> “Accepting that prestige is a good measure of excellence means that we’re not looking into the history of how things became prestigious,” Gonzales says. The founding of elite US universities is “intertwined with exclusion”, she adds. For instance, many institutions have a history of seizing land from Indigenous groups, or originally derived their wealth from or supported their infrastructure with the labour of enslaved Black people.
These are non-sequiturs. The research question here is whether faculty are hired from those prestigious schools above and beyond the rate at which they would have been hired based on other signals of their potential as researchers, which, presumably, are related to what school they go to.
I am not seeing how schools' historical relationships with marginalized peoples bears on that question.
I believe it was Gary King who said that nepotism and meritocracy are very hard to distinguish in academia. You would need a clever identification strategy [0] to tease out the effects of prestige on the margin. I'm afraid this article doesn't offer much on that front.
Totally anecdotal, but I've been in a number of tenure-track hiring meetings at multiple universities and someone always brings up the idea of "pedigree". As in, "X has a good pedigree" etc., as if that's an argument for hiring the person above and beyond their track record. So at least in my personal experience, these things do enter into the process.
Of course, the process involves a lot of other variables too; there are plenty who don't talk about pedigree, but there's often someone who will point to it as a rationale.
I hear similar whispers about federal grant receipts, etc., in that people who get stamped with approval in the form of training fellowships, predoctoral NSF awards, etc. are seen as sort of "understanding the system" etc.
As I think of it, I can think of lots of other "in-group signaling" in various domains, so maybe it's not unique to academics. But that cuts both ways when you're talking about exclusivity and "old-boy" networks.
Having a lot of money is Harvard quality. Remember these institutions survive because the rich donate. This is also how brilliant minds come in contact with capital, and how we fund people studying knots and english literature all day long. It's a form of patronage.
In turn, no one would ever give Jared Kusher a professorship unless he bought it.
The problem is that hiring committees are busy, have imperfect information and therefore rely on easy metrics, i.e. prestige of candidate's university and journals where he has published.
Many universities are now signatories of the SF Declaration, where they promise to value research based on ideas, not on prestige of journals: https://sfdora.org
I have noted e.g. UMass goes one step further and asks tenure-track applicants to remove affiliation and journal names on their CVs to avoid bias. So that someone who comes from e.g. Oxford and has published in Nature is not judged to be better a priori than someone who comes from Exeter and has published in JCI.
It would be very interesting to have that studied... but my general impressions (as somebody who does read the publications) is that the answer is usually no.
A bit over 2/5s of the white undergrads are admitted for the later. That came up in the Asian law suit. Similar mechanisms apply elsewhere, but we haven't had legal discovery (note: not speculation; insider knowledge).
Yes, speaking as an insider, cheating at universities like Harvard, Stanford, and MIT is ubiquitous. I'm not talking about undergrads copying exams, so much as research fraud, bizarre financial schemes to funnel endowment funds into faculty pockets, conflicts-of-interest, and occasionally, actual crime.
I was following the article until I ran into xenophobia:
"The absurd parental efforts of an Amy Chua, as recounted in her 2010 bestseller Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, were simply a much more extreme version of widespread behavior among her peer-group, which is why her story resonated so deeply among our educated elites."
Chua is an immigrant academic who has devoted much of her life to the study of cultural dynamics in the US. She published an honest account of her life parenting in the US, coming from a different cultural background, as a means of helping people understand the immigrant experience with America trying to Americanize them.
Instead, what she did got cast through an American cultural lens, anecdotes got distorted by the media, and she got beat up over a very personal, very honest, very well-crafted account.
I am an immigrant, and her book resonated 100% with me. Things I do with my kid seem absurd from an American cultural perspective. It's not the same set of things as Amy did, at all, but that's true of most immigrant families from different cultures, be that Middle Eastern countries, Africa, or many other places.
An author of this article either doesn't know what they're writing about (they're citing a book they haven't read), or they're lying.
Maybe I'm jaded but I've met a lot of brilliant people in my life. They come from all sorts of backgrounds.
I've often in turn seen how those backgrounds can become safety nets, not equally distributed. The benefit of the doubt is extended very far, and when you have knowledge on the other side of the curtain it starts to look self-fulfilling sometimes.
It's hard not to look at scatterplots of things like SATs, GREs, and GPAs, and see a lot of randomness. Not pure randomness but it starts to be hard to justify to yourself when correlations of .1-.3 begin to be interpreted in the general public as if they were .9.
