The Professoriate Needs Pedigree Diversity

This is a guest post by David Varel, originally on The Academe Blog:

The Professoriate Needs Pedigree Diversity

Guest Blogger

BY DAVID A. VAREL

These days, as any job seeker will tell you, universities are prioritizing diversity on their faculties. The way they are conceptualizing it has expanded dramatically over time, now including not only race and gender but also sexual orientation, disability, military service, and many other categories. Yet one omission is especially striking: “pedigree” diversity. Today, as always, the lion’s share of tenure-track jobs goes to graduates from only the most highly ranked programs.

The absence of pedigree diversity from the list is telling. It demonstrates the degree to which the myth of meritocracy and its ugly cousin elitism continue to pervade academia. Elitism holds that those who attended the most prestigious programs in the country are the best and the brightest, and that they therefore deserve to hold as many of the nation’s professorships as they can fill. The logic is seductive. It envisions a level playing field where all other inequalities are set aside so that anyone from any group can compete and earn a place at the top through individual ability, intelligence, and work ethic.

However, the essential fact that elite universities cannot escape is that they ultimately matriculate a hugely disproportionate number of affluent students whose wealth, social connections, and class-based cultural knowledge make them more viable candidates. The students with greater access to top-ranked doctoral programs are the ones who have associated themselves with elite institutions and well-known professors as undergraduate or master’s students, who have strategically plotted out their academic careers from an early age, and who understand how to make use of their accumulating social privilege (including better access to grants, fellowships, social networks, and status) to gain admission. Upon matriculation, those advantages only compound.

Then, after elite-pedigreed students graduate, their wealthy institutions often lavish them with multiyear postdoctoral and visiting positions, allowing them the time and funding to comfortably build their curricula vitae and maintain prestigious affiliations while on the job market. Meanwhile, second- and third-tier institutions can’t afford to do the same, and their graduates often have to support themselves—as I have—with time-consuming, low-status adjunct positions at various colleges, which pay poverty wages, have no benefits, leave little time to write and publish, and are often procured only through expensive cross-country moves. It is this fundamental class advantage shared by students in top-ranked graduate programs that gives lie to the idea of meritocracy.

One justification for hiring faculty members with elite pedigrees is that they are a safer bet to become productive scholars—if only because of their accumulated privileges. However, in a time when there is a glut of jobseekers who have been demonstrating their scholarly productivity by publishing books and articles even while underemployed for years, the justification for preferring graduates of top-ranked programs falls apart. It proves that the continued hiring of elite-pedigreed scholars (many of whom have yet to publish anything substantive) is more about acquiring the prestige of those institutions than it is about building a coterie of productive scholars.

Beyond the issue of fairness, universities need to understand that the lack of pedigree diversity actually damages the academic profession because it diminishes scholarship. The more that the bulk of the tenure-track professoriate comes from only a handful of top-ranked programs, the less diversity and depth of scholarship there will be. Critics within the legal profession once put this bluntly: “Were we biologists studying inbreeding, we might predict that successive generations of imbeciles would be produced by such a system.”

The lack of pedigree diversity also hurts students. Most people have come to accept that the lack of a nonwhite faculty member makes it harder for nonwhite students to identify with their professors or to see themselves as welcome in that department or the larger profession. But they don’t understand that pedigree functions similarly. What does a student at Idaho State think when his or her professors all went to Ivy League schools as undergraduates and Berkeley or Stanford for graduate school? Students who feel inferior to their professors or hopelessly behind  may give up the idea of entering the profession. The lack of role models with non-elite backgrounds becomes an engine for other types of homogeneity in the professoriate because students from lower-prestige universities tend to reflect a greater racial and socioeconomic diversity than do those from elite institutions.

The pedigree problem also damages the country as a whole. When its universities, which are so regularly touted as ladders of social mobility, become yet another tool for reproducing social hierarchies, there are few avenues left to challenge our nation’s endemic inequalities. As research shows, greater levels of inequality undermine democracy and sow political instability and domestic turmoil.

The pedigree problem has now reached crisis proportions after decades of disinvestment and state cuts to higher education. The financial difficulties, exacerbated by the rise of corporate management, swelling administrative staff, and the construction of outlandish country-club-style amenities at some universities, have contributed to the increasing reliance on contingent faculty members and the decline of tenure-track positions nationwide. Those applicants with elite pedigrees are therefore now taking an even greater percentage of the tenure-track positions that do become available. Both scholars and scholarship are becoming alarmingly less diverse as a result.

The time to act is now. We must make a concerted effort to add pedigree diversity to the list of diversities affirmatively sought after by hiring committees. Hiring those without elite educations, which also means those with, on average, fewer social privileges, more racial diversity, and a wealth of firsthand experience regarding the inequalities built into academia, will help to diversify universities along all other lines. It will present a better example for students, and it will create a professoriate that is not only more representative of the country but one that is probably also a bit humbler, grittier, and better prepared to challenge the inequities that too often go ignored.

