Racist? Maybe, maybe not, but this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education accuses its prestigious Assessment of Research-Doctorate Programs in the United States of suffering at least from “a form of implicit bias.”
The NRC assessment “stands as the authoritative source on the quality of American doctoral programs,” and, at least on the surface, appears to be thorough and definitive. As the authors of the Chronicle article point out,
[i]t surveyed institutions, programs, faculty members, and doctoral students on a wide range of issues, including faculty diversity, productivity, research focus, educational background, and advising load; doctoral-student admission criteria, financial support, health benefits, completion rates by race/ethnicity and gender, time to degree, and training and mentoring received; and faculty perceptions of the quality of doctoral programs at other universities in their disciplinary fields. The council even included questions regarding postdoctoral positions and the way they are defined in local settings.
In the spring of 2008, the NRC reported an impressive array of response rates to their multipronged assessment of doctoral programs: a 100-percent response rate by universities to the 29-page institutional survey, a 97-percent response rate by doctoral programs to the 34-page program survey, an 86-percent response rate among faculty members to the 19-page faculty survey, and a 72-percent response rate among doctoral students to the 18-page doctoral-student questionnaire. At our institution alone, the University of California at Berkeley, we estimate that participation in the study resulted collectively in the filling out of roughly 30,000 pages of questionnaires by faculty and administrative-staff members and doctoral students. Such lofty response rates are all the more remarkable in light of the fact that participating universities bore the significant cost of responding to the exhaustive data-collection phase, and actually paid the NRC to help support the effort.
What then, you may well ask, is the problem? According the the critique in the Chronicle, it’s what’s not included.
But something is missing from this influential report: a diverse range of fields that accurately reflects the breadth of academe and its research-doctorate recipients. Our analysis of Ph.D. fields that will be included and excluded from the NRC’s assessment, viewed in light of demographic patterns of recent degrees granted, suggests that the selection deemed worthy of assessment may suffer from a form of implicit bias.
…. African-American, American Indian, and Mexican-American people, as well as women, are disproportionately likelier to have received Ph.D.’s in fields that are not included in the NRC’s assessment, relative to white men and Asian-American people. For example, 54 percent of African-American women, 49 percent of American Indian women, 43 percent of Mexican-American women, 42 percent of African-American men, and 34 percent of women in general were awarded doctorates in fields not currently assessed by the NRC. In contrast, only 10 percent of Asian/Pacific Islander men, 18 percent of Asian/Pacific Islander women, 19 percent of white men, and 19 percent of men in general received Ph.D.’s in fields excluded from the assessment.
“What accounts,” the critical authors ask, “for this seemingly odd pattern of doctorates awarded to people in various demographic groups by fields included and excluded in the current NRC assessment?”
The exempted fields—including education, business, social work, psychological counseling, library science, home economics, and subfields of the health and agricultural sciences—share a professional and applied orientation as opposed to a basic research one. Many also emphasize public scholarship, a tradition that favors the interweaving of intellectual pursuit with social improvement.
The exclusion of fields favoring public scholarship helps to explain the large demographic disparities among recipients of Ph.D.’s from fields included in and excluded from the assessment. A growing body of literature supports the premise that underrepresented minority and female scholars are disproportionately likely to channel their efforts into academic endeavors that are configured to directly benefit the larger society and local communities.
The NRC explained that business schools did not want to be included and that “for many schools of education it was difficult to separate education research from specializations in applied areas of school administration, curriculum, etc.” Still, it wouldn’t be surprising, or evidence of “implicit bias, if the NRC decided on perfectly legitimate academic grounds to exclude programs heavily devoted to “the interweaving of intellectual pursuit with social improvement.”