> It's hard not to look at scatterplots of things like SATs, GREs, and GPAs, and see a lot of randomness. Not pure randomness but it starts to be hard to justify to yourself when correlations of .1-.3 begin to be interpreted in the general public as if they were .9.
The individual has been "vetted" in a more rigorous setting. For example, is someone who graduates with a 3.5GPA Math BA from the University of Central Florida trained as well as someone who graduates with 3.5 from the University of Maryland? What about UNC? What about MIT?
If pedigree was a useless signal, it wouldn't be used. Mind you, I've seen this used against people as well. For example...
"The last few MIT grads we hired were full of themselves and way too combative." These are real words from a hiring manager.
I'd treat the 3.5 from UCF, Maryland and UNC as roughly the same, but think MIT probably was slightly harder to achieve. Maybe UNC I'd view with a bit more suspicion since it's more likely that someone got by there due to one form of privilege or another, whereas the Central Florida student I can feel more confident they probably survived only by merit.
One funny aspect of the very phenomena that this article is about, is that it highlights how little difference where you go to school matters. Whether you go to "super prestigious Ivy league school" or "non-prestigious flyover country state school" you're probably using the exact same textbook, syllabus and have a professors who were classmates and peers at the same "prestigious" university.
Basically, the difference between a student at a midwestern public school and an Ivy league is about 99.999% how privileged they were in terms of either having rich, well-connected parents or matching a diversity criteria the school was seeking and at most, a 0.001% difference in merit.
“I'd treat the 3.5 from UCF, Maryland and UNC as roughly the same, but think MIT probably was slightly harder to achieve.”
Are you sure about that? Private, prestigious institutions have a habit of grade inflation beyond those of the nation’s reputable state schools (although all of the schools have inflated grades compared to previous decades)
I would probably view an equal or higher GPA from a top tier state school as a better distinguisher than one from an Ivy.
> Basically, the difference between a student at a midwestern public school and an Ivy league is about 99.999% how privileged they were in terms of either having rich, well-connected parents
Coincidentally, I was accepted to an Ivy League school but had to attend a Midwestern public school instead because my parents couldn't afford to send me to the Ivy League school.
>If pedigree was a useless signal, it wouldn't be used.
The notion of good pedigree benefits anyone who might fit in that category, so they're incentivized to convince people that this matters. For example, if someone on a hiring committee sees an applicant coming from their alma mater, they can call that a "good pedigree" and reinforce the value of their own background.
I mean, only if it actually is a good pedigree. I used to work at a company where one of the HR directors went to Harvard for undergrad. He could say that and people probably would have nodded their heads in agreement. You can't say that if you went to Ohio State. Nothing against the Buckeyes but it's just not in the same tier, to the point where that "pedigree" -- I can't even imagine anyone referring to their Ohio State education as a "pedigree" in any serious sense -- isn't any better or worse than any of the other ~60 half-way decent "$STATE State" or "$STATE University" schools.
There's also a lot of discussion here around the people who get excluded because they lack that pedigree. I don't think anyone is saying that you can't find brilliant folks who went to a small school you've never heard of. They're saying that you're hiring for one professorship, there are a lot of unknowns, and you're trying to eliminate false positives to avoid a bad hire. Seeing that between two otherwise-identical candidates, one of whom has a BA from Harvard and one of whom has a BA from West Virginia State, you're well within your duty as a member of the hiring committee to assume that the person from Harvard has at least as good a chance of being acceptable as the other one. False negatives are okay (not great), false positives are horrible.
The problem though is that exceptional people are scattered all over the system, since 1) not everybody can get into Harvard (class size) and a significant percentage who do are selected from a small monied elite. The number of non-Harvard graduates is much, much larger.
So statistically it is actually far more likely that the Harvard person is relatively mediocre to a neutral sampling of the entire system.
I don't think an equivalent GPA at a more prestigious school signals anything of the sort. In fact many more prestigious institutions grade fairly leniently on the assumption that their students are already ahead of the curve.
The few exceptions are at places like Berkeley where they accept a large number of students.
It's one of the reasons that I think eliminating standardized tests for admission to graduate institutions may be a mistake.
The research question isn't about whether "prestige is a good measure of excellence." That's the question that you ask after you discover that people are being hired based on prestige, if you don't automatically assume that's either a bad or a good thing.
