutions themselves did? How many Ivy League founders forcefully dispossessed indigenous groups specifically so they could build a university on their land? I'm not talking, like, how the land Yale University is on was once owned by the Mohegan, Mashantucket Pequot, Eastern Pequot, Schaghticoke, Golden Hill Paugussett, Niantic, and the Quinnipiac and other Algonquian speaking peoples and then some white dudes forcibly relocated them and then years later some other white dudes got together and founded a school which became Yale. If dispossession makes something prestigious then why isn't every college in America prestigious? They were all built on land seized from indigenous groups. Many in the South were built or benefited from the labor of enslaved black people in addition to that. By this logic the most prestigious universities in America really ought to be clustered in the deep South cotton belt. This strangely doesn't seem to be the case. It seems to me prestige and some form of exclusion have to go hand in hand. This might be in terms of cost to attend, or coming from the "right" ethnicity, or coming from the "right" family from within the "right" ethnicity, or having the highest SAT score, or some mix of these. If the Ivy League was open to any and all comers it would no more prestigious than any community college because anyone who wanted to could attend. I don't see why Yale couldn't build bigger buildings and open a bunch of satellite campuses in all 50 states if they wanted to. But if they did that it would be like Gucci selling $15 shirts at Walmart. It would utterly destroy the brand even if the quality remained the same. > This picture of elitism is bolstered by a study published last month in Nature Human Behaviour2, showing that almost 25% of faculty members in the United States have at least one parent with a PhD (in the general population, less than 1% of people have a parent with a PhD). What would the numbers look like if you did the math for plumbers, programmers, farmers, or any other trade? Suppose your dad was a welder and he taught you about it from a young age, gave you skills, put in a good word for you with his boss, which gave you a leg up on the people trying to get into the trade from nothing. It doesn't seem much different from me to the PhD thing. This is not even getting into whether (or to what extent) intelligence/personality is heritable. PhDs will spend a lot of time with each other, and mate with each other, and their kids will be PhDs because they were raised in a PhD environment by PhD parents and the cycle will repeat again. I could have told you that without a study. > Depending on the field, only 5–23% of faculty members worked at an institution more prestigious than the one at which they earned their PhD, according to the analysis. Well yeah. If they had enough prestige to go to a prestigious university they would have done so before earning their PhD. Either the most elite universities in the US are leaving a ton of $100 bills on the sidewalk by ignoring non-prestigious PhDs, or it's not a meritocracy and never was.
throwawaylinux 4y ago
> These are non-sequiturs. The research question here is whether faculty are hired from those prestigious schools above and beyond the rate at which they would have been hired based on other signals of their potential as researchers, which, presumably, are related to what school they go to. > I am not seeing how schools' historical relationships with marginalized peoples bears on that question. You're right, but it would be truly hilarious if those universities used this same reasoning to defend themselves. Now they don't like the intersectionality they preach when it's going to be used against them.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
julianeon 4y ago
It's not clear that the non sequitur is the fault of Gonzales. It is true that the history of elite universities is highly related to exclusion, as she said. One clear as day example: the historical exclusion of Jews. It's easy to find others. The article says: "For instance, many institutions have a history of seizing land from Indigenous groups, or originally derived their wealth from or supported their infrastructure with the labour of enslaved Black people." But did Gonzales give those examples? Even a friend to her argument would probably agree that exclusion in the admissions context of elite schools would be more relevant.

pessimizer 4y ago

The research question isn't about whether "prestige is a good measure of excellence." That's the question that you ask after you discover that people are being hired based on prestige, if you don't automatically assume that's either a bad or a good thing. If prestige is definitely driven by quality, it's not bad that professors are being hired because of the prestige of the schools they attended. But accepting that prestige is a good measure of excellence means that we're not looking into the history of how things became prestigious.

