Paul L. Caron
Dean





Tuesday, June 6, 2017

Better School, Better Scholars, Right? Not So Much

Chronicle of Higher Education op-ed: Better College, Better Scholars, Right? Not So Much, by Jacques Berlinerblau (Georgetown):

Deadwood blossoms among Ivy. World-class sprinters labor at institutions considered also-rans.

We live in an age ... where countless deserving individuals find themselves trapped in dismal professional situations that are completely incommensurate with their achievements. Good scholars routinely end up ’juncting and underemployed. Lesser scholars routinely end up at elite places vying for tenure. Herein lies the crisis of which I speak: the crisis of standardlessness. ...

Example 3: Professor Welch, over at Exquisite Boutique College, has been laboring for a quarter-century on a seminal study of late-19th-century Russian art. Colleagues like to recount tales of his epic labors, his devotion to craft, his personal sacrifices in pursuit of his subject matter. Welch has not yet published his masterpiece ("my very own Fabergé egg," he likes to joke). In fact, he hasn’t published anything in his pipeline — which extends to Siberia — since the fall of the Iron Curtain that coincided with his being granted tenure.

Welch is revered in his field. Much more so than Boris, who teaches at a college no one would ever describe as exquisite and who churns out four workmanlike, peer-reviewed articles per decade. Welch sits on well-regarded editorial boards. Boris sits in his tiny, windowless office double-checking his footnotes. ...

Professorial prestige, I contend, is an awfully arbitrary thing. ...

[Professors and students assume] that the greater the renown of an institution as measured by U.S. News & World Report, the greater will be the quantity and quality of research produced by scholars in its employ. Is this assumption accurate?

If it were, it would follow that an assistant professor in anthropology at Princeton University (U.S. News 2016 rank No. 1) publishes more and better work than her exact counterpart at the University of Southern California (U.S. News 2016 rank No. 23). The USC savant, in turn, outperforms the identically ranked anthropologist at Clark University (U.S. News 2016 rank No. 75). The Clark ethnographer has a heftier CV than a comparable scholar employed at Oklahoma State University (U.S. News 2016 rank No. 149). The better the institution, the better the research its tenure-line professors produce. Right?

Well, practice has a habit of trolling theory. Let’s imagine an experiment. All four of our hypothetical tenure-track anthropologists are asked to submit an updated CV and all of their relevant publications. Upon their arrival, these materials are scrubbed of any identifying markers. The anonymous files are then forwarded to a panel of experienced academicians, no-nonsense types who understand how the game is played. Their task: Figure out which CV corresponds to which sage employed at colleges ranked 1, 23, 75, and 149.

Our arbiters, I’m convinced, would fail this blind test. They would fail even if we asked them not to look at mere quantity of publications but quality as well. That’s because the contestants would all look puzzlingly similar. The judges might assume that the assistant professor at Clark worked at Southern California. And, yes, it is not unthinkable that they would place the Oklahoma State ethnographer in New Jersey. The problem is not that the Princeton person is a slouch. The problem is that all four are publishing a lot and all are very impressive on paper. Ergo, it would be impossible for the judges to distinguish between scholarly Coke and Pepsi. ...

The academic job market is in tatters. As a result, every tenure-line position in the country attracts a surfeit of applicants. Among the best of these candidates, the differences in accomplishments, talent, and potential are small and subtle. So, in order to make the right decision, evaluators must marshal the diligence, focus, and cold impartiality necessary to tweeze out those fine distinctions.

https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2017/06/better-college-better-scholars-right-not-so-much.html

Legal Education | Permalink

Comments

I like how the welfare and quality of instruction for the student body at the lower ranked institution matters not a f*ck to "Laterals." It's very telling. Personal ambition above all, eh?

Posted by: Unemployed Northeastern | Jun 9, 2017 8:00:39 AM

The corrective for this is the lateral hiring market, which unfortunately is not nearly as robust as it should be. If someone at a lower ranked institution, laboring with fewer rescues, a weaker brand name, and a host of other disadvantages, manages to out-publish, or out-scholar someone of similar seniority at a higher ranked institution, the scholar from the lower ranked institution should be scooped up by a higher ranked school.

Posted by: Laterals | Jun 8, 2017 9:16:43 AM

Can someone please tell me why "Professor Welch" has to publish anything at all? Is he staying current in his field? Are his lectures up-to-date? Is he an effective teacher? Does he care about his students?

