<p>^^^that’s killer, and really hard to believe! I’m not saying the prof is lying, but I am wondering why in the world they would suspect a student’s qualification JUST because he graduated from a perfectly good university. Thank God the English Dept at Cal doesn’t behave the same way, or Stanford, or the school I finally attended, or I never would have gone to grad school.</p>
<p>@ucb: I’m not sure I understand your question, but let me try to make what I said more clear. In my thirty years in English, and I’ve heard of this in departments in other fields, it has been common law practice for employers to avoid hiring students who have received their PhDs from the employer’s graduate program. The thinking is that, not only do your own students benefit from going somewhere else for their graduate educations, but the Department itself benefits when it brings in faculty members from outside its graduate program. Every program has weaknesses, blind spots, areas of the field in which they do not excel at a particular moment in time. To hire a PhD who came thru the program would not be good for the students she teaches because she would replicate the weaknesses of the dept at that moment and pass it on to the students. For instance, my dept does not have real strength in poetry analysis; we’re strong in other genres like fiction and particularly drama. We used to be strong in poetry, but those professors died or retired and this is the moment in which we find ourselves. I have students in my classes who cannot read poetry who are in their third years, and they struggle to write about it in part because their professors are teaching to the professors’ strengths. The students are not going to get a lot of help with learning to write about poetry if they’re only reading a sprinkling of poetry in their survey classes because at the upper level courses the faculty are mostly teaching in the genres in which they are experts. If there’s only one expert in poetry and the student doesn’t take her or that professor is studying abroad then that grad student will absorb the weakness of our department. To in turn hire that graduate would do nothing to strengthen the department where it has this hole. Is that any clearer, ucb?</p>