setgree 4y ago
Sure, I think it’s good to both first get the data on which scholars come from which schools, and I also think unpacking the social and political construction of prestige is a great research agenda. But to assess whether prestige is a source of bias in the hiring process, you have to separate prestige from other markers of quality. Otherwise, you have a big confounding variable problem. This author, and also the quoted professor of education, don’t seem to engage with that, and in fact seem to beg the question by assuming that prestige is an independent force in hiring decisions, which, I thought, was the thing the article was trying to demonstrate.
- cycomanic 4y ago
  Have you been on a university hiring committee? My anecdotal evidence is that yes prestige very strongly matters and coming from a very prestigious university often outweights other factors such as publication record. I haven't read the original article yet but one can easily test if e.g. the publication record of a graduate student from a non-and prestigious uni differ to the extend that is indicated by the hiring.
  - setgree 4y ago
    I have not been on a hiring committee — I actually failed my comprehensive exams partway through grad school which is how I ended up in tech :) — but your hypothesis sounds very reasonable to me. I’m just saying that we need a more careful causal identification strategy than that provided herein to say whether prestige has a meaningful effect on hiring, on average.
  - ninjin 4y ago
    I have been on multiple hiring committees and had insights into plenty of hiring processes at other “top-25” universities. My experience is that it is more complex than simply using prestigious universities, supervisors, and collaborators as markers. In fact, I have so far never heard that kind of argument raised, while I have heard diversity arguments raised more times than I can count. Rather, my experience tells me that having attended prestigious universities, as well as having had “great” supervisors and collaborators drives up other metrics for a candidate such as publications, impact, collaboration networks, etc. Success breeds success across academic generations, due to overall positive perception of people/institutions, (in particular at top American institutions) ample access to funds, etc. Note also – and this is very important – that the metrics I mentioned are considered “objective” and disconnected from prestige. Making matters even worse, the ability to make use of the opportunities that these prestigious institutions bring, is of course correlated with intrinsic attributes you want to see in a candidate (not everyone that goes to Harvard ends up being a superstar). It is very difficult for me to pick this apart. How can I possibly objectively tell whether individual A that entered a top-5 institution or individual B that entered a top-100 institution is most deserving? Given the complexity of it all, I suspect that I can not, but I also sincerely doubt that the insistence on “objective” metrics does much to alleviate an already very messy situation.
P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
It doesn't follow, it's a non-sequitur. There's nothing about using prestige as a proxy for excellence that has any bearing on investigating what got them there in the first place. It's akin to claiming that accepting financial success as a decent proxy for business acumen means no one is interested in knowing how they originally because financially successful. Not only does it not follow, it makes no sense as to why accepting one would even imply someone wasn't interested in the other.
pc86 4y ago
I think we're not looking into it because it doesn't matter in this context. We can look into it, sure. But the question of how Yale University treated certain groups of people or how they got certain plots of land doesn't have the slightest bearing on whether or not Professor Smith got her specific professorship because she went to Yale. They're both good questions but completely unrelated.

thfuran 4y ago

>These are non-sequiturs. And also probably little more than proxies for the age of the institution.

setgree 4y ago
At the very least, highly correlated :)
ckemere 4y ago
Stanford was essentially founded in the 20th century - much more recently than many east coast universities.

A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago

It is a nice catch. I read and re-read the quote and the argument is oddly worded. If I were to try to make sense of it and try to defend it, I think I would say that the author is trying to say that how you got where you are matters. It is still a bad and poorly worded argument. Than again, 'everything is racism' clearly sells clicks today so even non-sequitur works.

bo1024 4y ago

They’re definitely sequiturs, maybe not to the issues you want to discuss. You seem focused on how much academia is a meritocracy. There is an important and different question of how diverse and accessible academia is. For example certain Olympic sports like dressage (horse jumping) are meritocracies, but very exclusionary (or at least non diverse, non accessible).

NovemberWhiskey 4y ago
It is certainly a non-sequitur: can we simultaneously accept, or reject, the idea that prestige is a good measure of excellence while looking at (or not looking at) the history of how things become prestigious? Yes, we can. The one has nothing to do with the other.
- bo1024 4y ago
  Again, you're focusing on the question of meritocracy which is not the only interesting question here.
setgree 4y ago
The subtitle of this article is "‘Jarring’ study reveals hiring bias at US institutions." Trying to ascertain whether prestige leads to "hiring bias" is asking whether it has an independent effect on hiring. If prestige had zero effect -- if the observed correlation was actually measuring markers of researcher quality with which prestige is likely to be correlated -- then there would be zero bias. The fact that those institutions did many horrible things historically does not provide evidence on that question. That's why I called it a non-sequitur.
- bo1024 4y ago
  The word "bias" doesn't appear in the actual research study, nor "discrimination". I don't see that it addresses anything of the sort.
lo_zamoyski 4y ago
> There is an important and different question of how diverse and accessible academia is. What I find troubling is the baggage of background assumptions that makes this sort of value judgement possible. You have three professors, two white, one black. The two white professors, A and B, have diverging yet compelling views. The black professor C agrees with A. Which is better? Hiring A and B, or A and C? According to prevailing views of the value of diversity, the latter is preferable because of the racial diversity rule.

throwaway0asd 4y ago

The presence of bias is purely numerical and is allowed to thrive due to the lack of controls. Prestige is an unrelated red herring masking the very human behaviors that account for social gravity in many walks of life. This is commonly referred to as implicit bias and is generally the most common cause of various forms of selection bias, including racial discrimination from both the majority and minorities alike.

