Philosophy is Not Flat—Empirical Considerations for Prestige Bias in Philosophy (guest post)

 

Guest Post

 

by

Helen De Cruz*

 

Recently, Alexander Rosenberg, R. Taylor Cole Professor of Philosophy at Duke University, argued that philosophy is essentially a non-hierarchical discipline: “I never experienced any hierarchy or rank-pulling in philosophy. You had a good argument, or you didn’t”, he says in an interview (see also here for an interesting discussion thread). He doesn’t deny prestige bias, but insists that it is very rare: “Of course, there are a few (very few) philosophers who attach importance to pedigree.”

Is this correct? In my forthcoming paper on prestige bias in philosophy (to be published in Ergo), I provide empirical evidence that suggests that prestige bias is pervasive in philosophy. It has a profound influence on who gets to shape the discipline or who is relegated to only comment on it.

The main form (but not the only form) of prestige bias is focused on the doctoral department a job candidate got their PhD from. I present both correlational data and further arguments to show that the PhD granting department’s prestige plays an important role in where one gets hired and what opportunities one has subsequently. One striking pattern, shown in the figure below, which is based on hiring data as reported by Carolyn Dicey Jennings and collaborators’ Academic Placement Data and Analysis is as follows: the most prestigious departments provide job candidates to schools at all levels (unsurprising, since most schools are unranked), but people from lower-ranked departments seldom get jobs in more highly-ranked schools. At the time that I received the data (summer 2017), only one person who was not from a ranked school was hired at a PGR-top 20 institution.

 

[Description of image below: A stream diagram showing the different streams of hired candidates, from the origin of their department by PGR rank to the department they are hired at. The candidates from top-ranked departments (N=461) get hired both at other top-ranked departments, lower-ranked departments and unranked departments. By contrast, candidates from unranked departments (N=390) get mostly hired at other departments. Only 1 candidate from an unranked department was hired at a top-20 school, and only 14 were hired at PGR lower-ranked schools, the remainder were all hired at other unranked schools.]

  

Figure 1. Streams of placements from three different kinds of PhD granting institutions: PGR top 20 (purple), PGR top 21–50 (orange), and unranked (green).

 

Philosophy is not unique in this respect. In spite of their explicit endorsement of liberalism, academics are status-conscious, and social mobility—especially upward social mobility—is very low.

One may argue that prestige tracks the quality of candidates, and that it is rational for search committees to rely on it. At the time of hiring, candidates typically have few publications—a shift from no publications before—so prestige is one of the few things that search committees can use to make a first cut in dossiers, without an in-depth consideration of writing samples and letters of recommendation. But relying on this heuristic comes at a cost, because whether or not you get into a top program depends not only on merit.

As I show in the article, there is systematic bias in terms of both ethnicity and class.  Indeed, in the US, the most prestigious schools have mechanisms that allow them to discriminate against candidates who are not rich and white, including legacy preferences and holistic assessments of “character” rather than measurable outcomes. As Jerome Karabel shows, such mechanisms were originally introduced to keep bright Jewish students of European descent out of the Ivy League schools, prompted by a fear of “WASP flight”, the same mechanisms now used to keep the proportion of Asian Americans low at elite schools.

Pertinent to this blog, disability presents formidable barriers to access to the most prestigious schools and thus prestige bias systematically screens out disabled people, who are already underrepresented in philosophy. In the UK, Colleges of old universities (Oxford and Cambridge, mainly, but also Durham with its famous castle site) vary considerably in the support they provide to disabled students, such as the availability of ramps and lifts for wheelchair users. These buildings are often centuries old and not designed with accessibility in mind. Tutorials and lectures take place in teaching rooms that are hard to reach, often by flights of narrow staircases with uneven steps. In some cases, such old buildings have been made accessible, but this seems to be erratic and dependent on the efforts of individual administrators at these colleges.

When disabled students I spoke to (who were members of or in contact with MAP UK, a student-led initiative to support minority students in philosophy) asked about accessibility at elite schools to which they wanted to apply, they were often told that no provisions for accessibility were in place. In some cases, schools said they were unable to modify the buildings because they were protected monuments. In other cases, the schools assured that while there was nothing in place, there was a plan to put ramps and lifts once someone would need them. Prospective students were often hesitant to take up offers from colleges without accessibility provisions in place because they worried that the works would not be completed in time, and they were concerned that they would be regarded by other students and staff as a burden or someone who asks for special favors.

