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<p>Well, not necessarily. Top LACs don’t have top-ranked graduate programs because they don’t have grad program, not because they don’t have quality faculty. But for universities with graduate programs (like Case Western), their graduate program rankings are first and foremost a reflection of the perceived prestige of their faculties. Now it’s true that most of the very top people in any given field are going to be on one of the top faculties, working with highly regarded colleagues and top grad students. So they cream is oing to tend to rise to HYPSM, the “lesser Ivies,” and top publics like UC Berkeley and Michigan that are known for having top faculties, and top graduate programs. But there are a lot of outstanding faculty scattered around elsewhere. No doubt there are some superstars on the Case Western faculty; just not as many as at a Cornell, say, or a Michigan, or even Ohio State. But some very distinguished academics really prefer to teach at LACs; or they just end up on a career trajectory that takes them there for a time, or perhaps their entire career. </p>
<p>The chair of the philosophy department at Princeton when I was a grad student there way back when had previously taught at Wellesley for many years; he was regarded as one of the most distinguished figures in the field. Currently on the Wellesley faculty is Karl Case, an economist who co-developed the widely used Case-Shiller real estate price index with Robert Schiller from Yale. Swarthmore’s faculty includes James Kurth, a leading conservative political scientist, and K. David Harrison, a linguist and anthropologist who is one of the leading figures in the global effort to save endangered languages. The classicist Richmond Lattimore who produced many of the most widely used translations of ancient Greek works including “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey,” was for many years on the faculty at Bryn Mawr. Many of these people have academic pedigrees and scholarly publishing records that are indistinguishable from the faculty at top public and private universities; in fact, many spend part of their careers at top universities and part at top LACs. </p>
<p>It’s also a common misconception that faculty at LACs don’t do research. All the faculty at top LACs do research. The difference is that LACs have smaller faculties and most LACs don’t have the lab resources to run big-science research. But many science faculty at top LACs either have their own smaller labs, and/or collaborate as co-investigators with faculty at larger universities that do have bigger lab facilities.</p>