I’ve never heard of anyone getting a JRFship there who didn’t already have a Cambridge connection, usually through being a graduate/undergraduate.

And I spent two years there before fleeing, so I did meet quite a lot of JRFs.

(I think there is some basic Oxford insecurity that means it wants to import good people from elsewhere to try to keep up, while that wonderful Cambridge insularity means they see no need to correspond with the rest of the world but merely wish to incubate the careers of their best and brightest.)

It should be said that this kind of structure was at least acknowledged by one of my tutors, who advised me, as an Oxford DPhil in English heading out to the US, to seek gainful employ with a ‘good second-division university’, based on the premise that the Ivy League tends to recruit talent from its own and its peers, work it into the ground without any hope of tenure, and turn bright-eyed academic hopefuls into bitter husks. By contrast, a junior position in the ‘semi-periphery’ is considered a better place from which to launch one’s academic career, with less of a rat-race and more space in which to expand.

That’s why I’m a little surprised by the ‘self-loop’ described in the paper, but it might be the case that there are better reasons for Class I graduates to head to Class I institutions.

I’m particularly intrigued by the ‘inbreeding’ and ‘outbreeding’ of academic staff: the notion that while ‘feeder’ institutions don’t like to hire their own for junior positions, they’ll gladly send them out for ‘seasoning’ and bring them back when tenure’s at stake. That’s less the case at Oxford (an inbreeder if ever there was one) but I can see the logic behind it.

http://www.staff.uiuc.edu/~skh/TR.pdf

http://tinyurl.com/umdo

Yes I know it too well (being a post-doc myself). I might have read things wrong, but I was under the impression that the issue was how certain programs can be analysed from a ‘tribal’ (i.e. Class I vs. Class II) perspective. There just seem to be more ways of bucking the ‘class’ system in other disciplines (such as grants, publishing etc). You can get hired at Harvard and Stanford even if you come from a Class III school. Whereas in other (more theoretical? ) disciplines, if you did not graduate from an Ivy league school, you will not be hired by one. This of course is a wide generalization, but I wonder if the general point holds true. Anyhow, interesting article

It would be nice to think that somehow markets and scientific truth would be positively correlated, but I doubt it. The structure of careers in many sciences is even more hierarchically organized than the humanities and social sciences — the Postdoc “journeyman” stage is fully institutionalized, getting established is about builing a lab in a position to attract grants and so on.

Relatedly, do applied disciplines where ‘sucess’ can be measured at least in some forms independent from the system (i.e. schooling, theoretical background, what’s ‘hot’) that produced them –function more like efficient systems?

Furthermore, does this relate to the wide-spread downsizing of the humanities across academia in favor of more “success-orientated” (read: money-making) disciplines?

I keep sayin’ that “sayin’ ain’t doin’” but I never seems to do anythin’ about it!

We at Berkeley do keep saying that there is a clear market failure on the used junior market, and that we ought to try to pick off people two or three years out who are “underplaced” and hire them…

Let the rationalisations begin …