How Liberal Arts Colleges Perpetuate Bias

When you hire only those who have attended schools like yours, you practice discrimination.

By Michael J. Shott

My day job is teaching archaeology and researching North America’s remote prehistory at a Carnegie comprehensive university, a euphemism that describes grown-up teachers’ colleges. In my spare time, I study the factors that determine faculty placement in the higher-education firmament. In 1997, I compiled data on the more than seven hundred tenured and tenuretrack archaeologists in the American academy, including details about their educational background and scholarly productivity. The data showed that the amount of archaeologists’ scholarship bore little relationship to the status of the institution at which they taught. (Nor, arguably, did the quality of their scholarship, but quality is resistant to such an analysis.) Similarly, how much the archaeologists accomplished before hiring had little to do with who hired them, and where they worked had little to do with how productive or active they were. My findings led me to conclude that there is no academic meritocracy, despite the abiding popular belief in its existence. No one doubts that a hierarchy of institutions exists. But archaeologists are distributed in that hierarchy according to ostensibly extraneous factors, not scholarly merit.

This conclusion should surprise no insider to American higher education, although it may surprise students and parents. One factor that might determine academic placement is a preference among institutions for their own graduates. The historical tendency of Ivy League schools to hire their own graduates illustrates this inbreeding thesis. It is not just particular institutions, however, that hire their own. Whole classes of institutions are engaged in this practice. “Privileging History: Trends in the Undergraduate Origins of History PhDs,” a report released recently by the American Historical Association, finds that top-ranked PhD programs in history are admitting PhD students from a narrow group of mostly private institutions and likewise hiring from a narrow range of doctoral programs.

A Class Above

Some observers of private liberal arts colleges have suggested that they favor their own in faculty hiring. If so, the preference may come from the assumption that faculty members who got bachelor’s degrees at liberal arts colleges understand and appreciate their institutional mission better than others do—an “it-takesone-to-teach-one” rationale. Before leaping to this conclusion, however, I consulted my data for possible inbreeding bias among liberal arts colleges.

Two disclaimers: first, my data are nearly a decade old (although my field has changed little in size or career prospects since I collected the data) and, second, archaeology and its encompassing discipline of anthropology comprise a minuscule fraction of the professoriate. Disclaimers acknowledged, my analysis distinguished archaeologists whose bachelor’s degrees were from liberal arts colleges from those who graduated from all other institutional classes, public and private. After separating the two groups, I counted the number in each group who are employed by liberal arts colleges and by all other institutional classes combined, omitting only the Carnegie class of public liberal arts colleges because of its rarity. My results appear in the table on page 25.

Because research universities employ most archaeologists, they also employ most of the archaeologists who earned their bachelor’s degrees at liberal arts colleges. But only liberal arts colleges appoint liberal arts pedigrees out of proportion to their numbers in the professoriate at large. That is, liberal arts colleges employ many more liberal arts pedigrees than would be expected if professors were randomly apportioned among institutions. So the thesis is confirmed: at least in archaeology, the faculty at liberal arts colleges are inbred to some degree.

Unless you defend the dubious proposition that liberal arts colleges draw their students from a representative cross-section of American society, their fondness for inbreeding means that their faculties are as unrepresentative as their student bodies. The middle and upper classes are favored both as students and as faculty.

My own discipline reflects this bias, as I have explained. Archaeology as a course of study appeals much more to students from the upper class than it does to those from the working class, resulting in domination of the profession by the upper classes. To great fanfare, archaeology’s national organization issued a sociological profile of the profession in 1997 titled The American Archaeologist: A Profile. The study explored gender inequality at great length while practically ignoring class bias, pointing to the conclusion that archaeology is not concerned about class bias.

Persistence of Inbreeding

Since the 1970s, American universities have made sincere efforts to promote diversity. Higher education understands diversity to encompass race and gender. Social class is a different matter, at least in my small field.

