Where did faculty in US Classics Departments with top-ranked graduate programs get their own PhDs?

Gregory Crane
gcrane2008@gmail.com
Leipzig and Tufts Universities

Maryam Foradi
maryam.foradi@uni-leipzig.de
Leipzig University

June 11, 2015

Abstract: As part of another study, we analyzed websites for the ten US graduate programs in Classics most highly rated at http://www.phds.org/rankings/classics. These ten departments represent 3.6% of the Classics Departments in the US but the 159 Assistant, Associate and full Professors that we identified would (if we count all Assistant Professors and Associate Professors as tenured or tenure-track) account for 11.3% of 1,410 tenured and tenure track faculty in Classical Studies Programs identified in a 2014 American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Roughly half of all Assistant and Associate Professors from these ten departments (13 of 26 and 17 of 36, respectively) come from five institutions, only three of which (Harvard, Berkeley and Princeton) appear in the US rankings — the other two consistent members of the top five, Cambridge and Oxford do not, of course, appear on the US list. For full professors, the bias towards the top five was even more noticeable, with more than 60% (58 of 97) full Professors coming from this set of five institutions. Of the Assistant Professors (i.e., junior faculty hired in the past six years), just over a third, 9 out of 26, had PhDs from Harvard (5) or Berkeley (4). Whether this patterns will hold true in coming years is unclear, given the changing nature of United States higher education. Programs would do well to pay close attention to the ways in which the new graduate program at the Institute for Study of the Ancient World had begun developing a broader view of the ancient world and including new digital methodologies in the research that they support (http://isaw.nyu.edu/).

Details here.

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