The NYT reports:
[A] study, to be published this fall in The Georgetown Law Journal, analyzes 11 years of records reflecting federal campaign contributions by professors at the top 21 law schools as ranked by U.S. News & World Report. Almost a third of these law professors contribute to campaigns, but of them, the study finds, 81 percent who contributed $200 or more gave wholly or mostly to Democrats; 15 percent gave wholly or mostly to Republicans.
The percentages of professors contributing to Democrats were even more lopsided at some of the most prestigious schools: 91 percent at Harvard, 92 at Yale, 94 at Stanford. ...
Law professors' politics may be similar to those of other academics, but they are not representative of people with similar credentials and incomes. In the 2000 election cycle, according to data from the National Election Study produced at the University of Michigan, 34 percent of people with advanced degrees and 44 percent of those earning $95,000 to $200,000 gave exclusively to Democratic candidates. For law professors, the new study finds, it was 78 percent.
Jim Lindgren comments:
... a professor at the Harvard Law School told me that in 1988 he asked every member of the Harvard Law School faculty with even a hint of conservative or Republican leanings whether they favored or had voted for Bush in 1988. Only one had (1 out of 60-80 faculty); all others favored Dukakis. He also said that in about 2 or 3 dozen entry-level faculty hires from the mid-1970s through about 3 or 4 years ago (when they hired an entry-level conservative), the Harvard Law School had not hired a single Republican.
Now consider this thought experiment: [Imagine that in 1988 all but one of the Harvard Law faculty had favored Bush1 over Dukakis. And] Imagine that over the same period of a quarter century [mid 1970s through early 2000s], the Harvard Law School had hired at the entry-level only those who leaned Republican. Imagine how different the Harvard Law School would be, how different legal education would be, how different the government (and public policy) would be, populated with lawyers trained by an overwhelmingly Republican Harvard faculty. Somehow I think it would be a different world.
Yep. And the MSM/legal left would be screaming bloody murder about discrimination.
Actually, I don't think it's discrimination, so much as a problem of critical mass. I took on this issue in an October 2003 post, opining:
... for a candidate to survive the [law school faculty hiring] winnowing process, somebody has to pull their resume out of the slushpile and make sure it gets flagged for close review. Because most law schools lack a critical mass of libertarian and conservative faculty members, there is nobody predisposed to pulling conservative candidates' AALS form out of the slushpile (and a fair number of folks inclined, whether consciously or subconsciously, to bury it). Meanwhile 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. It is one of the few moments in the process when somebody is affirmatively trying to hire someone rather than just trying to get rid of the pile. And that, my friends, is why there would be a disparate impact even if there were no deliberate bias.
My TCS column on this subject blasted a couple of favorite arguments of liberals:
Many liberals advance some version of the "conservatives are stupid" argument, only occasionally dressed up in less pejorative forms. For example, here is Duke Philosophy Department chair Robert Brandon's take on the question:
"If, as John Stuart Mill said, stupid people are generally conservative, then there are lots of conservatives we will never hire. Mill's analysis may go some way towards explaining the power of the Republican party in our society and the relative scarcity of Republicans in academia. Players in the NBA tend to be taller than average. There is a good reason for this. Members of academia tend to be a bit smarter than average. There is a good reason for this too."
In fact, however, data from the widely used General Social Survey (GSS) consistently show that Republicans are better educated than Democrats (on average, they have more than half a year more education and hold a higher final degree). In addition, Republicans score better than Democrats on two tests included in the GSS.
Another explanation one sometimes sees is that liberals are better people than conservatives. As George Will observed:
"George Lakoff, a linguistics professor at Berkeley, denies that academic institutions are biased against conservatives. The disparity in hiring, he explains, occurs because conservatives are not as interested as liberals in academic careers. Why does he think liberals are like that? 'Unlike conservatives, they believe in working for the public good and social justice.' That clears that up."
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.
I concluded:
What is to be done? 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.
I still think that's about right.
Update: Ann Althouse and Pejman Yousefzadeh have more. Brian Leiter thinks the McGinnis study is "meaningless."
Update: Todd Zywicki blasts three commonly made arguments - rural/urban divide, regional selection, and willingness to apply the scientific method - to smithereens. He then concludes:
... it seems utterly absurd that people are still making uninformed armchair speculation about the causes of the prevailing ideological imbalance in the academy. Is it self-selection? Conservatives are greedier? Conservatives are dumber? When it comes to addressing the issue of other "underrepresented minorities" on college campuses, the record overflows with high profile blue ribbon panels of leading scholars and administrators. No stone is left unturned and no penny left unspent to try to determine why women are "underrepresented" in teaching math and science, or the underrepresentation of minorities. I think maybe it is time to take even a small percentage of those tens of millions being spent at places like Harvard and Columbia and perhaps do a study of the causes of the ideological disparity in the academy, rather than simply speculate and pontificate. At the very least, such a study would eliminate some of the more preposterous hypotheses (such as the idea that conservatives generically like money more than liberals or that conservatives lack the intellecutal frame of mind to succeed in academia).
Well said.