Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

Conservatives in the academy: An update

Randy Barnett and David Bernstein at the Conspiracy jump into the discussion, as does Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution. Barnett makes a particularly good point about the nature of the hiring process:

Given the collective nature of the decision process, is there someone on the faculty that feels so strongly favorable about candidate that he or she is willing (and happens to be in the position) to expend enough energy to overcome the disparate agendas of his colleagues? If you add to this norm, the presence of almost any heated ideological opposition, and/or the absence of any sympathetic influential member of the faculty willing to expend scarce political capital, the candidacy is doomed (as most candidacies are anyhow).

In the end, I think any candidate with political views in the minority (in which category I include radical left, as well as conservative or libertarian) must be significantly better than the normal appointment at a particular school to have a chance of getting a job offer from that school.

I think this is largely right. In my experience, it is a lot harder to get somebody hired than it is to block them from being hired. The process isn't as explicit as the blackballing scene in Animal House, but the law school hiring process is just as weighted against hiring. Hiring anybody, of whatever political stripe. Any opposition (for whatever reason) therefore is usually enough, absent a very strongly committed pro-hiring faction. At the same time, however, I still think that the absence of a critical mass of libertarian and conservative scholars at most law schools greatly exacerbates the structural problems about which Barnett writes (see my earlier posts, listed below).