The Academic Elite in History

Authors’ Note: In 1982 the National Academy of Sciences evaluated the quality of 102 doctoral programs in history. The fol­lowing year Changing Times listed the top 10 percent of all graduate programs based upon a combination of two variables from the National Academy study, which the magazine believed constituted the best measures of program quality. Given the questionable and subjective nature of the evaluation process that produced these ratings, this paper exam­ines the top eight history graduate programs (ten schools because of ties) based upon crite­ria established in the Changing Times arti­cle. It was found that these departments were substantially linked to each other by hiring each other’s graduates, and hence, enhancing each others’ reputations.

In the November 1983 edition of Chang­ing Times, a listing of the most highly regarded doctoral programs in thirty­-two academic disciplines was presented. These rankings were based on a five­ volume study published by the National Academy of Sciences. This study enti­tled “An Assessment of Research-Doc­torate Programs in the United States” reviewed 2,700 PhD programs in thir­ty-two disciplines from anthropology to zoology.

In the ratings reported by Changing Times, two key measures of reputation from the National Academy of Sciences’ study were combined: the first, “Faculty Quality,” assessed how professors around the country rated their peers in the same discipline; the second, “Pro­gram Quality,” assessed how well the faculty thought each program educated research scholars and scientists. Chang­ing Times combined these two measures and derived a ranking of the top 10 percent of the programs in each disci­pline. For the discipline of history Changing Times listed the top ten depart­ments based on scores derived from the National Academy of Sciences’ study. Following the assumptions of the Chang­ing Times article, the ten schools with the highest combined scores produced a list of history’s “academic elite,” the ten “best” programs in the country.

Given the questionable and subjective nature of the evaluation process which produced the academy’s ratings, we thought that it would be interesting to examine the composition of the faculties of the top ten. We suspected that these departments might be substantially linked to each other by hiring each other’s graduates, and hence, enhanc­ing each other’s reputations. We also suspected that among the academic elite there might be a high degree of aca­demic inbreeding, the hiring of gradu­ates from one’s own program. Given the international scope of the discipline, we also suspected that elite institutions might also hire a large number of for­eign scholars to distinguish themselves from less renowned programs, thus lending additional credibility to their reputations.

In reviewing the growth of graduate training in history in the United States, Dexter Perkins and John Snell have noted that “the awarding of PhDs in history began in 1882 when John Frank­lin Jameson at Johns Hopkins and Clar­ence Bowen at Yale received the de­gree.” By the turn of the century, eigh­teen institutions offered a PhD in history, with about nineteen doctorates produced on the average each year. In 1931, graduate programs had increased to forty-six and a decade later fifty-eight institutions offered the PhD, and, ac­cording to the Guide to Departments of History, 1980–81, almost three decades later this number had grown to 126 graduate programs which produced 628 PhDs in 1979–80.

In 1966 An Assessment of Quality in Graduate Education, a comprehensive evaluation of graduate education by the American Council of Education, was published. This report presented a sub­jective evaluation of history depart­ments. It assumed that the reputation of a graduate department reflected the presence of objective criteria upon which subjective evaluation was based. The ACE report concluded that the leading departments could be identified using either an [objective or subjective] approach, because they corroborated each other.

In 1969 ACE conducted a reputa­tional survey of thirty-six graduate pro­ grams, which included history pro­ grams. One hundred and thirty graduate deans were asked to provide survey participants who were then asked to rate the quality of graduate faculty and the effectiveness of doctoral programs in their discipline. Participants were asked to rate the quality of graduate faculty and the effectiveness of doctoral pro­ grams in their discipline. Participants were also asked to estimate changes in these programs, either positive or nega­tive, over the previous five years. In terms of the perceived quality of gradu­ate faculty, the top twenty-five institu­tions were listed in rank order. In addi­tion, the relative rankings of these same institutions based on surveys conducted in 1957 and 1964 were also given. The results were published in A Rating of Graduate Programs (1970).

The National Academy of Sciences in An Assessment of Research Doctorate Pro­grams in the United States: Social and Be­havioral Sciences evaluated the quality of 102 doctoral programs in history in 1981. The assessment was based on six­teen measures, twelve of which were deemed “objective.” The remaining four “subjective” measures were based on a reputational survey of faculty members conducted in April 1981, in which 166 historians were asked to par­ticipate. Fifty-four percent did so, with seventy-eight historians listing them­ selves as specializing in American his­ tory (47 percent), forty-six in European history (28 percent) and forty-two in the other/unknown category (25 percent). Two-thirds of all respondents had earned their highest degree prior to 1970, and a majority held the rank of full professor.

