Several weeks back I was thinking about how the Bible is taught at seminaries, and on a lark I decided to check out the website of a big school 200 miles from my apartment in Texas: Dallas Theological Seminary. I wondered, who are the people who teach Bible here? As I looked through their bios, something surprised me. By my count, 26 of their 29 Bible professors received degrees from Dallas Theological Seminary.
Interpretations of this statistic will vary. I don’t know anyone who works at DTS, but I suspect that their Bible faculty would say that they their professors were chosen because they are the best scholars in the field, and that nearly all of them have DTS degrees because DTS is the best school in the field. Someone with views like my own, on the other hand, would suspect that the statistic reveals an extreme form of insularity, with older professors all having come up together and having taught the current crop of younger professors, creating a strong network of mutual reinforcement for a static set of ideas.
I might be wrong. Anyhow, the DTS website piqued my interest, so then I looked at the websites for every single seminary in United States and recorded the names of all their Bible professors as well as where those professors got their various degrees. I compiled the data, and here it is:
I haven’t had a chance to analyze the data, except to rough up an adjacency matrix that I plotted in Rgraphviz (see the image above). But this particular visualization doesn’t say much to me (aside from “Rgraphviz == awesome!”), and I have lots of fiddling to do with the data before I can draw any conclusions.
To the extent that this stuff interests you, from the perspective of either analyzing the data or checking it for accuracy, I’m eager for input and advice. I’m sure I made some mistakes when I drew up the data, which took a long, long time, and I’m sure that there are many out there better at analyzing this sort of data than I am.
What I’d really like to know is whether and how seminaries cluster together in terms of their Bible professors. I got a M.A.R. degree at Yale Divinity School (where my Bible grades were awful, BTW), and I imagine that Dallas Theological Seminary-trained scholars would have a hard time getting a gig at Yale, and vice versa. If this is true, the data won’t say why — the reasons could be geographical, or ideological, or denominational, or of course theological — but I’m interested in seeing how the schools group. Can we see, for example, that people trained at “liberal” schools tend to teach at “liberal” schools, and the same for “conservatives”?
(Note that many of the numerous caveats about this data and its potential usefulness can be found in the document linked above.)
Your thoughts?