January 15, 2009
The Psychology of Prestige
One of my favorite academic bloggers is Dean Dad, author of the very wise “Confessions of a Community College Dean.” In a recent post, he argues that the current crisis in academic hiring may have the salutary result of dispelling what I would call the “myth of meritocracy” in the job market. He argues that the economic problems higher education is facing have created such a mismatch between the size and quality of the applicant pool, and the number of available faculty jobs, that there is no meaningful way to correlate applicants’ quality (however defined) with success on the job market.
Surely there are many wonderful candidates who, through no fault of their own, will not get faculty jobs. There are also a lesser number (I hope) of weak candidates who will somehow manage to find academic employment despite their shortcomings. Despite those facts, Dean Dad writes, “we academics persist in believing that the Great Chain of Prestige, starting at Harvard and working its way on down, is founded in basic truth. And because it’s an objective reflection of merit, being anyplace other than at the tippity-top must reflect a personal failing.”
For a long time, I have thought about the way academics internalize that “Great Chain of Prestige.” It is quite literally bred in the bones of graduate students at the most competitive programs, and it is responsible, beyond doubt, for an enormous amount of unhappiness in the professoriate. Dean Dad is optimistic that the empirically verifiable falsity of that myth will lead to some kind of psychological restructuring among academics. I wish I were so hopeful, but I do think that his points are an excellent basis for further thinking about how we measure and value success as faculty members.
By David Evans | Posted on Thursday January 15, 2009 | Permalink
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