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Comment by cwoolfe | Hacker News Reader

My wife has a PhD. She told me that universities are reluctant to hire their own PhDs because they'd rather have the cross-pollination of ideas from other institutions, in order to avoid an institutional echo-chamber.

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I have a PhD, and yes this is exactly the reason Universities don't want to hire their own. It has zero to do with "being too good to hire their own students" and everything to do with diversity of thought. I 100% agree with it.

You also don't really want to hire someone who's been completely beholden to another faculty member's whims for the past 5-6 years. That would lead to bad organizational dynamics – you want faculty who see each other as peers.

I have a PhD and this is absolutely not the reason universities don't want to hire their own. In the modern day, there is no reason whatsoever that university affiliation limits the spread of ideas or collaborations. The reason is there is a funnel - only the top x% of students get the TT positions and students of prestigious institutions are just more likely to have the big name publications that forms the sole criterion for academic hiring. Even the prestigious institutions like to spread the mantra of "we don't hire our own" but this is just so that professors can avoid having the awkward conversations with their students along the lines of "you're good, you're just not better than <y> candidate".

That would explain why mid-tier universities don't hire their own grads. Per the article, they don't hire other mid-tier grads either.

It does seem that the majority of universities are knowing producing grads that aren't up to their own standards. (Whether their standards are based on quality of teaching and research, or just paper prestige, is another question.)

I've been tenure track faculty and university departments are the last place I would go to look for a "diversity of thought", I've seen people excellent faculty attempted to be driven out of universities precisely because there thought was too "diverse" for the rest of the faculty.

There's also too many counter examples of this I know to believe there is any truth to that statement. The few times I've seen it it's because of how perfectly aligned the candidates thought is with the department (for both good and bad).

Every department has it's own politics and issues, but individual experiences don't mean the whole is wrong and certainly doesn't mean the idea itself is wrong. For example, there was a case at the school I got my PhD at where they hired someone who did their PhD at the school. This person was employed at another school for many years between, and thus it was deemed "ok", but I can tell you that not all professors agreed with it.

Unfortunately every system, no matter how well constructed or how ideal the ideas behind it are, is subject to gaming and politics. It would be wonderful to have more techniques to mitigate this sort of corruption, and certainly talking about it and bringing it to light when it happens is one of those techniques.

They mostly get their faculty from higher ranking schools though. They maybe say it is for "cross pollination", but it is mostly that faculty works at much worse universities than they graduates from so they prefer to get people from similar places they came from.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02998-w

> It has zero to do with "being too good to hire their own students" and everything to do with diversity of thought. I 100% agree with it.

If you think universities have diversity of thought you haven’t been to a university in the last few decades

MY dad who had a PHD and was a college dean said the same thing years ago. While that may be true but a lot of the universities only seem to recruit professors from a limited number of universities so the feed back loop is still there -Head of the IU econ department gets PHD from Harvard, hires new professor with PHD from Harvard, how is this different?

It's mostly an excuse. They're looking for reputation or monetary gain. If you have grants waiting to write a check to an institution or some high individual reputation that the university can claim as their own this excuse of cross-pollination disappears.

Another factor is that if your department's area is hiring for a new position that you might be a good fit for, your P.I. or advisor is likely on the hiring committee. Thus the committee then has to be wary of nepotism and conflicts of interest. When everyone is so incredibly specialized, it turns out that the sub-field you are working in is small.

Being in the same department as your faculty advisor can also be politically challenging.

This is a white lie at best. I’ve never sat on a hiring committee that cared about diversity of thought.

> universities are reluctant to hire their own PhDs because they'd rather have the cross-pollination of ideas

Maybe in her case, but that’s just not true. The whole point of the Internet was to exchange scientific ideas, and that has actually come true - all academics I know share data/ideas online in real-time.

Universities are just too cheap to hire as many PhDs as they generate.

That sounds like the same rationalisation companies use when people quit.

"It is good because we don't get inbred ideas".

More often than not the person departing has expert competence in the university or company specific systems or social structures, that are of no use somewhere else, and no one recruited from the outside have it.

Almost all of my CS professors had PhDs from Universities other than the one I received my degree at, but most of them had undergraduate degrees.

School 1 (BS) -> School 2 (PhD) -> School 1 (Teaching).

Yes, this is considered ok. It can also be the case that you have School 1 (PhD) -> School 2 (professor) -> School 1 (Professor). But that's still fairly uncommon.

That's an interesting excuse but isn't most PhD level academia at least in the United States a pretty big echo-chamber?

No, it's not. Compared to industry, it is very normal to challenge each other in academia. So much so that many people moving from academia to industry are often told they are too "mean" or "aggressive" in meetings because they tend to challenge the status quo thinking too much.

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