Unlike Physics, tax law is make believe. How can you empirically study something that doesn't exist? Perhaps there is something worth looking at in the behavioral aspects of how people react to having their pockets picked; but, examining whether we should crack the egg at the top or the bottom is silly.

We may not want to admit this - but law, accounting, and business are professional voc-tech disciplines. As teachers, we are trying to hand down the accumulated body of professional knowledge to the next generation of plumbers. Done well, there is nothing wrong with this. But, please, let's not fool ourselves.

Posted by: Dale Spradling | Jun 8, 2017 5:04:51 AM

Mr. PhysicsProf: What you write may be true for physics, but law is stuck on credentialism in a most extreme way. Nobody cares anything about a potential SCOTUS nominee other than where he/she went to law school–HLS, Yale, or maybe, in a pinch, Columbia. The rest don’t count. The lower federal courts, while not limited to HLS and Yale, are still over-stocked by T14 school grads. Ditto for the prestigious law firms and most of the prestigious gummint positions, such as Office of the Solicitor General and Office of Legal Counsel.

Posted by: Publius Novus | Jun 7, 2017 10:57:25 AM

In the physics community we know who is doing good work and who is not. And there are plenty of people and research groups at the "less prestigious" places that are world leaders in what they do. You don't get elected a Fellow of the APS or a member of the NAS for nothing.

I tell students applying to grad school that the most important factor for their future career is who is their Ph.D. advisor. The institution name is lower down on the list.

Posted by: PhysicsProf | Jun 6, 2017 10:10:12 AM

This article isn't even anecdotal. An anecdotal article contains one example. This article just makes up an imaginary example. The author should be embarassed.

Posted by: Eric Rasmusen | Jun 6, 2017 9:00:28 AM

Yup, it's a lottery. And like all lotteries, you're a sucker if you play.

It's true you were probably lied to about your odds; I was. I was told "lots of tenured profs will be retiring and may more professorships will be added." But it was a lie.

But how is whining changing your odds?

Posted by: Alice | Jun 6, 2017 8:44:44 AM

Academia, like BigLaw, is conservative in nature (the non-political meaning) and overly obsessed with pedigree. There are tons of brilliant people from the middle of the country who never considered the Ivies or Stanford, and because of that won't get a shot. There are also tons of perfectly pedigreed people who are lousy lawyers and academics...

It's a lot easier to check off boxes on schools than to actually analyze the quality of an applicant, and a lot lower risk for the hiring committee if they take the safe route and hire yet another Harvard graduate.

Posted by: todd | Jun 6, 2017 8:34:03 AM

Having recently ran the college admissions race, we got our son into the best institution based solely on price versus its US News ranking.

We also learned that colleges are very very good at adjusting their prices. Of the seven universities, five of them were within a few thousand dollars once financial aid was calculated. The colleges ranged from state-supported (about $35K) to private ($70K), yet they all came down to about $12K a year.

The marketplace in action. All this talk about rankings and finding a school that's a good fit masks collusion by the schools versus collusion by the (smarter) parents who see ways to game the system.

Posted by: Uma Thurmond's Feet | Jun 6, 2017 7:42:32 AM

Last commentator is sloppy in his use of "screed." It doesn't mean a piece of writing you don't like. It means "a long speech or piece of writing, typically one regarded as tedious." The preceding piece of writing is not long, and not being long it cannot be regarded as tedious either. I found it interesting.

Posted by: Observer | Jun 6, 2017 6:48:43 AM

I wouldn't say just because this article is anecdotal, that it isn't worth much attention. I believe that it describes a general truism regarding competition for very few (relatively speaking) tenured positions. So, in that sense it is helpful in understanding the general situation without focusing on statiscal data points.

Posted by: jimmycrackcorn | Jun 6, 2017 6:41:55 AM

There is one distinction evaluators never have any trouble making immediately: eliminating the conservative applicants.

Posted by: Dagny | Jun 6, 2017 6:24:18 AM

While I might agree with some of this, it must be noted that the article is a data-free screed and not worth much attention.

Posted by: mike | Jun 6, 2017 5:35:56 AM

Well, no doubt academia, like most every other career path I can think of, has a fair amount of arbitrariness and random luck involved in determining success. But like politics, a lot of academia fuels itself on narcissism. Big egos are not inclined to consider how much good luck was involved in their career success, or how much bad luck was involved in the failure of others. I'm not saying it's all luck - raw talent helps. But it isn't negligible.

Posted by: ruralcounsel | Jun 6, 2017 4:07:31 AM