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<p>As someone who has helped profs on search committees narrow down the options, I can honestly say I think that the behavior you describe here is both not universal and professionally irresponsible.</p>
<p>What if the degrees aren’t even from the same department? And if they are, what if they’re not from the same area? For example, say someone did most of their undergrad training on South America with the faculty members in the department who study South America, but for their PhD they’ve moved over to modern European history and the corresponding faculty in the department. Do you look at those issues? If you don’t you are essentially making the ridiculous assumption that between-department scholarly differences are without a doubt more significant than within-department scholarly differences.</p>
<p>Really, what in the world leads you to believe that simply because someone has experience with more than one institution, s/he is less “narrowly trained” than someone who only has experience with one institution? Did you ever stop and think that maybe the undergrads who DO go to different institutions for grad school are going to schools where the researchers in their fields are in the same school of thought as the undergrad mentors? Going to different schools for undergrad and grad in no way assures that potential job applicants haven’t been “narrowly trained.”</p>
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<p>Yeah, PERHAPS. But you shouldn’t let your prejudices guide your hiring decisions. What you should be looking at are quantity and quality of publications (as measured by peer-reviewed status,) the degree to which the potential hiree’s research augments scholastic diversity in the department, whether or not the hiree will, within a reasonable and professional degree, fit in with the existing departmental culture, and (lastly!) whether or not they will, as a function of their demographic profile, diversify the department in some way. If you’re going to make snap judgements of CVs, do them on these criterias- not on strictly biographical factors. Indeed, if a department has no faculty who did both undergrad and grad at the same school, hiring someone who did will lead to higher diversiy of background. Why is that a bad thing? Why do you insist on punishing people for being different? </p>
<p>For the good of knowledge, I sincerely hope that at some point in the future, your practice of tossing out the CVs of people who did both undergrad and grad at the same institution (if true) will be formally terminated from the academy. When you stop to think about it, it’s really no different than the practicies that once lead (and continue to lead!) to the exclusion of women, ethnic/religious/sexual minorties, disabled people, etc. In place of “a bachelors degree and a doctorate from the same instiution” we could just insert “the last names Gomez, Mehta, and similarly telling last names” and we’d be left with this:</p>
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<p>^The overriding assumption being that these people with these last names were ill-advised to pursue grad training in the first place and narrowly trained in the process of doing so. (“Because of course, minorties always stick with their own people and world-view.”) Please note that I’m not accusing you of having this racist view, simply pointing out that your undergrad/grad prejudices are the modern parallels of these slowlly ebbing racists views.</p>
<p>People are different - understand/accept that and move on to the advancement of human knowledge, which together with teaching quality, is what should actually matter in the hiring process. That one job applicant who got all three degrees at the same place might be the hottest young scholar in the field. They might not be and probably aren’t of course, but they should be treated on as equal a footing possible - just like everyone else in the pile.</p>