SLOWLY THEY CATCH ON.

A dozen years ago, I noted,

As long as departmental hiring committees have the responsibility for identifying people to hire, and as long as departmental promotion committees do the initial recommendations for tenure or promotion, junior faculty recognize that their primary responsibility is to be competitive in the discipline. That means establishing a reputation as a scholar.

Perhaps the people who manage higher education might want to re-examine whether the German model or the land-grant model of scholarship is the best one to apply to higher education, but as long as the reward structure is as it is, it ought not come as any surprise that faculty members respond to the incentives it provides.

Why, then, might faculty members wish to leave? I'll concede that securing a more visible position in the academic food chain is part of it. I'll note, however, that the food chain is probably more skewed than it ought to be, and some of the responsibility for that skewedness rests with senior faculty who are indifferent or hostile to their colleagues' ambitions. There is no shame in making a promising colleague look good enough to be raided away by some other program. There is nothing but shame in thinking that the success of a colleague somehow diminishes your own work.

Some responsibility for that skewedness must rest with administrators whose mindset is "We'll never be as good as College X and there's no point in even trying," particularly when that mindset mutates into the more virulent forms of access-assessment-remediation-retention and the lowered expectations that come in train. There is nothing quite like the intellectual challenge of keeping one's mind sufficiently sharp and focused to produce the kind of research that will be rewarded in the discipline after one has spent some time attempting to reason with Rate Your Students fodder. Does it come as any surprise that the sites run by the anonymous jobseekers that set off the conversation also have a goodly number of gripes about unprepared or unmotivated students? Improve the working conditions and people will be less disposed to want to publish their way out.

That was a conjecture, some scholars were intrigued enough by the hypothesis to test it.

Past studies have shown that faculty at prestigious universities tend to be more productive and prominent than faculty at less prestigious universities. This pattern is usually attributed to a competitive job market that selects inherently productive faculty into prestigious positions. Here, we test the extent to which, instead, faculty’s work environments drive their productivity. Using comprehensive data on an entire field of research, we use a matched-pair experimental design to isolate the effects of training at, versus working in, prestigious environments. We find that faculty’s work environments, not selection effects, drive their productivity and prominence, establishing that where a researcher works serves as a mechanism for cumulative advantage, locking in past success via job placement and thereby facilitating future success.

The right kind of preparation matters for landing a more prestigious position, as commonly understood. The right kind of academic environment reinforces the preparation.

The full article is behind a paywall.  Whether any departments or deans will take "The scientific productivity of early-career faculty is thus driven by where they work, rather than where they trained for their doctorate, indicating a limited role for doctoral prestige in predicting scientific contributions" seriously, and provide an environment conducive to excellent scholarship remains for future research.