On Monday we marked the hundredth birthday of the Nobel laureate and all-around intellectual curmudgeon George Stigler. I promised more Stigler quotes by the end of the week. Here, then, is Stigler on the consequences of competition in the market for higher education; the passage is from one of the two-dozen lively and provocative essays collected here. If he’d been born just a bit later, Stigler could have been a champion blogger.
For clarity: When Stigler refers to an academic “field”, he is referring to a sub-discipline. Economics is a discipline; industrial organization and public finance are fields. Physics is a discipline; particle physics and solid state physics are fields.
We cannot build universities that are uniformly excellent … I shall seek to establish this conclusion directly on the basis of two empirical propositions.
The first proposition is that there are at most fourteen really first-class men in any field, and more commonly there are about six. Where, you ask, did I get these numbers? I consider your question irrelevant, but I shall pause to notice the related question: Is the proposition true? And here I ask you to do your homework: gather with your colleagues and make up a numbered list of the twenty-five best men in one of your fields — and remember that these fields are specialized. Would your department be first-class if it began its staffing in each field with the twenty-fifth, or even the fifteenth, name? You have in fact done this work on appointment committees. I remember no cases of an embarrassment of riches, and I remember many where finding five names involved a shift to “promising young men”, not all of whom keep their promises. I leave it to the professors of moral philosophy and genetics to tell us whether the paucity of first-class men is a sort of scientific myopia, a love of invidious ranking, or a harsh outcome of imprudent marriages. But the proposition is true.