If prestige is definitely driven by quality, it's not bad that professors are being hired because of the prestige of the schools they attended. But accepting that prestige is a good measure of excellence means that we're not looking into the history of how things became prestigious.
There's nothing about using prestige as a proxy for excellence that has any bearing on investigating what got them there in the first place.
It's akin to claiming that accepting financial success as a decent proxy for business acumen means no one is interested in knowing how they originally because financially successful. Not only does it not follow, it makes no sense as to why accepting one would even imply someone wasn't interested in the other.
Sure, I think it’s good to both first get the data on which scholars come from which schools, and I also think unpacking the social and political construction of prestige is a great research agenda.
But to assess whether prestige is a source of bias in the hiring process, you have to separate prestige from other markers of quality. Otherwise, you have a big confounding variable problem. This author, and also the quoted professor of education, don’t seem to engage with that, and in fact seem to beg the question by assuming that prestige is an independent force in hiring decisions, which, I thought, was the thing the article was trying to demonstrate.
Have you been on a university hiring committee? My anecdotal evidence is that yes prestige very strongly matters and coming from a very prestigious university often outweights other factors such as publication record.
I haven't read the original article yet but one can easily test if e.g. the publication record of a graduate student from a non-and prestigious uni differ to the extend that is indicated by the hiring.
I have been on multiple hiring committees and had insights into plenty of hiring processes at other “top-25” universities. My experience is that it is more complex than simply using prestigious universities, supervisors, and collaborators as markers. In fact, I have so far never heard that kind of argument raised, while I have heard diversity arguments raised more times than I can count.
Rather, my experience tells me that having attended prestigious universities, as well as having had “great” supervisors and collaborators drives up other metrics for a candidate such as publications, impact, collaboration networks, etc. Success breeds success across academic generations, due to overall positive perception of people/institutions, (in particular at top American institutions) ample access to funds, etc. Note also – and this is very important – that the metrics I mentioned are considered “objective” and disconnected from prestige. Making matters even worse, the ability to make use of the opportunities that these prestigious institutions bring, is of course correlated with intrinsic attributes you want to see in a candidate (not everyone that goes to Harvard ends up being a superstar).
It is very difficult for me to pick this apart. How can I possibly objectively tell whether individual A that entered a top-5 institution or individual B that entered a top-100 institution is most deserving? Given the complexity of it all, I suspect that I can not, but I also sincerely doubt that the insistence on “objective” metrics does much to alleviate an already very messy situation.
> How can I possibly objectively tell whether individual A that entered a top 5 institution or individual B that entered a top 100 institution is most deserving?
Of course! If only we and thousands of other hiring committees would have thought of that!
Obviously we read their work, their CVs, their teaching statements, their research proposals, listen to their presentations, have personal meetings, etc. But if you read my original comment again I am sure you will notice that this is not what I am talking about. I state multiple times that these “objective” metrics that you now tout in response to my post are strongly correlated with prestigious institutions and supervisory pedigree. Thus, picking them apart is incredibly challenging.
Okay, let my try to put this gently, go back and read my original post again and then respond here as to why your reply here is obviously nonsensical. Sorry, I am losing my patience here as you do not even seem to understand the basics of the ongoing discussion and what it is that is problematic.
I have not been on a hiring committee — I actually failed my comprehensive exams partway through grad school which is how I ended up in tech :) — but your hypothesis sounds very reasonable to me. I’m just saying that we need a more careful causal identification strategy than that provided herein to say whether prestige has a meaningful effect on hiring, on average.
All else being equal eg publication record, a candidate A from a less prestigious place is ranked higher than candidate B from a more prestigious place. This is because the candidate A did the same stuff with much less support than B.
The issue is that prestige is highly correlated to research outputs, so it is difficult to disentangle.
While it maybe should be that way it definitely is not in my experience.
In my experience if you have done a postdoc/PhD at e.g. Stanford people will look much less thoroughly at your publication record. I've actually argued in committees that a candidate from a less prestigious school should be reranked higher than a candidate from a prestigious school, because they had a much better publication record. The interesting thing was once I brought this up in the discussion, most people agreed. However in their own ranking they had put the person from the prestigious school higher, which indicates to me that this is an unconscious bias.
I guess it depends on the publication record. But a bad publication record from someone who came from a prestigious place gets an extra negative from someone who came from an average place.
