Elite American universities are a site of struggle. Within them is a divided intellectual culture where faculty adopt distinct orientations toward their work activities, and they compete for position and power. To outcompete their peers, faculty innovate and secure more and varied forms of resources. The university supports these efforts with new programs, centers, and institutional initiatives, and it consecrates them through the selective conferral of promotions to tenure, full professorships, and administrative leadership positions. In this way the elite university as a field reproduces the legitimacy of elite faculty and the university’s dominant position in the larger academic field, but in a way adaptive to the changing environment. We present evidence of this via a full census of faculty members’ backgrounds, accrued capital, …
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