Academic Incest

I am in favor of a moderate amount of it.

Let me explain. Academic incest is when a student goes to the same school for their bachelors, masters and doctorate etc. Or, when a schools faculty is (by design or not) all of the same academic background (I suppose uniformity in academic/ideological beliefs would also qualify for academic incest)

The reason why this is considered to be ‘incest’ (negative connotations intended) is because these practices tend to isolate ideas. These ideas once isolated tend to develop ‘in a vacuum’ and develop provincial school of thoughts: for example in economics: “the Chicago school”, “the saltwater school”, “the Austrian school”.

The assumption is that you can develop your institution into a dynamic center of learning and ideas if you can have some professors trained in each of the ‘schools’ and if your education includes a mix of all the school of thoughts. In short the idea is to take advantage of hybrid vigor.

The problem with the prevailing practice is that you need to create and maintain the pure breeds if you want to have cross breeds. If you do not, then every academic institution produces similar graduates who have been exposed to the same mixes of the different schools of thought and the whole system falls to a dismaying uniformity and lack of originality.

The second reason for moderate academic incest is that the hope of creating a master in all schools of thought is, I think, overly ambitious. It would require a polymath to keep them all straight and then be able to form a synthesis that was as valid and complex as the prior ideas. To expect this to happen as a matter of putting students through the classes is unrealistic. As a president of a corporation or of a nation my preference would be then, to have a board of advisors who are experts each in their own school (which I cannot judge between because of inexpertise).

The third reason for moderate academic incest is that not all schools of thought are created equal. What if the saltwater school of thought is fuzzy headed and mostly wrong? I would do a disservice if I hired professors who where trained in that school.
For example I believe that string theory is an academic black hole. Therefore I would, in hiring for the physics department, like to be able to choose between professors who had spent a lot of time studying it and those who had not. It is better to have choice between viable alternatives because it is more likely for there to be a right choice. If there isn’t the entire field is at least more conducive to new schools of though arising. The economic schools of though I mentioned are in a sense ancient – they all predate 1975 and are less defined now then they were – for the reasons I’ve mentioned.