How the Academic Job Market Used to Work

From a recent installment of the memoirs of Robert Paul Wolff:

The time has come for me to tell the story of how I was hired by Columbia University. This is all going to sound very odd to younger readers, so some words of preparation and background are called for. Back when I was a student and then a young untenured professor, there were really only ten universities in America at which one could usefully study Philosophy at the doctoral level: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Penn, Chicago, Michigan, Stanford, Berkeley, and UCLA. When one of those departments had an opening, someone would pick up the phone or drop a line to a friend at one or another of the ten schools and ask whether they had a promising young philosopher ready to start teaching. That, you will recall, is how I got the Chicago job. There were, of course, huge numbers of colleges and universities around the country even then, and most of them, especially the less prestigious among them, would actually advertise openings and invite applications. But no one at one of the top schools would have considered trying to fill a position in that manner.

As Professor Wolff notes, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act put an end to those practices.  His observations about the hierarchy in the 1950s and early 1960s is also interesting.  I was a little surprised not to see Brown (C.J. Ducasse, a young Roderick Chisolm) and Cornell (Max Black and Norman Malcolm, among others) on that list, but putting that to one side, it is striking that about a half-century later, two of those ten departments, while still offering major PhD programs are now well outside "the top ten" (Penn and Chicago), Yale has only very recently returned to the top ranks after decades in the 'wilderness' as it were, while Columbia and Berkeley, in particular, teeter on the edge of the 'top ten' (sometimes in, sometimes out).  By contrast, NYU, Rutgers, MIT, and Pittsburgh are clearly on any list of "the top ten," and Arizona teeters in and out.  I wonder whether any other fields have had this much change in their top ranks over the last half-century?