The dynamics of faculty hiring networks

Abstract

Faculty hiring networks—who hires whose graduates as faculty—exhibit steep hierarchies, which can reinforce both social and epistemic inequalities in academia. Understanding the mechanisms driving these patterns would inform efforts to diversify the academy and shed new light on the role of hiring in shaping which scientific discoveries are made. Here, we investigate the degree to which structural mechanisms can explain hierarchy and other network characteristics observed in empirical faculty hiring networks. We study a family of adaptive rewiring network models, which reinforce institutional prestige within the hierarchy in five distinct ways. Each mechanism determines the probability that a new hire comes from a particular institution according to that institution’s prestige score, which is inferred from the hiring network’s existing structure. We find that structural inequalities and centrality patterns in real hiring networks are best reproduced by a mechanism of global placement power, in which a new hire is drawn from a particular institution in proportion to the number of previously drawn hires anywhere. On the other hand, network measures of biased visibility are better recapitulated by a mechanism of local placement power, in which a new hire is drawn from a particular institution in proportion to the number of its previous hires already present at the hiring institution. These contrasting results suggest that the underlying structural mechanism reinforcing hierarchies in faculty hiring networks is a mixture of global and local preference for institutional prestige. Under these dynamics, we show that each institution’s position in the hierarchy is remarkably stable, due to a dynamic competition that overwhelmingly favors more prestigious institutions. These results highlight the reinforcing effects of a prestige-based faculty hiring system, and the importance of understanding its ramifications on diversity and innovation in academia.

Quantifying hierarchy and dynamics in US faculty hiring and retention

“…Analyses of faculty hiring networks, which map who hires whose graduates as faculty, show unambiguously in multiple fields that prestigious departments supply an outsized proportion of faculty, regardless of whether prestige is measured by an extrinsic ranking or reputation scheme [11][12][13] or derived from the structure of the faculty hiring network itself [14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29] . Prestigious departments also exhibit 'social closure' 15 by excluding those who lack prestige, facilitated by relatively stable hierarchies over time, both empirically 17 and in mathematical models of self-reinforcing network dynamics 30,31 .…”

Academic free speech or right-wing grievance?

“…164 Out-of-proportion hiring of White men is never viewed as a racial or gender preference, yet every candidate of color risks being labeled a "diversity hire" in the eyes of some. Network effects exacerbate inequality by amplifying the advantages of privileged groups, 189, [333][334][335][336][337] meaning that those who aren't victimized by systemic discrimination actually benefit from it. The so-called meritocracy frequently devolves into pattern-matching, with a template reflecting the legacy elites who have historically dominated the scientific enterprise.…”

Temporal Dynamics of Faculty Hiring in Mathematics

“…Recent years have observed a growing interest in quantifying the faculty hiring process in various fields (Hanneman, 2001;Barnett et al, 2010;Clauset et al, 2015;Cowan and Rossello, 2018;Fernandes et al, 2020;Mai et al, 2015;Zuo et al, 2019;Fowler et al, 2007;Lee et al, 2021;Wapman et al, 2022). For instance, researchers used a network science approach to study the trajectories of 19,000 faculty members in business, computer science, and history (Clauset et al, 2015).…”

“…They also found that doctoral program prestige is a strong predictor of faculty placement and that there exists a bias towards men compared with women with the same training, especially in the fields of business and computer science (Clauset et al, 2015). A follow up study in 2021, which used the same data set, utilized adaptive rewiring network models to test mechanisms that give rise to the hierarchical nature of the faculty hiring observed in the 2015 study (Lee et al, 2021). It concludes that a mixture of two mechanisms, total faculty production and local homophily, likely drives the dynamics of real world faculty hiring (Lee et al, 2021).…”

“…A follow up study in 2021, which used the same data set, utilized adaptive rewiring network models to test mechanisms that give rise to the hierarchical nature of the faculty hiring observed in the 2015 study (Lee et al, 2021). It concludes that a mixture of two mechanisms, total faculty production and local homophily, likely drives the dynamics of real world faculty hiring (Lee et al, 2021). Another recent study combined a survey of tenure-track faculty members in eight fields, US census data, and the NSF Survey of Earned Doctorates to study the impact of socioeconomic status on faculty position acquisition and found that faculty members tended to grow up in wealthier homes and were 25 times more likely to have a parent who held a Ph.D., when compared with the general US population (Morgan et al, 2022).…”