I just received a 206 page book from the UCLA Associate Vice Chancellor for Faculty Diversity (I had no idea we even had such a person), which provides a department by department breakdown of racial, ethnic, and gender diversity. The breakdown includes not only raw data, but also an estimate of "underutilization," which is defined as the "difference between actual number of faculty [in a particular department] of a particular group [i.e. race or gender] and the expected number of faculty based on the availability estimate [i.e., the estimated number of potential faculty hires of that race or gender in that field nationally]."
The data are also available on line.
I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do with this book, since Prop 209 presumably bars me from making use of such data in voting on hiring decisions. In any case, I note that there is no data on forms of diversity other than race and gender, such as intellectual or political diversity. No surprise there. My guess is that the highest underutilization number would be for pro-life female Republicans of all ethnicities.
I base this estimate on one of the most famous unpublished studies of the legal academy. As the Yale Daily News reported back in 1996, for example:
"The basic argument for diversity in faculty hiring is incoherent unless there is more hiring of white Republicans and Christians because they are the two groups more underrepresented than women and most minorities," [Northwestern law professor and Volokh Conspirator James] Lindgren said.
Lindgren confined his remarks to the hiring of professors and justified his claims on the basis of a study he conducted which breaks law professors down according to political affiliations, religion, gender, and race.
Although Lindgren's study was distributed to students upon entrance into the lecture hall of Room 127 in the Sterling Law buildings, the figures are not for publication. [Update: Jim corrects several aspects of the Yale story here.]
Anyway, here's my law school's underutilization data:
The number of Republicans on our faculty is roughly the same as the number of African-Americans, for whatever that's worth, by the way. According to the University of Pennsylvania’s National Annenberg 2004 Election Survey, 31.8% of the electorate identifies as Republican. Assuming that figure as the availability estimate, the expected number of Republican faculty should be 20.35 (I know that Republican affiliation skews lower among individuals with post-graduate degrees, but I'm having trouble finding that data). Subtracting the expected number of Republican faculty from the number of actual Republicans (5) gives us an underutilization factor of -15.35, which would be significantly higher than the factor for any ethnic group.
