Is there any rule in US that prohibits recruiting as faculty the students studied in the same university/institution?

Question

There is a phenomenon in my country. I am not judging whether it is correct or not because of my ignorance on it. My honest opinion, as per my current knowledge, is that the phenomenon is bad as whole.

The phenomenon is as follows:

A student completes either doctorate or post graduation at university or any academic institute named N. She gets appointment as assistant professor in the same institute N whenever vacancies are present. Although the percentage of such people vaires, the percentage is significant. It may be above 50% in most of the cases. It is not just happening in normal institutes but also in premier institutes.

I am providing two examples just for reference: Anna University, IIT Kharagpur.

The medium of instruction in most of the institutes is English only. This question is not about discussing advantages or disadvantages or judging this phenomenon.

The question is only about the existence of laws or rules prohibiting the happening of this phenomenon in US. Is there any such rule?

If not exists country wide, then are there any universities with existence of such rule?

I am not asking about permanent prohibition, but at least with some restriction to avoid that phenomenon.

Answer 1

There is certainly no such general rule in the US. However, many (not all) universities would prefer not to hire their own graduates immediately, but are probably happy to bring them back after they have established themselves elsewhere, perhaps with a post-doc or a faculty position elsewhere.

There are complementary reasons for it. The most fundamental one is that many faculty feel that a student has learned about as much as can be learned already working with the faculty of the home institution and that it will do them good, professionally, to be exposed to the ideas of others at a different institution.

The lesser reason is that by spreading out their doctoral graduates they are also spreading out their own ideas. Another way to put it is that a new institution will benefit from the ideas that their recent graduates might bring to it.

These combine into a situation where a department is more likely to bring in people with new ideas, a definite plus.

The combination of these tends to make the world of scholarship more interconnected with more collaboration possibilities. This is, perhaps, less important in the internet age, but it was pretty strong previously. And those interconnections can be vital in driving knowledge (research, scholarship,...) forward.

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I'll also note that most faculty hiring at research universities in US requires a broad search; at least national. It can be very difficult to pre-select a candidate and then write a description of a job that will only really apply to that one person. I know of one case where this was attempted and the description provided was very detailed and exact. After it was broadcast, at least three other candidates appeared who met the criteria at least as well as the one originally desired.

Answer 2

Usually US universities have anti-discriminatory laws regarding hiring of candidates, which would forbid them from not hiring their own PhD students as tenure track or tenured faculties. Whether the practice is widespread probably depends on the University.

I know of examples where PhD students were later hired as an Assistant Professor (Tenure Track) in US universities. However, in my (limited) experience, such phenomenon is quite rare.