University of Southern California hired tenure-track assistant professors this year with PhDs from SUNY-Buffalo, U Mass/Amherst, and British Columbia. That's striking and quite unusual for a "top ten" program, but demonstrates a clear confidence in judgment and careful reading of files. Of course, U Mass/Amherst and British Columbia are strong departments at the international level (both top 40 in the Anglophone world), but they rarely place graduates at this level. Other examples are harder to come by (e.g., Harvard hired Samantha Matherne (PhD, UC Riverside), who works on Kant and post-Kantian philosophy, an area where UCR is excellent), and certainly not three in one year. Looking over other "top 10" departments in the U.S., the only other case I find of tenure-stream junior faculty without PhDs from "top 10" programs is at Michigan (Emmalon Davis [PhD, Indiana], Sonya Ozbey [PhD, DePaul]), although those junior faculty were hired in different years.
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