On the other spectrum, someone from nowhere solving something big makes huge headlines (mathematician from unknown place solves millennia-old problem). At that level it doesn’t matter where you came from, you’re in.
It’s the muddy middle that becomes difficult to assess. Two people who have published decently but not great. Nothing remarkable about them. Then prestige may factor in to their benefit.
I think this study is approaching the limits of what can be determined using quantitative methods. The academia is not single field but a collection of tens of thousands of overlapping niches. If you want to understand the dynamics in a niche, you must spend years studying it, which does not scale.
In the niche I'm most familiar with, where I can often tell the difference between the reputation of a researcher and the quality of their work, prestige does not seem to have a significant role. University of Cambridge is the only institute that stands out, while most top people and most faculty members come from a wide range of reputable but unexceptional research universities.
Prestige seems to have a bigger role in another subfield I work in, but I'm not as confident in evaluating the people in it. The big difference seems to be that this subfield favors building large labs and emphasizes the role of the PI as a manager and a visionary rather than as a researcher. I'm not even sure if the quality of research means the same things in this field as in my home field.
I think we're not looking into it because it doesn't matter in this context. We can look into it, sure. But the question of how Yale University treated certain groups of people or how they got certain plots of land doesn't have the slightest bearing on whether or not Professor Smith got her specific professorship because she went to Yale. They're both good questions but completely unrelated.
It is a nice catch. I read and re-read the quote and the argument is oddly worded. If I were to try to make sense of it and try to defend it, I think I would say that the author is trying to say that how you got where you are matters. It is still a bad and poorly worded argument. Than again, 'everything is racism' clearly sells clicks today so even non-sequitur works.
> I am not seeing how schools' historical relationships with marginalized peoples bears on that question.
Though it wasn't one of their examples, alumni preference in admissions means that schools that formerly excluded based on race still have an element of that today.
And it means that older SATs that had stronger cultural bias in the reading comprehension parts etc. are still affecting admissions today, through the chain of alumni preference.
I am unsure about training (access to, and performance at prestigious phd programs is easy even if you come from a third-tier undergrad), but I don't believe that professors at lower tier research institutes are necessarily less productive.
Probably the most productive synthetic biologist is one at Michigan state: John Frost... with a lab of about six, he's produced in microorganisms within the span of ten-ish years:
- rocket fuel precursor (butanetriol for BTTN), both stereoisomers
- BPA replacement
(phloroglucinol)
- precursor to tamiflu (shikimate)
- nylon-6 precursor (caprolactam)
And probably some others that I don't remember off the top of my head. More famous synthetic biologists have done less with labs of hundreds.
It's not clear that the non sequitur is the fault of Gonzales.
It is true that the history of elite universities is highly related to exclusion, as she said. One clear as day example: the historical exclusion of Jews. It's easy to find others.
The article says: "For instance, many institutions have a history of seizing land from Indigenous groups, or originally derived their wealth from or supported their infrastructure with the labour of enslaved Black people." But did Gonzales give those examples? Even a friend to her argument would probably agree that exclusion in the admissions context of elite schools would be more relevant.
They’re definitely sequiturs, maybe not to the issues you want to discuss. You seem focused on how much academia is a meritocracy. There is an important and different question of how diverse and accessible academia is.
For example certain Olympic sports like dressage (horse jumping) are meritocracies, but very exclusionary (or at least non diverse, non accessible).
The subtitle of this article is "‘Jarring’ study reveals hiring bias at US institutions."
Trying to ascertain whether prestige leads to "hiring bias" is asking whether it has an independent effect on hiring. If prestige had zero effect -- if the observed correlation was actually measuring markers of researcher quality with which prestige is likely to be correlated -- then there would be zero bias.
The fact that those institutions did many horrible things historically does not provide evidence on that question. That's why I called it a non-sequitur.
It is certainly a non-sequitur: can we simultaneously accept, or reject, the idea that prestige is a good measure of excellence while looking at (or not looking at) the history of how things become prestigious? Yes, we can. The one has nothing to do with the other.
> There is an important and different question of how diverse and accessible academia is.
What I find troubling is the baggage of background assumptions that makes this sort of value judgement possible.
You have three professors, two white, one black. The two white professors, A and B, have diverging yet compelling views. The black professor C agrees with A. Which is better? Hiring A and B, or A and C? According to prevailing views of the value of diversity, the latter is preferable because of the racial diversity rule.
