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Comment by tensor | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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