POWER RULES EXIST.

They must.  Nature just told us so.  "Most US professors are trained at same few elite universities."

In today's world, though, what would be the predictable workings of a power rule have to be evidence of biases.

The finding suggests that prestige is overvalued in hiring decisions and that academic researchers have little opportunity to obtain jobs at institutions considered more elite than the ones at which they were trained.

Specifically, the study, published in Nature on 21 September, shows that just 20% of PhD-granting institutions in the United States supplied 80% of tenure-track faculty members to institutions across the country between 2011 and 2020 (see ‘Hiring bias’). No historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) or Hispanic-serving institutions (HSIs) were among that 20%, says Hunter Wapman, a computer scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder) and a co-author of the paper. One in eight US-trained tenure-track faculty members got their PhDs from just five elite universities: the University of California, Berkeley; Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts; the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor; Stanford University in California; and the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

The academic pecking order has long been a thing. The only thing worse than being recognized as among the fifty claimants to membership in the top twenty of a U.S. News category is not being so recognized.  In addition, the claimant universities have doctoral programs, and one measure of their productivity is that their doctoral students get jobs.  Hiring faculty from programs high on the pecking order might be Pareto improving.  "The Ph.D. is a research degree, and the academic job market has always been one in which aspirants do their work at the best possible place, and take the best possible job available. And yet there are more graduates from Harvard or M.I.T. than the top five departments will take, and so on down the pecking order."

The Nature article suggests that hiring patterns might not be raising those academic profiles.

Together, the studies portray an academic system in which most faculty members are trained at a few universities, and academic researchers generally come from families with similar backgrounds, setting up a cycle of sameness. “Is the system a meritocracy?” asks Daniel Larremore, a computational scientist at CU Boulder who is a co-author of both papers. “In peer review, no; in the spread of ideas, no; and in faculty hiring, surely no.”

Yes, the dynamics of old-boy networks have a lot in common with the dynamics of cliques, and somewhere Charlie "Prof Scam" Sykes is chuckling.

The enterprise might be self-referential, and cliquish, and dysfunctional.

Depending on the field, only 5–23% of faculty members worked at an institution more prestigious than the one at which they earned their PhD, according to the analysis. Fields with the least ‘upward mobility’ included classics and economics, whereas those with the most included animal science and pharmacology.

Hiring committees seem to be using prestige as a proxy for excellence on the job, says Kimberly Griffin, dean of the College of Education at the University of Maryland in College Park. But ‘prestige’ does not necessarily indicate ‘better-qualified’, and prestigious graduate programmes often admit students on the basis of standardized test scores, letters of recommendation and the renown of their undergraduate degree.

What institutional changes, though, will shake up the existing pecking order?  For instance, could the universities of the Mid-American Conference credibly commit to boycotting Harvard or Stanford in recruiting faculty, in the way a few judges are boycotting Yale Law in recruiting clerks?  To what end?  Might there be more research creativity?  By what criteria, and would anyone pay any attention to it?  Or would it be a sad ploy for attention the way weeknight football is?