In a small academic department, how important is it to have faculty who received their own doctorates from different universities?
For example, in a department of ten faculty, how many can have degrees from the same university and still have a diverse overall faculty educational background?
Hi Michael,
For me, where doctorates were awarded is not so much a factor within Faculty - as more what 'topics' are the doctorates? Within small Faculty departments, I would argue that it is more desirable to promote a more focused, specialized approach to scholarly activity. Too much diversity and approaches may be 'splintered' with everyone 'doing their own thing' instead of pulling in a more collective direction. If everyone in a small department had received their PhD awards at the same institution, then this could work in favour of a more collective action; call it 'group think' if you want. Within much larger Faculties, then more diversity can be encouraged although, instead, it is more likely that there are multiple topic groups rather than a single collective strategy.
A book was published in January of this year on academic inbreeding and higher education. The case studies from 8 countries I think, showed that while inbred departments do not necessarily perform worse than the non-inbred ones, they do though lack innovative ideas. But while it is recognised that diversity is desirable, in-breeding is common place. EU funders for example do favour and encourage applications from international and inter-disciplinary collaborative projects because of the diversity they bring to the table. Of course, there is no formula as to how many is enough and how many are too many! The ability to work closely with colleagues from other departments of your institution, other national and international colleagues will become important in the future.
I agree that the diversity is better. One of the problem in Spain is particularly that the most part of the professors studied their PhD in the same University where today they are teaching...
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Higher Education
- Universities