Intellectual inbreeding or
academic inbreeding refers to the practice in
academiaAcademia, Acadème, or the Academy are collective terms for the community of students and scholars engaged in higher education and research....
of a university's hiring its own graduates to be
professorThe meaning of the word professor varies. In some English-speaking countries, it refers to a senior academic who holds a departmental chair, especially as head of the department, or a personal chair awarded specifically to that individual...
s. It is generally viewed as
insularInsularity reflects a wide range of physical and emotional meanings in accordance with a person or place:* For a place, it relates to an island or any physically isolated place distant and inaccessible without sufficient means of transport...
and unhealthy for academia; it is thought to reduce the possibility of new ideas coming in from outside sources, just as genetic
inbreedingInbreeding is breeding between close relatives, whether plant or animal. If practiced repeatedly, it can lead to exposure of recessive, deleterious traits. This generally leads to a decreased fitness of a population, which is called inbreeding depression. Deleterious alleles causing inbreeding...
reduces the possibility of new genes entering in to a
populationIn biology, a population is the collection of inter-breeding organisms of a particular species; in sociology, a collection of human beings. Individuals within a population share a factor may be reduced by statistical means, but such a generalization may be too vague to imply anything...
.
Economists David Colander and Arjo Klamer, Ph.D.
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Intellectual inbreeding or
academic inbreeding refers to the practice in
academiaAcademia, Acadème, or the Academy are collective terms for the community of students and scholars engaged in higher education and research....
of a university's hiring its own graduates to be
professorThe meaning of the word professor varies. In some English-speaking countries, it refers to a senior academic who holds a departmental chair, especially as head of the department, or a personal chair awarded specifically to that individual...
s. It is generally viewed as
insularInsularity reflects a wide range of physical and emotional meanings in accordance with a person or place:* For a place, it relates to an island or any physically isolated place distant and inaccessible without sufficient means of transport...
and unhealthy for academia; it is thought to reduce the possibility of new ideas coming in from outside sources, just as genetic
inbreedingInbreeding is breeding between close relatives, whether plant or animal. If practiced repeatedly, it can lead to exposure of recessive, deleterious traits. This generally leads to a decreased fitness of a population, which is called inbreeding depression. Deleterious alleles causing inbreeding...
reduces the possibility of new genes entering in to a
populationIn biology, a population is the collection of inter-breeding organisms of a particular species; in sociology, a collection of human beings. Individuals within a population share a factor may be reduced by statistical means, but such a generalization may be too vague to imply anything...
.
Economists David Colander and Arjo Klamer, Ph.D. wrote a book entitled
The Making of an Economist which researched the growing concern behind the methodology of academic teaching and the lowering numbers of
PhDPHD may refer to:* Parisada Hindu Dharma, an Indonesian reform organization* PHD, a track on The Crystal Method album Tweekend* PHD finger, a protein sequence* PHD Mountain Software, an outdoor clothing and equipment company...
s in
economicsEconomics is the social science that studies the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. The term economics comes from the Ancient Greek from + , hence "rules of the house"...
granted annually in the
United StatesThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
. Colander-Klamer state the trends described shrinking number of economic professors teaching at the University level would result in
intellectual inbreeding.
According to the Commission on Graduate Education in Economics (COGEE), they recognize it as "a trend for emulation rather than diversification." Academic inbreeding has also been cited as a major problem in the major universities of the
People's Republic of ChinaThe People's Republic of China , commonly known as China, is the largest country in East Asia and the most populous in the world with over 1.3 billion people, approximately one-fifth of the world's population...
—such as
Peking UniversityPeking University , colloquially known in Chinese as Beida , is a major research university located in Beijing, China. It is the first formally established modern research university in and the first national university of China. It was founded as Imperial Capital University in 1898 as a...
and
Tsinghua UniversityTsinghua University , is a university in Beijing, People's Republic of China. Tsinghua University was established in 1911, originally under the name “Tsinghua Xuetang”. The school was renamed the "Tsinghua School" in 1912. The university section was founded in 1925 and the name “National Tsinghua...
, which have adopted measures in recent years specifically to combat the practice—and
South KoreaSouth Korea, officially the Republic of Korea and often simply referred to as Korea, is a country in East Asia, located on the southern half of the Korean Peninsula. It is neighbored by China to the west, Japan to the east, and North Korea to the north. Its capital is Seoul, the second largest...
.
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