Intellectual inbreeding or academic inbreeding refers to the practice in academia of a university's hiring its own graduates to be professors. It is generally viewed as insular and unhealthy for academia; it is thought to reduce the possibility of new ideas coming in from outside sources, just as genetic inbreeding reduces the possibility of new genes entering in to a population.
Economists David Colander and Arjo Klamer, Ph.D. wrote a book titled The Making of an Economist, which researched the growing concern behind the methodology of academic teaching and the lowering numbers of PhDs in economics granted annually in the United States. Colander and Klamer state that the trend of a 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 China—such as Peking University and Tsinghua University, which have adopted measures in recent years specifically to combat the practice—and South Korea.
Famous quotes containing the words intellectual and/or inbreeding:
“I keep having the same experience and keep resisting it every time. I do not want to believe it although it is palpable: the great majority of people lacks an intellectual conscience. Indeed, it has often seemed to me as if anyone calling for an intellectual conscience were as lonely in the most densely populated cities as if he were in a desert.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“Be reflective ... and stay away from the theater as much as you can. Stay out of the theatrical world, out of its petty interests, its inbreeding tendencies, its stifling atmosphere, its corroding influence. Once become “theatricalized,” and you are lost, my friend; you are lost.”
—Minnie Maddern Fiske (1865–1932)