Imo, this comment is treating these sports as straw man symbols to assert an ideological point. Good horsemanship takes decades and isn't really comparable to intellectualism. We aren't your gods, and using riders as examples for iconoclasm is tedious.
I'm sorry if I gave offense, but I'm not sure what about my analogy you're objecting to and I would be glad if you could help me understand. I just meant to illustrate that an endeavor can be a fair and just meritocracy, but also non diverse and non representative -- these are two separate issues.
The presence of bias is purely numerical and is allowed to thrive due to the lack of controls. Prestige is an unrelated red herring masking the very human behaviors that account for social gravity in many walks of life. This is commonly referred to as implicit bias and is generally the most common cause of various forms of selection bias, including racial discrimination from both the majority and minorities alike.
> The presence of bias is purely numerical and is allowed to thrive due to the lack of controls.
This statement is wonderfully self-contradictory. The study overwhelmingly proves the first part wrong. The presence of bias is numerical, certainly, but it is not purely numerical and must actually exist, which is acknowledged after the "and," in contradiction.
> Prestige is an unrelated red herring masking the very human behaviors that account for social gravity in many walks of life.
The study conclusively demonstrates that prestige most certainly is central to academic mobility. Also, biases are among the very human behaviors that account for social gravity.
> This is commonly referred to as implicit bias
Again, contradictory to immediately previous statement. If prestige is a red herring, it can't also be implicit bias unless the implicitly biased individual is intentionally misleading themselves, i.e. demonstrating cognitive dissonance.
> and is generally the most common cause of various forms of selection bias,
Prestige is highly unlikely to be the most common cause of selection bias. Systematic error is a far more common cause of selection bias.
> including racial discrimination from both the majority and minorities alike.
The surprising claim here is that prestige causes racism. But racism has many causes, the most common being that it is learned. In origin, I think it is probably caused by a combination of low intellect, lack of education, irrational fear of diversity, and narcissistic self-interest. And it should be noted that the idea of reverse racism has been employed wherever white supremacy is diminished. It is, IMO, neither legitimate nor valid conceptually and fundamentally a tu quoque fallacy.
No, the study proves that bias, in this one case, demonstrates the Pareto Principle which is a purely numerical thing.
Alignment to bias is essential to mobility anywhere that bias prevails irrespective of prestige. Prestige is the effect not the cause. The rest of your comment is built upon that cause/effect confusion.
> No, the study proves that bias, in this one case, demonstrates the Pareto Principle which is a purely numerical thing.
This is a category error. The study nicely demonstrates the 80/20 rule, which itself is purely numerical, but the subjects, the academics, are real people, not numbers, nor is the demonstrated bias purely mathematical, it actually exists. The bias is real irregardless of demonstrating the Pareto Principle. The land ownership that Pareto originally demonstrated as following an 80/20 rule is not numerical, i.e. owning land is not numerical; it is land tenure.
> Alignment to bias is essential to mobility anywhere that bias prevails irrespective of prestige.
This is question begging, assuming the conclusion, aka petitio principii.
> Prestige is the effect not the cause. The rest of your comment is built upon that cause/effect confusion.
And this is a straw man and contradictory to your original statements. Unravelling your OP, it was your claim that prestige was the cause of something:
>> Prestige... is generally the most common cause of...
You write beautifully, your prose flows exceptionally smoothly, a talent I wish I had. I'm honestly envious. But the underlying argument is at times contradictory and wholly fallacious.
What’s being implied here is that the endowments of these elite institutions were created through historical crimes, but activists won’t make an issue of that if the universities support diverse hiring initiatives.
> These are non-sequiturs. The research question here is whether faculty are hired from those prestigious schools above and beyond the rate at which they would have been hired based on other signals of their potential as researchers, which, presumably, are related to what school they go to.
> I am not seeing how schools' historical relationships with marginalized peoples bears on that question.
You're right, but it would be truly hilarious if those universities used this same reasoning to defend themselves. Now they don't like the intersectionality they preach when it's going to be used against them.
> The research question here is whether faculty are hired from those prestigious schools above and beyond the rate at which they would have been hired based on other signals of their potential as researchers
It's interesting that you use the word "potential". Tenure-track positions are very hard to get, and most newly minded PhDs have very little track record. If they're lucky, they have a publication or two in a journal, but many will have only their dissertation. So I think the question is whether PhDs coming from prestigious schools are judged to have more "research potential" based on where they come from rather than their limited record.