Guest blogger David A. Varel, who earned his PhD in history from the University of Colorado, is an adjunct professor at Metropolitan State University of Denver. He is the author of The Lost Black Scholar: Resurrecting Allison Davis in American Social Thought and The Scholar and the Struggle: Lawrence Reddick’s Crusade for Black History and Black Power.

Comments

[Anon]

Michael Higdon at Tennessee has a great piece on this topic: https://scholarship.law.stjohns.edu/lawreview/vol87/iss1/5/

[A non]

1. Per the study in cited article, did White and Black students fare better, the same, or worse under Hispanic teachers?

2. Is the answer to breaking down social inequalities importing and legalizing millions of unskilled illiterates? Is that policy's real aim to increase those inequalities?

3. How can and should one mandate breaking down the elitist barriers to entering law faculties? If one simply adds "pedigree diversity" as but a single factor among many to a mandatory checklist, then what are the chances it will have any real impact?

4. If it nonetheless succeeds, and you thereby get a sizable portion of white working class (Protestant) Republicans into legal academia, won't that threaten the guild's long-standing mandate?

[PaulB]

During all the hullabaloo over Elizabeth Warren claiming Native American ancestry to get hired, there was almost no mention that she was one of only two professors at Harvard Law that did not attend a top ten law school (Rutgers in her case). An unbiased hiring system would undoubtedly have a disproportionate number of faculty from elite institutions but I doubt those schools have a complete monopoly on wisdom and accomplishment.

[Anomymous]

Interesting post. One thing to keep in mind is that academics love passionately to cast themselves as victims, and frequently make statements in casual conversation that would seem awkward or bizarre outside of academia about how poor or underprivileged they are.

So any attempt to bring pedigree diversity or socioeconomic diversity to the academy will require a careful effort to account for this.

[anon]

This is one piece that rings true.

Witness, for example, the entry of ACB onto a court where grad from Harvard or Yale has not only been preferred, but required.

Likewise, faculty hiring. The admission committee is looking for "pedigree" to be sure, but hardly because this criterion imports quality. Look around you. Mainly, part time tenured faculty (one or two courses per semester, for two 14 week semesters per year, amounting to 28 weeks of part time employment) who have published nothing much. They put in their "hard road" accumulating medals for doing pretty much only what, as the piece points out, their privilege enabled them to do. Nothing more.

As a group, law faculties are particularly ineffectual and lazy. The only real impact in the community is effected by the "low status" clinicians. So many tenured law professors live in cushy neighborhoods, with copious staffs of servants (nannies, housekeepers, gardeners, etc.) to serve them, while they posture about "social justice."

If the hiring committees could only see that the students and the community at large don't give a .hit about a professor's attendance at Harvard, then perhaps they would realize that despite being "warriors for social justice" they are just a bunch of arm-chair, snobby elitists, protecting their country club from the riff raff (i.e., the people most likely to advocate for and effect real change).

[anon]

PS

Is there anything more comical than the Harvard-grad at some bottom feeding, lowest tier, diploma mill law school, posturing as some sort of "scholar" and "elite law professor"?

Truly, these folks are confused to such an extent that their delusions of grandeur are hilarious.

"What was your latest scholarship?" Risible.

[LawProf John Banzhaf]

If some diversity in terms of where professors graduated is important, isn’t diversity in terms of philosophy and politics even more important in terms of teaching,especially perhaps in law schools.

Regarding political or philosophical leanings, studies consistently show that something like 75% to 85% of all law professors are liberal (as demonstrated by their political donations and otherwise), whereas only about 15% are even moderately conservative.

Moreover, the most highly ranked law schools - those graduating law students most likely to becomes Supreme Court justices and federal judges, to bring precedent-setting legal actions, and to draft major new laws and regulations, etc. - are even more liberal; e.g., reportedly more than 95% at top-ranked Yale Law School.

While these studies did not address the effect of having a law faculty which is much more liberal than the general population on what and how such law professors teach prospective lawyers, it's hard to see how a relative paucity of conservative and/or libertarian views would not have a significant impact, and for the same reason that African Americans and Hispanics are so actively sought out by law schools as part of their affirmative actions programs for both students and faculty.

After all, the primary if not exclusive legal justification for employing affirmative action (a/k/a/ "reverse discrimination") favoring so-called underrepresented minorities - including African Americans and Hispanics - is that students benefit from a range of viewpoints expressed in the classroom.

[anon4]

You can marshal all the logical arguments you want, just as many have before and many will in the future, but the legal academic market is driven by the social game of prestige-creation, prestige-chasing, and prestige-hoarding. Logical arguments have no effect on the people playing that game.

[twbb]

Given the profoundly stupid legal takes currently coming from reprobates like Jonathan Turley, Alan Dershowitz, and Richard Epstein, this piece seems quite timely. I would also note the idea that the best judge of someone's scholarly or juridical ability is a small group of anonymous, mid-level bureaucrats at the admissions office of five law schools is similarly profoundly stupid.