A comparison of the results of the National Academy of Sciences’ study and the 1969 ACE survey, which includ­ ed previous surveys in 1957 and 1964, revealed substantial stability in the per­ception of faculty quality, and quality of graduate programs over much of the last three decades. From 1957 until to­day only two history programs that were outside the elite during portions of this period have been able to enter the top ten. These include Stanford ranked fif­teenth in the 1957 survey, and Michigan ranked twelfth the same year. Johns Hopkins, ranked nineth in 1957, fell to eleventh in the 1964 and 1969 surveys, but in the National Academy’s 1981 survey it regained its elite ranking by placing seventh (tied).

There may be several possible reasons why perceptions regarding the  quality of graduate programs in history have remained fairly consistent. In our view, the consistently high reputational rank­ing enjoyed by top-rated programs is directly linked to the composition of their faculty and the highly subjective nature of the survey results.

Using the American Historical Associ­ation’s Guide to Departments of History (1980–81), the full-time faculties of the top-ten ranked history departments were examined. The item of primary interest was where full-time faculty members at these institutions had re­ceived their doctoral degrees.

In analyzing the faculties of history’s top-ranked departments, it soon be­ came obvious that there were numerous interrelationships among departments in terms of where the faculty had re­ceived their doctoral degrees. Table 1 lists the top-ranked departments and indicates the percentage of full-time faculty who received their doctoral de­grees from one of the top-ranked de­ partments on the list (which would in­clude those who received their degree from the same department where they are currently on the faculty). This table also indicates the percentage of full­ time faculty who received their doctoral degree from a foreign university.

As can be seen in Table 1, all of the top-ranked departments had a substan­tial proportion of their faculty who had received their PhD degree from a member of the “Academic Elite.” Princeton had the highest percentage of degree holders from among the top­ ranked departments (88.9 percent), and the University of Wisconsin (Madison) had the lowest (61.7 percent). Most of the schools had anywhere from two­ thirds to over three-fourths of their faculty who had graduated from one of the prestigious programs.

All of  the academic elite had faculty who had received their PhD degree from a foreign university. Johns Hop­kins University had the highest percent­ age of degree holders from foreign uni­versities (23.8 percent). Columbia Uni­versity also had a rather large percentage of foreign graduates on their history faculty (20.3 percent). Princeton University and Stanford University each had only one foreign grad­ uate.

Table 2 addresses the issue of aca­ demic inbreeding among the top­ ranked history programs. In Graduate Education in the United States, and The Academic Marketplace, Berelson and Ca­plow and McGee have demonstrated that a high degree of inbreeding among elite schools is not accidental. According to both studies, if elite programs are to maintain their prestige ranking, they cannot hire a large number of PhDs from lower ranked departments, and this would include faculty from upward­ly mobile “middleman” programs, whose elite credentials have yet to be established. G. R. Gross in his study “The Organization Set: A Study of Soci­ology Departments” found that the higher the prestige of a department, the greater the proportion of home-grown graduate faculty. With some modifications, “Prestige of Sociology Depart­ments and the Placing of New PhDs,” D. Shichor’s study, confirmed Gross’s findings. He found the relation between departmental inbreeding and the pres­tige of a department to be curvilinear, with the highest and lowest ranking departments having the highest rates of inbreeding, while mid-level depart­ments were found to have the lowest rates. Not surprisingly, in regard to in­ breeding, findings from history pro­ grams were almost identical to those of sociology.

As can be seen, Harvard University had the largest percentage of their own graduates on their full-time history fac­ulty (68.4 percent). Columbia University and Yale University also had rather large percentages of their own gradu­ates on their history staffs (37.3 percent and 28.6 percent, respectively). Inter­estingly, the University of Michigan had hired only two of its own graduates.

Table 3 looks at the number of PhDs produced from each department who were represented on the full-time facul­ty of one of the elite departments in 1981–82. Harvard had 120 of its gradu­ates in faculty positions in one of the elite history departments. Columbia and Yale followed with fifty-three and forty­ six, respectively. Stanford, Johns Hop­kins, and Michigan had the least with sixteen, twelve, and eight, respectively.

Graduate departments in history (or in any discipline) must rely to a large extent upon their reputations to attract highly qualified faculty and graduate students to participate in their pro­grams. Further, as students complete the PhD and enter the academic job market, they are acutely aware of the fact that the reputation of the institution from which they received their degree becomes an important variable in their employability.

