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The Persistent Political Bias of the Academy

InsideHigherEd reports:

Faculty members identify as liberals and vote Democratic in far greater proportions than found in the American public at large. That finding by itself won’t shock many, but the national study released Saturday at a Harvard University symposium may be notable both for its methodology and other, more surprising findings. ...

The results of the study find a professoriate that may be less liberal than is widely assumed, even if conservatives are correctly assumed to be in a distinct minority. The authors present evidence that there are more faculty members who identify as moderates than as liberals. The authors of the study also found evidence of a significant decline by age group in faculty radicalism, with younger faculty members less likely than their older counterparts to identify as radical or activist. And while the study found that faculty members generally hold what are thought to be liberal positions on social issues, professors are divided on affirmative action in college admissions. ...

[But] Lawrence H. Summers, the economist and former Harvard president, did his own cut on their numbers and said that his analysis pointed to a problematic liberal domination at elite research universities. ... He focused on elite graduate universities and on what he defined as core disciplines for undergraduate education (excluding health professions, for example). When conducting such an analysis, Summers said, he found “even less ideological diversity” than he thought he would, and that in the humanities and social sciences, Republicans are “the third group,” after Democrats and Nader and other left-wing third parties.

So even if the imbalance isn’t as big as some studies find and even if the professorate isn’t as far to the left as some studies find, there is still a huge imbalance that leaves the professorate way to the left of the American population as a whole. Contrary to the claims of some defenders of the status quo, moreover, these disparities clearly have a deleterious effect on the learning environment. A survey of students at 50 top U.S. universities and colleges conducted this fall by the Center for Survey Research & Analysis at the University of Connecticut found considerable evidence that politics pervaded the classroom:

“For instance, nearly half said that their professors ‘frequently comment on politics in class even though it has nothing to do with the course’ or use the classroom to present their personal political views. In answers to other questions, the majority acknowledged that liberal views predominate. Most troubling, however, were the responses to the survey item ‘On my campus, there are courses in which students feel they have to agree with the professor’s political or social views in order to get a good grade’—29% agreed.”

Why is there this persistent imbalance? Summers is further quoted as to the reason for the imbalance:

Summers said, he has largely viewed the political imbalance as one of “able people making choices.” He said that if you are a smart individual, and you like the market, profits, and “striving for profits,” you have “a wide range of choices in life,” of which an academic career is but one. If you are a smart person who doesn’t like the world of markets and profits, “you have a much narrower range of choices,” he said, and academic careers may be quite desirable. In this way of thinking, he said, it’s not surprising to find more liberals than conservatives on college faculties.

In other words, if you can’t hack it in the real economy , you go into teaching? (Oops, what’s that say about me? Hmmm....) In fact, however, Summers is wrong. After all, what about all those conservatives who have taken low paying jobs at think tanks like Cato, Heritage, or AEI? Or the public interest lawyers working at low paying jobs at places like the Pacific Legal Foundation? My firm belief is that those institutions provide a pool of individuals who would be perfectly happy to settle into the academy, if they had a fair shot at finding an academic job.

So why the persistent bias? I’ve offered the following explanation:

It is the question of a “fair shot” that is the real problem. Actual bias is a problem, but probably isn’t as much a one as conservatives outside the academy would like to believe. As Volokh Conspiracy blogger Juan Non-Volokh observed: “My experience in the academy ... confirms [that most] of the hostility faced by conservatives (and libertarians) is not explicit, and often not conscious or deliberate.” Mine too, although there have been a fair number of questionable moments.

The real culprit is the law school hiring process. Each fall the Association of American Law Schools collects resumes from prospective law teaching candidates, which are then transmitted to the appointments committee of each law school. The members of that committee then face the unenviable task of winnowing down well over a 1000 applications to a list of 25 or so candidates with whom the committee will meet at the so-called “meat market” convention. After which, the committee must further winnow those 25 or so down to a smaller number, 3-5, who are invited out to the law school for on campus interviews.

As a result, the hiring process is almost entirely negative. You spend the vast majority of your time winnowing the application pile—i.e., finding reasons not to hire someone. If you have on-site interviews of 0.3% of the applicant pool, any opposition by any committee member is enough to exclude someone. At the early stages of the process, they barely need to posit a reason.

In my experience, it thus 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. (And I mean hiring anybody, regardless of political affiliation.) Any opposition (for whatever reason) therefore is usually enough, absent a very strongly committed pro-hiring faction.

In most cases, a candidate’s best chance of surviving the winnowing process is for someone on the committee to become the candidate’s champion. The champion will pull the candidate’s resume out of the slush pile and make sure it gets flagged for close review. Because most law schools lack a critical mass of libertarian and conservative faculty members, however, there is nobody predisposed to pulling conservative candidates’ AALS forms out of the slush pile (and a fair number of folks inclined, whether consciously or subconsciously, to bury them). Applicants with conservative lines on their resume—an Olin fellowship, Federalist Society membership, or, heaven help you, a Scalia clerkship—thus tend to be passed over no matter how sterling the rest of their credentials may be.

In contrast, the latest left-leaning prodigy from Harvard or Yale has a mentor at one of those schools who makes calls to his/her buddies and ideological soulmates at other law schools. The recipients of those calls then flag the prodigy’s file, giving them a critical leg-up in the process. Law school hiring tends to be driven by the self-perpetuating network of left-leaning senior faculty.

It may not be deliberate bias, but there still is a disparate impact.

The solution?

Proponents of diversity, as measured by race, gender, sexual orientation, or what have you, long complained about the “old boys network” that dominated law school hiring. (Oddly enough, as the proponents of such diversity have achieved their own critical mass on most law school campuses, one tends to hear this complaint less often. Indeed, from what I see and hear, there seems to be something a “new boys and girls network” at work.) It’s time for us conservatives and libertarians to take up that complaint. We shouldn’t ask for affirmative action in favor of our fellow travelers, but we should insist that the pool of candidates not be artificially constricted by either the old or the new networks.

Meanwhile, a comment at InsideHighered offers the following take:

The only reason professors appear to be ‘left’ is that the benchmark in the U.S. has been shifted so far to the right.

A ‘liberal’ professor in the U.S. would be thought of as centerist or even right wing in Canada and in Europe. The United States has very few genuinely left wing professors, labled ‘extremely liberal’.

The proof of this can be seen in the issues: the Iraq war, the role of women, abortion, gay rights. These are no longer left-right political issues in most countries. Only the most extreme right raises the minority point of view on these at all.

As usual, the advice is to view American issues from a more global context. Observers will find that the professoriate, which is part of an international community, stands to the right of the global political spectrum, which is to be expected.

As for the redefinition of what constitutes ‘moderate’ and ‘liberal’, well, we have only articles like this to blame, that feed rather than correct a narrow prejudice.

First, I thought anti-globalization was the “in” creed. Second, does this mean it’s okay for the professorate - largely paid by American taxpayers - to be wildly out-of-step Americans as long as they’re in step with elite foreign opinion? It’s an interesting example of the decline of national identification on the left. One wonders what the commenter would make of Lincoln’s claim that the American Union was “the last best hope of earth.” Third, notice the denial that there are moral truths. War, sex, abortion are not the subject of knowable moral truths, but rather are to be decided by opinion polls among elite Europeans.