Maursault 4y ago
> The presence of bias is purely numerical and is allowed to thrive due to the lack of controls. This statement is wonderfully self-contradictory. The study overwhelmingly proves the first part wrong. The presence of bias is numerical, certainly, but it is not purely numerical and must actually exist, which is acknowledged after the "and," in contradiction. > Prestige is an unrelated red herring masking the very human behaviors that account for social gravity in many walks of life. The study conclusively demonstrates that prestige most certainly is central to academic mobility. Also, biases are among the very human behaviors that account for social gravity. > This is commonly referred to as implicit bias Again, contradictory to immediately previous statement. If prestige is a red herring, it can't also be implicit bias unless the implicitly biased individual is intentionally misleading themselves, i.e. demonstrating cognitive dissonance. > and is generally the most common cause of various forms of selection bias, Prestige is highly unlikely to be the most common cause of selection bias. Systematic error is a far more common cause of selection bias. > including racial discrimination from both the majority and minorities alike. The surprising claim here is that prestige causes racism. But racism has many causes, the most common being that it is learned. In origin, I think it is probably caused by a combination of low intellect, lack of education, irrational fear of diversity, and narcissistic self-interest. And it should be noted that the idea of reverse racism has been employed wherever white supremacy is diminished. It is, IMO, neither legitimate nor valid conceptually and fundamentally a tu quoque fallacy.
- throwaway0asd 4y ago
  No, the study proves that bias, in this one case, demonstrates the Pareto Principle which is a purely numerical thing. Alignment to bias is essential to mobility anywhere that bias prevails irrespective of prestige. Prestige is the effect not the cause. The rest of your comment is built upon that cause/effect confusion.

drewcoo 4y ago

> non-sequiturs if prestige is a good measure -> how did it get that way? -> exclusion -> examples of exclusion You might claim the point is not germane for other reasons but clearly this shows a clear sequence of thought so the claim "non-sequitur" doesn't hold. "It's too hard to measure" also doesn't mean "not germane," though.

lapcat 4y ago

> The research question here is whether faculty are hired from those prestigious schools above and beyond the rate at which they would have been hired based on other signals of their potential as researchers It's interesting that you use the word "potential". Tenure-track positions are very hard to get, and most newly minded PhDs have very little track record. If they're lucky, they have a publication or two in a journal, but many will have only their dissertation. So I think the question is whether PhDs coming from prestigious schools are judged to have more "research potential" based on where they come from rather than their limited record. The "potential" problem is even worse when it comes to admitting undergraduates into graduate programs. If you don't get a tenure-track position right out of grad school, it can be difficult to ever work your way up to one, because you'll probably have to take a job at a school with a greater teaching load than a typical research university, which leaves little time for you to do your research and prove yourself. In a sense, the "potential" becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy.

peteradio 4y ago
Many fields you'd have many more papers than just your dissertation (not that I did, looks at ground).
humanistbot 4y ago
This is why it has become normal to do 3-7 years of postdoc research positions before being considered for a tenure-track faculty position, even for those from elite universities.
- barry-cotter 4y ago
  Only in fields where there’s no demand for their skills outside academia, like English literature or History, or vastly more supply than demand, like most of the sciences. Fields like Economics or Computer Science have post docs but they’re not normative. Most people who end up with tenure track jobs never do one.
  - mod50ack 4y ago

mrxd 4y ago

What’s being implied here is that the endowments of these elite institutions were created through historical crimes, but activists won’t make an issue of that if the universities support diverse hiring initiatives.

cma 4y ago

> I am not seeing how schools' historical relationships with marginalized peoples bears on that question. Though it wasn't one of their examples, alumni preference in admissions means that schools that formerly excluded based on race still have an element of that today. And it means that older SATs that had stronger cultural bias in the reading comprehension parts etc. are still affecting admissions today, through the chain of alumni preference.

derbOac 4y ago

Totally anecdotal, but I've been in a number of tenure-track hiring meetings at multiple universities and someone always brings up the idea of "pedigree". As in, "X has a good pedigree" etc., as if that's an argument for hiring the person above and beyond their track record. So at least in my personal experience, these things do enter into the process. Of course, the process involves a lot of other variables too; there are plenty who don't talk about pedigree, but there's often someone who will point to it as a rationale. I hear similar whispers about federal grant receipts, etc., in that people who get stamped with approval in the form of training fellowships, predoctoral NSF awards, etc. are seen as sort of "understanding the system" etc. As I think of it, I can think of lots of other "in-group signaling" in various domains, so maybe it's not unique to academics. But that cuts both ways when you're talking about exclusivity and "old-boy" networks.