Class bias persists in the academy. Class bias in higher education is not a recent phenomenon; it’s the reason we needed the GI Bill. In 1979, sociologists Seymour Martin Lipset and Everett Ladd concluded in an essay published in Qualitative and Quantitative Social Research: Papers in Honor of Paul F. Lazarsfeld that “prestigious, research-oriented institutions have drawn their professors disproportionately from the higher social strata.” Sociologists Robert McGinness and J. Scott Long wrote in 1988 in The Academic Profession: The Professoriate in Crisis that “the rewards of prestigious academic positions are much better correlated with measures of pedigree than of productivity.” Reporting on a survey they had conducted, researchers Kenneth Oldfield and Richard F. Conant wrote in 2001 in the Journal of Public Affairs Education that University of Illinois faculty are drawn predominantly from the middle and upper classes and that “the professoriate’s class background has changed little since 1977” or, presumably, since 1877 or 1777.

The most recent national survey that I know of is that by higher education scholars Martin J. Finkelstein, Robert K. Seal, and Jack H. Schuster, which they describe in their 1998 book, The New Academic Generation: A Profession in Transformation. The book’s emphases reveal more than its authors probably intended about their unstated presumptions. They correctly value gender and racial equity and celebrate the improving fortunes of women and racial minorities in the academy. They also document persistent class inequities in the professoriate’s composition. “The new generation of college faculty continues to be drawn from the higher socioeconomic strata of American society . . . even when controlling for . . . age and gender,” they write. Curiously, however, they attach little significance to this fact.

The book manifests its relative indifference to class in several ways. Repeatedly, the authors discuss faculty diversification as involving only women and minorities, not workingclass professors of either sex or any race. The index has forty-six entries under “gender,” eleven under “race,” but only two under “socioeconomic status.” The word “class” is not indexed at all. The book’s central thesis is that younger and older faculty members differ more in “who they are than in what they do.” That is, younger and older faculty members have similar habits, values, and patterns of work, but younger faculty are more diverse. Yet there is scarcely any generational difference in class status. The book documents a class bias every bit as severe as the gender and race bias it highlights—and blithely ignores class bias. The polite, implicit message is plain: class doesn’t matter.

This message is abundantly clear in the book’s treatment of “nativeborn white male” as a descriptive and analytical category. Now, I am a native-born white male. So is George Bush. Unlike him, however, I have a working-class background, whatever my (modest) class status today may be as an academic. Treating the George Bushes, tweedy Ivy League professors, and the Mike Shotts of the world as members of a homogeneous category presumes that we have exactly the same opportunities and inherited advantages over women and minorities, no matter their class. These coupled notions are as risible at face value as they are unexamined in the book.

Dim Prospects for Change

Inbreeding is a historical property of American higher education that is neither confined to my field nor diminishing with time. In its class background, the professoriate is not a faithful reflection of American society. That is no surprise. It is, however, faithful to the values and attitudes of its own: the middle and upper classes. That is no surprise, either. To the middle and upper classes, class simply is not the issue that gender and race are, and the mere act of raising it is considered impolite, even vulgar. As a result, the professoriate is oblivious to class bias. Class is the whale in the living room whose stinking carcass polite academic society politely ignores.

Kenneth Oldfield and Richard Conant propose an ambitious expansion of affirmative action to rectify class bias. Their proposal has undeniable merit but highly uncertain prospects. Arrayed against it are deep-seated prejudices in the current political environment against federal social programs, the class interests of current and prospective faculty and the institutions that employ them, and empathy fatigue: “Another oppressed class?” people might be expected to ask. “We’re willing to wring our hands over the unjust treatment of women and minorities, but enough already!”

Faculty members like me can hope for the best while, remaining faithful to our working-class experience, expecting much less. At least, however, my own field and the higher education community might consider broader, more thorough studies of the professoriate that explore, not ignore, class bias. No one can doubt that the problem has deep historical roots. Once we know how grave it is, then we will learn if we have the energy and moral capacity to solve it.

Michael Shott is professor of anthropology at the University of Akron.

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