New Departments Move to Top (Graduate) Chair-Producing List

by Kathleen A. Tiemann, University of North Dakota, and Thomas L. Van Valey, Western Michigan University

Between 1974 and 1986, there was an apparent monopoly in chair production by less than 10 percent of the nation’s graduate departments of sociology. While these top chair-producing departments produced 55 percent of chairs in 1974, by 1996 they produced only 30 percent of the chairs. Since then, a more diverse group of sociology departments that award the PhD has emerged as top chair producers. In this follow-up to our examination of graduate departments of sociology in the U.S. (Van Valey and Tiemann 1989), we used the ASA’s Guide to Graduate Departments in Sociology as our data source. As before, we coded the PhD alma maters of people who served as chairs of a graduate department of sociology during the period under study, in this instance, 1986-1997.

Table 1(PDF) provides the rank orders of top chair-producing departments. The left-hand column indicates the rank of each of the top 10 chair-producing departments during the 1986-1997 period (including ties). Chicago, Texas and Wisconsin each appeared annually over the 12 years, while California-Berkeley, Harvard, and North Carolina appeared nine times each or 75 percent of the time. Minnesota, Indiana, Ohio State and Columbia were among the top 10 chair-producing departments for six of the 12 years examined. The remaining 17 top departmental chair-producers made the list between one and five times.

The middle column of Table 1(PDF) shows each department’s rank as a top chair-producing department in the 1974-1985 period (including ties). An examination of these two time periods shows both stability and change. For example, Chicago maintained its track record as a top chair producer. It appeared on the list of top producers 12 times in each time period. Texas and Wisconsin also appeared 12 times each between 1986-1997, but were much lower in rank than in the period between 1974-1985. Columbia and Michigan were both on the list of the top producers for 11 years between 1974-1985, but these departments appeared only six and five times respectively in the latter time period. By 1986-97. Michigan has slipped from the top ten. The situation is more striking for Iowa, Michigan State, Yale University, and Louisiana State. While these departments were on the list for at least seven years each between 1974-1985, they made the list only once between 1986-1997. Thus, overall none remained in the top ten departments producing chairs of graduate departments.

To summarize, the data show the strength of a cluster of schools to produce chairs over a long span of time (1974-97). In the first span, due to a tie, 12 schools were on the top ten list. Taking these top 12, eight of these schools or two-thirds remain in this strong position. The data also make clear that the dominance displayed in the period from 1974 to 1985 is not entirely stable. There was a measure of turnover in chair-producing departments between 1974-85 and 1986-97. While Iowa, Michigan, Yale, and Louisiana State dropped during the recent period, the University of Texas, the University of Minnesota, Indiana University, and Princeton University moved into higher rankings as chair-producer departments.

One might speculate as to why some of the departments that had dominated so clearly in the earlier 12-year period were unable to maintain their levels of chair production from 1986-97. One explanation might simply be that departments have broadened their searches for chairs to include more candidates from other universities. Increasing the competition in this manner would quite likely result in more successful candidates coming from a wider range of departments. In such instances, it might be that prior experience as a chair in another department of similar size or institutional context is a more important selection factor than the prestige of one’s alma mater or possibly even the length of one’s vita. A second explanation is related to the costs and benefits of being a chair. Perhaps the people trained in the top-ranked universities are more likely to see the role of chair as a hindrance to their research careers and thus their personal prestige and/or mobility. In many cases, the commitments of time and energy involved in chairing a department often leave little remaining for personal research and scholarship. Thus, they may define the costs of being chair as greater than the benefits, at least until they have reached a stage in their academic careers where they see that additional research experience has less marginal utility for them than administrative experience.