OJFord 4y ago
But is that entirely wrong? Isn't 'good pedigree' saying 'we can trust the unknown here more than in other cases'?
- derbOac 4y ago
  Maybe? I think that's where this gets murky. What are you basing that trust on?
  - fny 4y ago
    The individual has been "vetted" in a more rigorous setting. For example, is someone who graduates with a 3.5GPA Math BA from the University of Central Florida trained as well as someone who graduates with 3.5 from the University of Maryland? What about UNC? What about MIT? If pedigree was a useless signal, it wouldn't be used. Mind you, I've seen this used against people as well. For example... "The last few MIT grads we hired were full of themselves and way too combative." These are real words from a hiring manager.
    - SantalBlush 4y ago

throwawaymaths 4y ago

I am unsure about training (access to, and performance at prestigious phd programs is easy even if you come from a third-tier undergrad), but I don't believe that professors at lower tier research institutes are necessarily less productive. Probably the most productive synthetic biologist is one at Michigan state: John Frost... with a lab of about six, he's produced in microorganisms within the span of ten-ish years: - rocket fuel precursor (butanetriol for BTTN), both stereoisomers - BPA replacement (phloroglucinol) - precursor to tamiflu (shikimate) - nylon-6 precursor (caprolactam) And probably some others that I don't remember off the top of my head. More famous synthetic biologists have done less with labs of hundreds.

tacomonstrous 4y ago
Michigan State is lower tier than the likes of Harvard maybe, but it's still a premier research institution by global standards.
- throwawaymaths 4y ago
  I did not mean this as a dig against Michigan state by any means.

PolygonSheep 4y ago

> many institutions have a history of seizing land from Indigenous groups The institutions themselves did? How many Ivy League founders forcefully dispossessed indigenous groups specifically so they could build a university on their land? I'm not talking, like, how the land Yale University is on was once owned by the Mohegan, Mashantucket Pequot, Eastern Pequot, Schaghticoke, Golden Hill Paugussett, Niantic, and the Quinnipiac and other Algonquian speaking peoples and then some white dudes forcibly relocated them and then years later some other white dudes got together and founded a school which became Yale. If dispossession makes something prestigious then why isn't every college in America prestigious? They were all built on land seized from indigenous groups. Many in the South were built or benefited from the labor of enslaved black people in addition to that. By this logic the most prestigious universities in America really ought to be clustered in the deep South cotton belt. This strangely doesn't seem to be the case. It seems to me prestige and some form of exclusion have to go hand in hand. This might be in terms of cost to attend, or coming from the "right" ethnicity, or coming from the "right" family from within the "right" ethnicity, or having the highest SAT score, or some mix of these. If the Ivy League was open to any and all comers it would no more prestigious than any community college because anyone who wanted to could attend. I don't see why Yale couldn't build bigger buildings and open a bunch of satellite campuses in all 50 states if they wanted to. But if they did that it would be like Gucci selling $15 shirts at Walmart. It would utterly destroy the brand even if the quality remained the same. > This picture of elitism is bolstered by a study published last month in Nature Human Behaviour2, showing that almost 25% of faculty members in the United States have at least one parent with a PhD (in the general population, less than 1% of people have a parent with a PhD). What would the numbers look like if you did the math for plumbers, programmers, farmers, or any other trade? Suppose your dad was a welder and he taught you about it from a young age, gave you skills, put in a good word for you with his boss, which gave you a leg up on the people trying to get into the trade from nothing. It doesn't seem much different from me to the PhD thing. This is not even getting into whether (or to what extent) intelligence/personality is heritable. PhDs will spend a lot of time with each other, and mate with each other, and their kids will be PhDs because they were raised in a PhD environment by PhD parents and the cycle will repeat again. I could have told you that without a study. > Depending on the field, only 5–23% of faculty members worked at an institution more prestigious than the one at which they earned their PhD, according to the analysis. Well yeah. If they had enough prestige to go to a prestigious university they would have done so before earning their PhD. Either the most elite universities in the US are leaving a ton of $100 bills on the sidewalk by ignoring non-prestigious PhDs, or it's not a meritocracy and never was.

throwawaylinux 4y ago

> These are non-sequiturs. The research question here is whether faculty are hired from those prestigious schools above and beyond the rate at which they would have been hired based on other signals of their potential as researchers, which, presumably, are related to what school they go to. > I am not seeing how schools' historical relationships with marginalized peoples bears on that question. You're right, but it would be truly hilarious if those universities used this same reasoning to defend themselves. Now they don't like the intersectionality they preach when it's going to be used against them.

deleted 4y ago

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julianeon 4y ago

It's not clear that the non sequitur is the fault of Gonzales. It is true that the history of elite universities is highly related to exclusion, as she said. One clear as day example: the historical exclusion of Jews. It's easy to find others. The article says: "For instance, many institutions have a history of seizing land from Indigenous groups, or originally derived their wealth from or supported their infrastructure with the labour of enslaved Black people." But did Gonzales give those examples? Even a friend to her argument would probably agree that exclusion in the admissions context of elite schools would be more relevant.