More generally, disabled people may require access to carers or other facilities that cannot easily be provided away from home, which restricts their options for accepting offers from schools. Similar worries apply to people who have caring responsibilities to disabled people. These problems remain even if elite schools make adequate provisions for disabled people.

In sum, if we are serious about diversifying the profession then paying attention to an overreliance on prestige in job candidate evaluation (and other domains) can be a step forward. Prestige bias presents additional hurdles to job candidates of lower socio-economic status, job candidates who are not white (as is clearly evident by the very low representation of Black and African-American philosophers in the UK and the US), and disabled philosophers. Being more reflective of prestige bias, and how we allow it to influence the philosophical conservation, is thus something that I encourage everyone to do.

 

*Helen De Cruz is a senior lecturer at Oxford Brookes University who specializes in experimental philosophy and philosophy of religion.

 Helen De Cruz's forthcoming Ergo article on prestige bias in philosophy is here.

 

posted by Shelley

Comments

[Shelley]

Helen,
thank you very much for this guest post. Disability is seldom considered in these discussions about prestige bias.

I wanted to underscore the point that the lack of disabled faculty at "elite" institutions, including the lack of disabled philosophers at these institutions, affects disabled students in a multitude of ways and also means that these institutions reproduce oppressive ideas, stereotypes, and beliefs about disability.

I wrote an earlier blogpost about the attempts by disabled students at Yale to get their administration to address issues of inaccessibility on that campus, as well as the lack of disabled faculty at Yale, and the need for courses in critical disability studies.

You will find the earlier post at the link below: http://philosophycommons.typepad.com/disability_and_disadvanta/2017/03/disability-resources-task-force-at-yale-releases-report.html

[Adam]

thank you for this, i look forward to reading the article. i never really knew what class i was in until i began studies at my phd institution in the U.S. articles/posts like this help me process that and subsequent realizations. take care.

[Arguedas Gabriela]

Helen, this is a great commentary. Would you give me permission to translate it into Spanish? My email is arguedas.gabriela@gmail.com. Thanks!

[Helen De Cruz]

It is OK to translate it in Spanish - please do mention the original source and please also provide a link to it. Many thanks

[Alan White]

Helen, that graphic by itself is very powerful! Thank you for this work.

[Filippo Contesi]

Thanks for this, Helen. I do not understand why the diagram (and your data?) jumps from PGR 21--50 to PGR unranked. Are the PGR 51--75 programmes included in PGR unranked?

[Helen De Cruz]

Hi Filippo, yes, the rankings on the PGR (at least the one I consulted) only had info for programs ranked up until 50. The current rankings do give programs outside of the top-50 in the US and UK, but these aren't given a specific rank, just a mean score.

[Filippo Contesi]

Hi, Helen, many thanks. I'm not sure I understand. (Sorry for being slow!) There have been no changes in this respect between current and (at least the most recent) previous editions of the PGR. Both do rank programmes beyond the 50th, although they do so only by geographic region (US, UK, Australasia and Canada). In other words, they do not include an explicit 'global' table beyond the 50th programme. However, since the 'global' table is simply an ordering by mean, a PGR 51--75 (and perhaps even beyond given the presence of means for some unranked programmes) table can be easily put together. Or am I missing something here?

But, anyway, is your answer that you included in 'PGR unranked' all data for those programmes which the PGR ranks locally (or provides means for) and are outside of the 'global' top 50?

[Filippo Contesi]

APPENDIX: This is the kind of ranked PGR 51-downwards I mean:

51st: Birmingham, Bristol, Johns Hopkins, Maryland
55th: California Davis, Sheffield, Warwick, Western Ontario
59th: Illinois Chicago, Monash
61st: Durham, Manchester, York, Boston, Florida State, Texas A&M, California Santa Barbara, Minnesota Minneapolis-St Paul
69th: St Louis, Rochester, Calgary, Melbourne, (Birkbeck, Glasgow, Reading)
76th: (Nottingham, Utah)
78th: Auckland, (Arizona State, Purdue, U. at Buffalo, Missouri Columbia)