Academic Migration: Interdisciplinary and Interdepartmental Hierarchy, Closure, or Similarity?

The last two decades have seen a surge in research initiatives in many scientific fields surrounding interdisciplinarity and interdepartmentalization. This has spawned many research centers on US university campuses supported by billions of raised university or federal grant money to educate students as well as to facilitate interdisciplinary exchange and collaborations between faculty. This is often led by the belief that both intra- and interdisciplinary exchange in science pushes research fields forward and accelerates breakthrough discovery. Interdisciplinary scientific collaboration is argued to pull together diverse insights from multiple bodies of knowledge, is unrestricted by disciplinary boundaries or semantics, and can draw from a larger methodological tool set.

Yet in spite of the push for such exchanges, there is surprisingly little empirical knowledge on its prevalence, patterning, or determinants. This is remarkable, because prior work shows that the social fabric of science itself is inherently shaped by exchanges of ideas, knowledge, and scholars themselves. Here, we focus on the latter and study scholarly hiring between disciplines and departments. How prevalent are such exchanges between disciplines and departments and how did this develop over time? And, more importantly, what determines the emergence of these exchange structures: do some organisational units disproportionately place faculty elsewhere, do they cluster in such a hiring network, or are hires most explained by how intellectually similar organisations are? These questions motivate the main goals of this study: identify patterns of interdisciplinary and interdepartmental exchange and explain the emergence and persistence of these network structures.

We build on and extend prior work, particular the branches of literature on interdepartmental faculty hiring. Hiring often involves exchange indicative of implicit judgment; when one department hires a graduate student of another as faculty, there is a positive assessment of the graduate department that places the student. The assortment of these dyadic exchanges across disciplines represent migration networks of scholars that illuminate disciplinary hierarchy, clustering, and similarity. Our study empirically considers these network dynamics, thus providing insight into which actors wield the most influence in knowledge and scholarly exchange and why.

Our empirical site contains a realized scientific migration market of approximately 1.03 million records of nearly all US PhD students and corresponding metadata – names, supervisors, disciplines, and so forth – from their PhD theses (1980-2010). These data capture a wide cross-section of scholarly disciplines (N = 51) PhD-granting universities (N = 221), and departments (N = 8,205). What is particularly useful about this database is that it allows us to follow PhD recipients through time in a near-closed system of PhD recipients and their scholarly careers moving onward, thus showing the interdisciplinarization – which disciplines place students where and why? – of US academia. We analyze these exchanges through a series of (st)ERGMs that include nodal (size, popularity), dyadic (natural language processing measures of intellectual distance between disciplines, field homophily), and closure dynamics.

This seminar takes place in room T09-67. Alternatively, see below to join online:
https://eur-nl.zoom.us/j/99042495034

Meeting ID: 990 4249 5034