Anyone who has spent any time in an academic department knows that departments have their own culture, their own character. A group of 10-30 people who all work together, who make decisions together, forms a kind of community that develops a distinctive way of thinking about problems and solving them. This leads to all kinds of good things, but the down side to this is that departments can develop a kind of myopia, particularly among the members who have been there the longest: if you've been part of a department for 10-15 years, you will be acculturated to that department, and I imagine it gets pretty easy to forget that other places may think about things differently--or, at the very least, it becomes easy to forget how others places think differently.
Departments recognize this fact: it's the reason (or one of the reasons) why we generally don't hire our own graduate students to tenure-track positions within the department. The practice of hiring one's own is called "incest" for a reason: a "healthy" department needs "genetic diversity"--which is just to say that it needs to bring new ideas and new perspectives into the community in order to avoid becoming so insular and self-affirming that the department simply loses touch with what the rest of the world is thinking and doing. In frowning upon hiring those we've trained ourselves, we recognize implicitly that people from outside our own department--our own small community--bring in, not just fresh critical perspectives (the hiring process too rarely looks for a candidate doing really different work), but different paradigms and assumptions about everything from decision-making processes to curricular issues that will enliven and improve an academic community by diversifying it intellectually.
But hiring people trained elsewhere isn't enough to overcome the myopia that comes with the other, positive aspects of departmental community. It's not enough, first of all, because hiring has slowed so much. I've interviewed in departments who were doing their first searches in 10 years. Administrative stinginess with tenure-track lines (at least in my field), combined with a disinclination among the most senior of the senior faculty to retire, means that departments are bringing people in from the outside far less frequently than is salutary. Relying on hires to bring in new perspectives is also not enough because it doesn't do enough to address individual acculturation; that is, while new hires may bring new perspectives to a department as a whole, they don't necessarily have much leverage when it comes to convincing the tenured ranks of the department to think in different ways. New faculty have the least power (particularly if we include the non-tenure-track faculty, among whom we are likely to find the highest turnover and therefore the most "new" people). Speaking for myself, I have more than once been new in a department, felt frustration at what seemed to me a limited way of thinking about a problem the department was facing, but also felt incapable of persuading my senior colleagues to change the terms of the debate (despite the fact that these colleagues have generally been lovely people that I feel lucky to work with). Institutional memory is a powerful force. It is extremely valuable insofar as it helps us remember why our department is where it is and allows us to learn from past successes and failures; but institutional memory can also be limiting, can prevent people from seeing that an approach may work now that didn't work before simply because the times have changed.
I am not criticizing senior faculty for this: I think it's an inevitable result of being part of a single community for an extended period of time, and particularly it's a result of having worked to help build that community into what it is. In other words, this limited perspective is an unavoidable side-effect of having done a lot of good stuff. So the solution to this problem is not, I think, for professors to seek out new jobs every 5-10 years. A functional department needs stability, needs to have the kind of community that has developed ways of handling problems over time, and high turn-over would work against community-building. But what about faculty exchange programs? What if universities worked together to "swap" a certain number of faculty every semester? What if it were written into tenure contracts that every, say, 10 semesters or so, a tenured faculty member must spend one semester at a different institution, while faculty member's department would welcome a tenured professor from another institution to serve in the faculty member's place for that semester?
An exchange like this would mean that departments would have a steady but not overwhelming number of "senior visiting" professors running through the department--not junior colleagues who need to be trained, but seasoned professors who can bring a different set of assumptions and of experiences into the department. And it would mean that tenured faculty members would also get to immerse themselves in another department's culture regularly but not so frequently that it would be unproductively disruptive to their work or lives, enabling the faculty member to experience and work with a different departmental culture. Such an exchange could also allow departments to seek out partner-departments that offer something very different from themselves: for instance, a department with high-research productivity but which thinks it needs to work on its teaching profile might seek out an exchange with a more teaching-oriented department, and vice versa. A department unsure how to approach a curricular revision might seek out exchanges with departments who have recently undergone radical revisions in new directions, to see what that revisions look like on the ground and to get input from members of partner-departments in the home department's discussions.
I have no real idea what the logistics of such an exchange would look like--I imagine it would be complicated to coordinate across an entire university, let alone multiple universities--but it seems to me that the benefits of such a system would be immeasurable. A limited amount of faculty exchange already happens at well-funded, high-prestige universities where departments have "visiting scholar" lines through which they can bring in other high-prestige faculty members. But what I'm thinking of here is not just an abroad program for the academic elite: I think it would be beneficial to think about faculty exchange for all faculty and all departments for the purposes of curricular and community enrichment, rather than just prestige-building. Not only would individual departments decrease the myopia that comes with living in a specific, local community, but such a program would also expand a sense of community within the disciplines outside institutional boundaries, and potentially foster greater unity within our disciplines at a time when the value of a college education is largely under attack.
