Superpowers: The American Academic Elite

DEC 3, 1211:29 AM
AUTHOR Georgetown Public Policy Review CATEGORIES Politics

By Robert Oprisko

On September 21, 2010, Associate Justice

Clarence Thomas criticized the use of academic prestige in the hiring of law
students after he was made aware that four of his clerks were called third-tier
trash on Internet message boards. The studentswho hailed from George Mason,
Rutgers, George Washington, and Creightonwere considered inferior to peers
with more prestigious academic pedigrees. This line of thinking is a clear indication
that individual merit is in competition with institutional affiliation to determine future
success. With the effects of the 2008 recession lingering and the job market still
tight across the United States, institutional hiring practices have become a more
prominent public policy concern. While there are protections against employment
discrimination based upon race, age, gender, etc., there is nothing that protects
against academic class.
In my book, Honor: A Phenomenology, I present a system whereby individuals
navigate society based upon processes of honor that determine their value. My
conceptualization of prestige (individual excellence) and affiliated honor (excellence
granted based only upon membership in prestigious groups) presents a theoretical
framework that my research partners and I use to explore hiring practices in
academia. We compiled a database of the tenure-track and tenured faculty in all
ranked research universities to determine which of those universities successfully
placed candidates at peer institutions. We found strongly suggestive evidence that
hiring based upon institutional excellence is ubiquitous.
We used the 2009 U.S. News and World Report rankings for political science
graduate programs as a proxy variable to determine an applicants academic class,
or affiliated honor, in order to determine if it significantly influenced hiring processes
officially predicated upon individual talent (referred to as prestige). The aggregation
of this data includes 116 institutions and 3,135 faculty members who are either
tenure-track or tenured. We hypothesized that affiliated honor would directly
correlate to employment success. We also hypothesized that a cascade effect
would emerge where institutions would place within and immediately below their
prestige level such that a prestige-based hierarchy would present itself. The results
dramatically show that we were both very right on the first hypothesis and very

wrong on the second. There is a group of highly prestigious universities that

dominate the political science academic market, effectively shutting out all
competition at multiple levels. The fact that these academic superpowers are so
dominant and place candidates ubiquitously indicates that institutional prestige
drives hiring practices in academia and, perhaps, other highly selective professions
(such as law, as indicated in Justice Clarence Thomas remarks.)
Our research confirms that there is a direct correlation between institutional
prestige and candidate placement. If we consider the highest ranked programs, the
three tied at #1, we find that Harvard University has successfully placed 239
political scientists at 75 institutionsincluding twelve at Harvard. Princeton has
successfully placed 108 political scientists at 62 institutionsincluding five at
Princeton. Stanford has successfully placed 128 political scientists at 51
institutionsincluding three at Stanford. The highest ranked public university, The
University of Michigan at Ann Arbor (ranked number four overall), has successfully
placed 141 political scientists in 61 institutionsincluding seven at Michigan. These
four schools contribute 616 political scientists; roughly twenty percent of the total
tenure-track lines in the discipline at research-intensive programs. The median
institutional ranking for the 116 institutions covered is eleven, which implies that
eleven schools contribute 50 percent of the political science academics to
research-intensive universities in the United States. Over 100 political science PhD
programs are graduating students that will contest the remaining 50 percent of
openings.
These numbers likely understate the impact of prestigious universities; the present
study does not include the many liberal arts colleges and regional universities that
also hire graduates of these programs and increase the network of advocates for
graduates from highly ranked universities. Of course, this is somewhat expected
given that the most prestigious programs are often also the ones that have the
highest numbers of students. As we move forward with this project, we will control
for institution size and output.
Hiring based upon institutional prestige disproportionately expands the network of
the academic superpowers and increases their competitive advantage. In turn, this
appears to diminish the institution at which one currently works. The evidence
suggests that departments are more concerned with who is placed at their
institution than in placing graduates from their institution. As time passes, certain
graduate schools might be unable to place any candidates; not because they
cannot produce good teachers and scholars, but because the perception is that
good students only come from a handful of schools, according to Diane
Rubenstein of Cornell. Justice Clarence Thomas takes issue with this perception,
holding that graduates from schools ranked lower are not third-tier trash.

There are smart kids every place. They are male, they are female, they are black,
they are white, they are from the West, they are from the South, they are from
public schools, they are from public universities, they are from poor families, they
are from sharecroppers, they are from all over. (Clarence Thomas, Univ. of Florida,
2/4/2010)
Excellent or not, students from less prestigious institutions are less likely to get an
opportunity to showcase their talent.
As the academic market tightens up, there are fewer positions available and more
graduates than needed. Many universities are losing the ability to place their own
students within academia. The theoretical consequence of such hiring practices is
that hiring committees often appear to favor people like themselves rather than
candidates from schools like the ones in which they work. Therefore, when
committees are made up of professors from prestigious institutions, they might be
more likely to hire candidates from similarly prestigious institutions. This practice
reinforces the perceived inferiority of their current institution. The prophecy of good
academics graduating from a handful of dominant programs becomes self-fulfilling
and the market landscape bleak for the vast majority of PhD programs. As we
move forward with the project, we will collect data to assess the degree to which
this pattern is occurring.
Robert L. Oprisko is a Visiting Professor at Butler University. The author thanks
research partners Natalie Jackson, Senior Analyst at the Marist Institute for Public
Opinion at Marist College, and Krisitie Dobbs, Research Assistant at Butler
University, for their help with this piece. This article is based on their working paper
Superpowers: The American Academic Elite.