Academic departments are generally assumed to shy away from “inbreeding,” or awarding their own graduates faculty positions. But a new study of sociology departments suggests that the taboo holds relatively little power among the most and the least prestigious, and that it’s the status-conscious ones in the middle that are most worried about violating the standard.
Both high-status sociology departments with firmly established reputations and low-status departments with little to lose are much more likely to hire graduates of their own doctoral programs than are midstatus departments, which presumably worry most about their image, according to paper on the study’s findings presented here on Sunday at the American Sociological Association’s annual conference.
The idea that academic departments should not hire their graduates is more than a century old; Charles W. Eliot, then Harvard University’s president, famously warned back in 1908 that academic inbreeding posed “a grave danger for a university.”
The belief is based on two assumptions: The first holds that such inbreeding harms academic quality, by loading a department with people who have limited knowledge of other schools of thought. The second holds that academic departments staffed with substantial numbers of their own graduates will be seen as nepotistic in their hiring practices, thereby discouraging outside applicants from applying and perhaps causing their own graduates to be denied jobs by other colleges, out of retaliation, the paper says.
If academic inbreeding simply stemmed from competition in the academic job market—with the top academic programs naturally drawing their own graduates, and so on down the line—then middle-tier programs would, presumably, engage in the practice more than would those with lesser reputations. Such is not the case, concludes the study, conducted by Scott L. Feld, a professor of sociology at Purdue University, and Min Yim, a doctoral student in that department.
Instead, the researchers’ paper says, sociology departments’ behavior in respect to academic inbreeding fits into what people in that profession call “middle-status conformity theory.” It holds that those of high and low status feel relatively free to deviate from social norms, and that the biggest conformists are those in the middle who fear doing anything to lose status and want to distinguish themselves from those at the bottom of the heap. Although the theory generally has been used to explain the behavior of individuals, it has also been tested in studies observing the behavior of organizations such as law firms.
The probability of any sociology department engaging in academic inbreeding declines from the top tier down through the middle but then “skyrockets rapidly at the bottom,” the paper says. One factor contributing to the upward spike at the bottom, it says, may be that lower-status departments are more likely to have unusual areas of specialization, creating pressure on them to hire their own graduates to carry on work in those areas.
The researchers based their analysis on data on full-time faculty members in Ph.D.-granting sociology departments published in the 1997 and 2007 editions of the American Sociological Association’s Guide to Graduate Departments in Sociology. Their study examined 113 academic departments, which they ranked in order of prestige based on a formula that took into account the share of their graduates that found faculty positions and whether the departments that hired those graduates themselves had high placement rates.
“Although it is not common, academic inbreeding is still practiced by many institutions,” the paper says. Of the 1,963 faculty sociologists in the 1997 cohort of its study, 77, or about 4 percent, had received their Ph.D. from the department where they were currently working.
