Hyper-Specialized Departments

How under-resourced departments could punch far above their weight

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Today, academic departments try to span as much of a field as possible. Hiring focuses on subfields that aren’t represented in the department, actively avoiding new faculty whose work could even be construed as overlapping with existing faculty. There are good reasons for this approach: it gives new faculty a chance to establish themselves without having a well-established colleague in their specialty breathing down their neck, most graduate students can find someone to work with regardless of their interests, and it looks good for the department to have experts teaching undergrads in any given topic.

This “departmental coverage” system contrasts with the Soviet system where they effectively forced all scientists in a specialization to move to the same place. (This is a simplification, but captures the general approach.) All the laser experts went to Vilnius, all the nuclear physicists went to Moscow, etc. What’s wild is that Lithuania is still known for its laser industry today, decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It’s well-known that there are compounding aggregation effects that reward concentrations of expertise (see: Silicon Valley, Shenzhen, etc.) but almost all academics have chosen to forgo those effects. You do see some specialization at the university level in the US: otherwise unremarkable universities with world-class departments like Ohio State for astronomy or University of Utah for computer graphics.

What if some departments decided to go all in on an emerging subfield? Instead of topical breadth, they just tried to hire as many of the best people in that area as possible; the next three faculty searches all focused on the same subfield. Graduate students would know that they should only consider a department if they wanted to study a very specific thing, but if they wanted to study that thing there would be nowhere better to go. There is a lot of hand-wringing about the Matthew Effect in research. The top people go to top universities along with the funding and good students, creating a feedback loop that results in the long tail of university research being, frankly, pretty terrible. Hyper-specialization could be a way for small under-resourced departments to punch far above their weight.