David Kamens on Hagstrom's 'Inputs, Outputs, and the Prestige of American University Science Departments

IN HIS RECENT article Hagstrom (1971:375-398) makes an initial assumption about academic markets that later makes it difficult for him to develop a causal explanation of the determinants of departmental prestige. This assumption is that departments within universities operate in relatively autonomous labor markets, so that determinants of the attractiveness, and hence recruitment success, of one department are independent of those for others. Hagstrom asserts that, Departments enter the contest with different resources and handicaps and the contest produces wide variations in facilities and rewards (p. 375). While intuitively sensible, this idea overlooks an important, but little noted finding of Cartter (1966:125) in his study of the prestige ratings of graduate departments. Cartter found that the prestige ratings of two departments, zoology and history, were highly correlated with the ratings of others. In 24 out of 29 cases, these correlations were at least .70. Furthermore, the intercorrelations between the ranks of a number of other departments were also high. Thus, with some important exceptions, one can predict the prestige rank of a large number of departments within a university simply by knowing the rating of one department. These findings suggest that quality tends to be a university wide phenomenon, and not one determined by events and decisions at the departmental level, though these are undoubtedly important and contributory. Thus, for the major graduate departments, the underlying conditions that determine the success of one are the same as those that affect the attractiveness of others. Cartter's evidence indicates that universities are the important units that govern the development of departments. This means that Hagstrom should have looked at the university contexts of departments in addition to characteristics of departments themselves in his attempt to explain variations in departmental prestige. Then he could have examined the residuals or deviant cases to determine why some departments are less dependent on the university context than

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