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.
Highlights
Faculty hiring is a crucial process that shapes the composition and structure of the academic workforce
2.2 Models of faculty hiring To model the dynamics of faculty hiring networks, we considered an evolving adaptive rewiring model that represents the processes of retirement and hiring, in which the network’s current structure endogenously affects future hiring decisions
3 Results 3.1 Reproduction of empirical structural inequalities To compare the five hiring models’ abilities to reproduce the observed values of the two measures of structural inequality, the Gini coefficient G and the hierarchy steepness ρ, we systematically varied the strength of prestige preference β ∈ [0.0, 2.0] and the level of random hiring p ∈ [0.0, 1.0] for both the egalitarian and skewed initial conditions
Summary
Faculty hiring is a crucial process that shapes the composition and structure of the academic workforce. One aspect of a department’s power is its ability to place its graduates as faculty at other institutions. This placement power can be inferred from analyzing the structure of faculty hiring networks, in which nodes represent departments and a directed link (i → j) indicates that of (2021) 10:48 a graduate of node i is faculty at node j. Faculty hiring networks are well described by a steep linear hierarchy of the nodes in which 86–91% of directed edges point from higher-ranked nodes toward lower-ranked nodes, and the strength of this hierarchy is much greater than can be attributed to the heavy-tailed out-degree distribution alone [5]
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