The "potential" problem is even worse when it comes to admitting undergraduates into graduate programs.
If you don't get a tenure-track position right out of grad school, it can be difficult to ever work your way up to one, because you'll probably have to take a job at a school with a greater teaching load than a typical research university, which leaves little time for you to do your research and prove yourself. In a sense, the "potential" becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy.
This is why it has become normal to do 3-7 years of postdoc research positions before being considered for a tenure-track faculty position, even for those from elite universities.
Only in fields where there’s no demand for their skills outside academia, like English literature or History, or vastly more supply than demand, like most of the sciences. Fields like Economics or Computer Science have post docs but they’re not normative. Most people who end up with tenure track jobs never do one.
Hogwash! It depends on far more than the field. In Computer Science, factors such as the current “heat” of the market, saturation in terms of hires at institutions in your field, procedures in a given country, “production rate” of PhD students, etc. all have a major impact on whether you will have to “run the postdoctoral gauntlet”. About half of the tenured professors that I know in my “generation” had to do several years of work before ending up on the tenure track and I am both in Computer Science and in a field that has been very hot for nearly ten years.
> many institutions have a history of seizing land from Indigenous groups
The institutions themselves did? How many Ivy League founders forcefully dispossessed indigenous groups specifically so they could build a university on their land?
I'm not talking, like, how the land Yale University is on was once owned by the Mohegan, Mashantucket Pequot, Eastern Pequot, Schaghticoke, Golden Hill Paugussett, Niantic, and the Quinnipiac and other Algonquian speaking peoples and then some white dudes forcibly relocated them and then years later some other white dudes got together and founded a school which became Yale.
If dispossession makes something prestigious then why isn't every college in America prestigious? They were all built on land seized from indigenous groups. Many in the South were built or benefited from the labor of enslaved black people in addition to that. By this logic the most prestigious universities in America really ought to be clustered in the deep South cotton belt. This strangely doesn't seem to be the case.
It seems to me prestige and some form of exclusion have to go hand in hand. This might be in terms of cost to attend, or coming from the "right" ethnicity, or coming from the "right" family from within the "right" ethnicity, or having the highest SAT score, or some mix of these.
If the Ivy League was open to any and all comers it would no more prestigious than any community college because anyone who wanted to could attend. I don't see why Yale couldn't build bigger buildings and open a bunch of satellite campuses in all 50 states if they wanted to. But if they did that it would be like Gucci selling $15 shirts at Walmart. It would utterly destroy the brand even if the quality remained the same.
> This picture of elitism is bolstered by a study published last month in Nature Human Behaviour2, showing that almost 25% of faculty members in the United States have at least one parent with a PhD (in the general population, less than 1% of people have a parent with a PhD).
What would the numbers look like if you did the math for plumbers, programmers, farmers, or any other trade? Suppose your dad was a welder and he taught you about it from a young age, gave you skills, put in a good word for you with his boss, which gave you a leg up on the people trying to get into the trade from nothing. It doesn't seem much different from me to the PhD thing. This is not even getting into whether (or to what extent) intelligence/personality is heritable. PhDs will spend a lot of time with each other, and mate with each other, and their kids will be PhDs because they were raised in a PhD environment by PhD parents and the cycle will repeat again. I could have told you that without a study.
> Depending on the field, only 5–23% of faculty members worked at an institution more prestigious than the one at which they earned their PhD, according to the analysis.
Well yeah. If they had enough prestige to go to a prestigious university they would have done so before earning their PhD. Either the most elite universities in the US are leaving a ton of $100 bills on the sidewalk by ignoring non-prestigious PhDs, or it's not a meritocracy and never was.
-> how did it get that way?
-> exclusion
-> examples of exclusion
You might claim the point is not germane for other reasons but clearly this shows a clear sequence of thought so the claim "non-sequitur" doesn't hold. "It's too hard to measure" also doesn't mean "not germane," though.
These are non-sequiturs. The research question here is whether faculty are hired from those prestigious schools above and beyond the rate at which they would have been hired based on other signals of their potential as researchers, which, presumably, are related to what school they go to.
I am not seeing how schools' historical relationships with marginalized peoples bears on that question.
I believe it was Gary King who said that nepotism and meritocracy are very hard to distinguish in academia. You would need a clever identification strategy [0] to tease out the effects of prestige on the margin. I'm afraid this article doesn't offer much on that front.
[0] https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.15.4.69