Although I’m content-to-happy here in Mondoville (depending on how many papers I have to grade at any given moment), I still check the job listings in my discipline each year — it’s a kind of window shopping. Several colleagues of mine do this as well, with greater or lesser amounts of serious intent. This leads to running jokes about the schools that wouldn’t dream of hiring folks like us, both because we now teach at places like Mondoville and because we came from places like Muncie, Tulsa, or Lincoln. As my buddy The Historian says, “We don’t have the pedigree for those jobs.”
There are other factors that go into it as well — most of the schools at the top of the food chain see themselves as research factories, and the Mondovilles of the world typically don’t allow much opportunity for research. What’s more, there’s the whole “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM” syndrome at work. Consequently, there’s not much in the way of upward mobility in academic hiring. As I put it in one of my seminars in grad school, hiring institutions typically try to marry up, and graduates typically have to marry down.
(Please understand: I’m not complaining. As I’ve said on numerous occasions, I’m astonishingly lucky to be in Mondoville, and I’m only too aware of the folks — including some of my readers — who would love to be in my situation. I genuinely hope that one day they can be.)
Of course, this state of affairs brings the dual problems of the self-fulfilling prophecy (Some Ph.D. programs — like mine — are seen as less likely to produce research scholars, so their graduates find positions where they don’t get to do much research, if any, which “proves” that those programs don’t produce scholars, and so on…) and insularity, especially at the highest levels (High-end institutions hire graduates of other high-end schools. Groupthink is the Hapsburg jaw of academia… and it happens for the same reason.)
So what led me back to this particular hobbyhorse of mine? A few days ago, I was reading what amounts to a bulletin board for people on the academic job market. I ran across someone who ran the numbers:
The Ivy League’s description of “top” people, per their hiring practices, in reality = high social capital. Harvard says they hire the best. That “best” includes not a single person who has studied at a Community College. Just 1% comes from non-top-tier public universities.
As an aside, this poster mentioned a book I’ll be adding to my reading list.
Meanwhile, Elizabeth “The Anchoress” Scalia posted at First Things, noting that society has fallen for the general idea of mistaking credentials for education, or even for talent:
[Education] is a marvelous thing; to have the opportunity to study is a privilege too many take for granted. But have we become a society that places too much weight on the attainment of a diploma, which sometimes indicates nothing more than an ability to keep to a schedule and follow a syllabus, and underappreciates the ability to wonder, to strike out on an individual path, and to learn on one’s own? When did non-conformists become so unromantic and undervalued?
Her answer is interesting — she suggests that it may be connected to a decline in faith:
[W]hen faith was common to kings and paupers, self-evident brightness and acumen were appreciated and acknowledged. People understood that there was more than one way to learn, or that ideas could be burnished and gifts could be nourished by sheer curiosity sustained on a pilot-light of passion, even without the consent and certification of an appointed body.
As recently as sixty years ago society was willing to take some things on faith, and that habit-of-faith allowed room for instinct to have a voice; it permitted one to try people out—to give a guy a chance to prove himself. Lacking faith, lacking a mindset that can trust in possibilities, there is nothing to fall back on but credentials.
As someone whose intellectual hero never earned a Ph.D., and more importantly, someone whose biggest hero was an autodidact (which in many ways I consider myself as well), I’m only too aware of the obstacles those folks would face in today’s academy. That’s a waste and a tragedy to my way of thinking, but it’s also a loss to the academy, and a loss that can be attributed to the sort of cowardice that depends on pedigrees because people are afraid to take a chance on a mutt.
H/T: Transterrestrial Musings.
Professor Mondo 
“…I’m only too aware of the folks — including some of my readers — who would love to be in my situation. I genuinely hope that one day they can be.”
Thank you.
Please keep hoping.
😉
I think I could be far more supportive of credentialism if I saw evidence that it actually meant something, but I’ve spent too much time with people who hold degrees from supposedly “elite” institutions to believe it.
I fight this in my own way. I work for a small business and am often in the position to screen resumes for potential writers, editors, and fact-checkers. After several years, I finally convinced my colleagues to remove “college degree required” from our job ads. Now, most applicants will have college degrees, and much of what we do requires the sort of editorial precision most people hone by writing college papers, but I don’t want to exclude qualified applicants who left college without finishing or who didn’t attend college at all. Their numbers will be relatively small, but I don’t want to be the guy who discourages or overlooks that one awesome autodidact, and keeping an eye out for that person takes almost no extra time–just the will to do so.
You and your colleagues at Mondoville might be heartened by the flip-side of this observation, which is that even the pedigreed programs produce too many PhDs, and only two people from my program have gotten a job in my subfield in the past two years, one at a Mondoville in the northeast. Half a dozen more have been actively on the market for two or three years without even a postdoc to show for it. So while the top schools may all hire one another’s graduates, there are barely enough such schools to make a dent in the pile of the un- or barely-employed.
Another thing is that this winnowing process starts earlier than grad school. When I visited the grad programs that accepted me two years ago, almost all the other prospective students at the elite programs had gone to elite colleges (it seemed like half of Yale’s grad students had been Yale undergrads), and all the prospective students at the lesser-known programs were from odd little schools like St. John’s College or low-ranked state u’s. The disparity in grad school intake was vast, and it has snowball effects further down the line. But the disparity is not in employment rates, since less prestigious programs still have success in placing their graduates, just not in placing them at Yale–a source of great resentment among the unemployed graduates of prestigious programs.
Again, I’m reminded of something I read a few years ago (maybe from Pannapacker?) that indicated that the odds of finding a tenure-track gig at an institution on the level of the seeker’s Ph.D. program is about 5%. We’re back to the idea of Ph.D. as waste product/adjunct fodder, where grad students are cheap labor for service courses with little regard for what they’ll have a chance to do afterwards.
A related note that I’ve heard fairly often is that the top-tier programs tend to produce overspecialization, whereas what we need at the Mondovilles of the world are flexible folks. Case in point: I self-identify as a medievalist, but in my 7.5 years at Mondoville, I’ve taught everything from Shakespeare to 1950s crime fiction to fantasy, and I teach a film course every couple of years. I also teach creative writing more often these days.
It reminds me of my undergrad days. My first undergrad school had a large Greek community, and I picked up some of the vocabulary by osmosis. One term I heard was a “suicide,” which was when a rushee was only willing to accept a bid from one frat of the four we had. If that one didn’t bid, the rushee was SOL. I suspect the pedigree schools may be training their grad students to be professional suicides, gearing their studies only for the type of specialized gig they might find at their own institutions. That’s when the 5% kicks back in, and it kicks a lot of folks in the teeth.
I think there is something else here which has gone unmentioned. The absolute and relative quality of universities and their programs fluctuates over time. University departments often decline and sometimes rise again. This is generally not noticed because the prestige of a good program has a very long half life after the program starts to deteriorate. Likewise it may take a while for an improving program to be recognized. So the overall quality of some high ranked schools may in fact not be as good as people think and some with lesser reputations may in fact be better.
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