J. Helmer in The Deadly Simple Me­chanics of Society (1974) indicated there is a strong correlation between the pres­tige of the department where one gets a PhD and the prestige of the depart­ment where the individual gets his or her first and later jobs. While a variety of variables enter into the screening process for faculty selection, it would be naive to argue that the subjective evalu­ation accorded the degree-granting in­stitution is not part of the decision proc­ess. Thus, graduate programs around the country vie for respectability, status, and in some cases, “oneupmanship.”

The ten graduate programs that were top-ranked in the 1982 National Acade­my of Sciences study are undoubtedly excellent graduate programs in history. We are not trying to suggest otherwise. However, jt is our belief that several factors are at work in any procedure in which academic departments are ranked in such a manner. Primarily, we contend that a rather small group of institutions (ten in this case) tend to enhance each others’ reputations by hir­ing each others’ graduates over a period of time. It should be recalled that the study cited by Changing Times used two measures of reputation in order to es­tablish their list of the “best” graduate departments: how professors rated their peers in the same discipline, and how well the faculty thought each pro­gram educated research scholars and scientists. In looking at these criteria, it can be seen that they are inherently linked and it should be realized that when faculty among these “academic elites” are asked to rate their peers at other schools, they are, to a large extent, rating their former professors and/or students. In other words, there are a total of 447 full-time faculty at these ten schools, and 335 of them graduated from one of these ten schools (see Table 4). It is obviously in their vested inter­ests to rank their alma maters highly.

Our notion that elite programs also hire foreign scholars to enhance their reputations received moderate support. Forty-four foreign scholars were mem­bers of elite programs. Columbia Uni­versity had the greatest number of for­eign scholars on their staff with twelve, 20.3 percent. Most others had between one and five graduates of foreign insti­tutions. Our findings suggest that while the use of foreign scholars may be an important means of reputational en­hancement, it is a complex variable.

The remarkable stability in the rank­ing of elite programs over the last few decades suggests that not only do elite faculty rate their own programs highly, but so do large numbers of faculty mem­bers from smaller, less prestigious pro­grams. Several factors seem to explain this phenomenon. On the one hand, our data suggest that the consistently high rankings of elite programs may be due to the large numbers of graduates elite programs put into the discipline each year. While they place some gradu­ates in other elite schools, most drop into mid-level schools or less renowned institutions where they continue to sub­jectively rank their alma maters as the very best. The high number of elite school graduates at all levels also seems to enable them to play a major role in shaping “public opinion” within the dis­cipline.

There is another way of explaining the relative stability in the ranking of elite programs through time. Obviously, there are not enough faculty from elite schools at middle- and lower-level pro­grams for them to maintain the high status ranking of their alma maters without some support from their nonelite colleagues. It seems clear that nonelite faculty, those defined by Helmer as coming from “middle range” or “boon­ docker” programs, have adopted the elite’s definition that their programs are, in fact, the best. Tradition may be a partial explanation for the nonelite’s acceptance of their inferior status. Elite schools have been accorded high esteem for decades or longer, and these tradi­tions typically have gone unchallenged. It might also be contended that non­elite faculty working at the same institu­tion with peers who have graduated from elite schools have witnessed their superior talents in the form of the quan­tity of quality of their publications, and this too may have influenced the deci­sion of faculty from nonelite programs to consistently rank certain programs higher than others.

A  more likely explanation, however, is that the nonelite in a classic example of “false consciousness” have adopted their elite peer’s definition that the lat­ter’s  programs and their faculties are superior to their own. Buttressed by only a few subjective government sur­veys and contact with a handful of indi­viduals from elite programs, the none­lite have not only accepted but even perpetuated the notion that the elites’ graduate programs are deserving of high esteem, whereas others including their own, are not. In many cases, facul­ty from nonelite programs have come to agree among themselves that such schools as Yale and Berkeley are superior to their own. Moreover, many actively promote such notions to prospective stu­dents, who like their faculty mentors, will eventually transmit these same traditions to the next generation of historians.

Ultimately, it should be asked, “are the ten highest-ranked programs in­ deed the best PhD programs in history? Or do these schools comprise an ‘aca­demic elite’ who have the largest num­ber of faculty members in the discipline and who have a vested interest in main­taining the current ‘definition of the situation’ that they are the best?” (The Unadjusted Girl, W. I. Thomas, 1931.) Our data suggest the latter; Helmer’s contention that “the hierarchy of pres­tige is thus fundamentally a hierarchy of power unequally distributed” seems to receive strong support. Paraphrasing Helmer, “No more in history than in the rest of the world do the deserving get their just reward.”