Seminar: Daniel McFarland – Stanford University

Scholar-Knowledge Migration
> For several decades US research universities have called for diminished intellectual balkanization and increased knowledge sharing across fields. With such sharing comes the hope for increased innovation, but also a growing concern about colonization due to hierarchal qualities of scientific knowledge production. To assess how interdisciplinary knowledge sharing has occurred, we look at how scholars and their ideas migrate within and across academic fields. We use the records of millions of dissertations from the leading 240 US research universities from 1990-2010 to identify both scholar migrations (from advisee to advisor roles) and language borrowing (as incidence of term adoption). We propose and test a series of hypotheses concerning scholar-migration flow across academic fields: e.g., migration has increased over time (temporal shifts); fields with more faculty positions draw in more hires from fields with more student graduates (supply and demand processes); fields tend to repopulate themselves over time and draw from the same intellectual domains and cultures (field and cultural reproduction); higher status fields send ideas and migrants to lower status fields (hierarchical trickles); and knowledge adoption follows scholar migration (persistent costs of expertise). We find general support for these hypotheses, and describe what appears to be a persistent structure of expertise dissemination reflective of the modern era.

> Daniel A. McFarland, Sanne Smith, David Jurgens 

Daniel McFarland
Stanford University – Department of Sociology

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