In a previous post I looked at which presses most often publish the winners for the CCCC Outstanding Book Award. The idea was to identify institutions that have significant power in deciding what is considered to be quality scholarship for people in rhetorical studies, in this case those associated with CCCC.
Below is a chart of the PhD granting institutions of the book award winners, hoping I might see some more patterns, and I did. A word about method. This list includes only the first author for each winner (and honorable mention). In a future post, I’ll put together a graph with all authors for comparison. For most authors I used information from the WorldCat record of their winning book along with ProQuest’s dissertation database to identify their PhD granting institution. Some authors were a little bit more difficult to identify, and I ended up looking to their Library of Congress authority record if I couldn’t find their actual dissertation in the dissertation database. The University of Wisconsin-Madison has most frequently granted the degree of the award winner. Other notable institutions were the University of Arizona, University of Michigan, and the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.
Invisible Colleges theory doesn’t identify the many reasons those universities have been important, just that they have historically been. For instance, it could be that the faculty and student network in those schools tend to more often help students write monographs that would be considered for the award. Or maybe they’re particularly good at teaching their students how to go about being nominated. Or it could be that review committees have historically favored scholarship that resembles the types of work from those schools. Or maybe it’s luck. I’m hoping to better understand as I keep reviewing the texts that are part of this data set.
Here’s the full breakdown of PhD granting schools that have been trained students who went on to win the award.
Data Table
| PhD Granting School | Number of Award Winners |
| University of Wisconsin Madison | 7 |
| University of Arizona | 3 |
| University of Michigan | 3 |
| University of North Carolina Chapel Hill | 3 |
| None | 2 |
| Ohio State University | 3 |
| Purdue University | 2 |
| Rutgers University | 2 |
| Temple University | 2 |
| University of Pittsburgh | 2 |
| University of Texas Austin | 2 |
| Washington State University | 2 |
| Brandeis University | 1 |
| Carnegie Mellon University | 1 |
| Illinois State University | 1 |
| Indiana University Bloomington | 1 |
| Louisiana State University | 1 |
| Michigan Technological University | 1 |
| New York University | 1 |
| State University of New York at Albany | 1 |
| Syracuse University | 1 |
| University of California Irvine | 1 |
| University of California Los Angeles | 1 |
| University of California San Diego | 1 |
| University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign | 1 |
| University of Kansas | 1 |
| University of Massachusetts Amherst | 1 |
| University of Northern Colorado | 1 |
| University of Tennessee | 1 |
| University of Texas Arlington | 1 |
| University of Virginia | 1 |
| University of Wisconsin Milwaukee | 1 |
| Washington University St. Louis | 1 |