joncgoodwin

The schools you see on the x-axis of these graphs are not based on rankings. They are programs that have placed the most people in the U. S. News Top 30 English graduate programs (as of their last published rankings and current faculty pages). I'm doing PhD programs only for now to study interchange. I am curious to compare regional state universities and liberal arts colleges with PhD-granting programs, but the data-gathering for this cannot be easily automated and is quite laborious. (Imagine a faculty page of someone named "Jane Smith" that does not list where she received her PhD. The dissertation database could list hundreds of people with the same name, with perhaps a handful in English literature. If you have an area to go by, that might narrow it down, but always. Someone with an uncommon name completed a PhD in the same area as someone with the exact same name in the same year. Sometimes catalogues will list where faculty were educated, but not always.) I did not create these graphs for this forum, nor did I post them here. I saw the thread in my referrers and thought I would clear up some of the misperceptions.

Some responses to the questions raised here, in reverse chronological order: 1) There's a line break in this http://jgoodwin.net/jobs/ graph. The complete sentence is "Where faculty earned their terminal degrees at U. S. News Top 30 programs." 2) I will eventually enter the data from the approximately 120 other PhD programs. I'm using the U. S. News order because it's there, not because I think it's valid. 3) This graph: http://jgoodwin.net/jobs/group.html has a breakdown by rank. Assistant professor appointments show a notably different pattern than full. 4) The chord diagram (http://jgoodwin.net/jobs/chord.html) shows faculty interchange between programs in the U. S. News Top 30 that had at least five exchanges of faculty in one direction or another (hiring or placement). The mouseovers will show you labels when they are omitted. 5) I don't know what's been stated here in recent weeks. The article that Slate references did not, as far as I know, collect data on sub-fields in English. I am. I will eventually have charts showing where rhetoric/composition, creative writing, and linguistics faculty who teach in English departments earned their degrees. These sub-fields affect the prestige hierarchy in English departments, and the Pedagogy article did not address this, which is one reason why I'm collecting this data.