> “Accepting that prestige is a good measure of excellence means that we’re not looking into the history of how things became prestigious,” Gonzales says. The founding of elite US universities is “intertwined with exclusion”, she adds. For instance, many institutions have a history of seizing land from Indigenous groups, or originally derived their wealth from or supported their infrastructure with the labour of enslaved Black people.
These are non-sequiturs. The research question here is whether faculty are hired from those prestigious schools above and beyond the rate at which they would have been hired based on other signals of their potential as researchers, which, presumably, are related to what school they go to.
I am not seeing how schools' historical relationships with marginalized peoples bears on that question.
I believe it was Gary King who said that nepotism and meritocracy are very hard to distinguish in academia. You would need a clever identification strategy [0] to tease out the effects of prestige on the margin. I'm afraid this article doesn't offer much on that front.
These are non-sequiturs. The research question here is whether faculty are hired from those prestigious schools above and beyond the rate at which they would have been hired based on other signals of their potential as researchers, which, presumably, are related to what school they go to.
I am not seeing how schools' historical relationships with marginalized peoples bears on that question.
I believe it was Gary King who said that nepotism and meritocracy are very hard to distinguish in academia. You would need a clever identification strategy [0] to tease out the effects of prestige on the margin. I'm afraid this article doesn't offer much on that front.
[0] https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.15.4.69