ProfessorBainbridge.com

Does the anti-conservative bias in higher education matter?

From the Washington Times:

Mitchell Langbert, an associate professor of business management at Brooklyn College, reviewed the party affiliations of 8,688 tenure-track, Ph.D.-holding professors at 51 of the top 60 liberal arts colleges listed in U.S. News and World Report’s 2017 rankings.

Nearly 60 percent of all faculty members were registered as either a Republican or a Democrat, and of that sample, there were 10.4 times as many Democrats as Republicans. ...

Studies show that academic psychologists are more likely to study the attitudes and behaviors of conservatives than liberals. They are also more likely to view conservative beliefs as deviant.

Sociologists prefer not to work with fundamentalists, evangelicals, National Rifle Association members and Republicans, according to another study cited by Mr. Langbert. 

Another item in the "I probably couldn't get a job as an academic these days" file

As an addition to the "I probably couldn't get a job as an academic these days" file comes this link (via @roddreher) to a University of California San Diego document requiring a written statement from faculty applicants:

The Contributions to Diversity Statement should describe your past efforts, as well as future plans to advance diversity, equity and inclusion. It should also demonstrate an understanding of the barriers facing women and underrepresented minorities and of UC San Diego’s mission to meet the educational needs of our diverse student population.

Some faculty candidates may not have substantial past activities. If such cases, we recommend focusing on future plans in your statement. However, please note that a demonstrated record of past effort is given greater weight than articulating awareness of barriers or stating future plans. A more developed and substantial plan is expected for senior candidates.

I suspect "none" would not be an acceptable answer. I also expect a detailed discussion of how one has tried to promote intellectual diversity within the academy by resisting the left-liberal hegemony would be even less acceptable. Just as well I'm not trying to get a job at UCSD. 

Student evaluations

Maybe the whole idea of student evaluations is a stupid leftover of the 60s. When I was in law school at @UVALaw there were no student evaluations. Prof Mike Dooley told me as long as the students weren't burning him in effigy outside the Dean's office, all was well. https://t.co/EAQYddVbYc

— Professor Bainbridge (@ProfBainbridge) March 19, 2018

I cite some clear thinking on student evaluations here; https://t.co/s6TGydc5Cm

— Professor Bainbridge (@ProfBainbridge) March 19, 2018

Has UCLA Weaponized Title IX to silence conservatives and whistleblowers?

I find this case extremely troubling.

From the "It's not Paranoia if They're Really Out to Get You" File, Screwed by the University of California ... Again

I suppose we all have our gripes about healthcare these days, so I hope you'll pardon me for venting about mine. The University of California keeps making health care changes and every single time it makes my healthcare situation worse. A few years ago, they dropped my then primary care provider as an in-network provider. I changed primary care providers to a doctor who took UC Care Blue Shield plan. The University then switched to Anthem (possibly the worst health insurer in the world). My primary care provider refuses to accept Anthem--and who can blame him?--so I'm out of network ... again.

Starting this year the University has also switched to Anthem as its prescription benefits manager and, as you will doubtless have foreseen, my preferred pharmacy--Costco by mail--is out of network.

As a result, both my preferred primary care provider and pharmacy are now out of network.

I suppose I shall now have to switch pharmacies, with probably doesn’t seem all that big an issue in the scheme of things. But I continue to wonder what the University will do next to make my healthcare more costly and less functional.

How far should Catholic universities go in accommodating students of other faiths?

My colleague Eugene Volokh tackles the question, noting among other things that:

Both public universities and private universities that aspire to serious and cosmopolitan intellectual life should be treating students of minority religions equally. But it doesn’t follow that they should commemorate the same way holidays that are an important part of the traditions of 90 percent of the students (both the Christians and the nonreligious who still grew up celebrating Christmas) as holidays that are important to 2 percent. ...

Loyola keeping a Catholic identity helps promote real intellectual diversity in American public life (and, again, I’d say the same as to other religious universities; I can imagine some religious belief systems that are so pernicious that, while they must be constitutionally protected, we can still say they hurt American life more than they help it, but I think that most of the traditions that found universities do have a good deal to contribute).

My own take is that if you're not Catholic don't go to a Catholic university unless you're willing to at least tolerate it's Catholic identity. Sadly, a lot of Catholic universities have chosen to embrace secular modernity and religious minorities by abandoning their Catholic identity. (Yes, Georgetown and Notre Dame, I'm looking at you--albeit from a distance).

Republicans don't trust higher education. Can you blame them?

The WaPo is all a twitter over higher education funding:

“Why does a kid go to a major university these days?” said Antenori, 51, a former Green Beret who served in the Arizona state legislature. “A lot of Republicans would say they go there to get brainwashed and learn how to become activists and basically go out in the world and cause trouble.”

Antenori is part of an increasingly vocal campaign to transform higher education in America. Though U.S. universities are envied around the world, he and other conservatives want to reduce the flow of government cash to what they see as elitist, politically correct institutions that often fail to provide practical skills for the job market. ...

In July, a Pew Research Center study found that 58 percent of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents believe colleges and universities have a negative effect “on the way things are going in the country,” up from 37 percent two years ago. ... A Gallup poll in August found that a third of Republicans had confidence in universities, which they viewed as too liberal or political.

When you consider a lot of the crap that passes for conventional academic wisdom these days, can you blame them?

Challenging conventional academic "wisdom"

Notable & Quotable: Jonathan Haidt on Identity Politics https://t.co/uUa1uvDHbQ via @WSJOpinion
‘Every situation is analyzed in terms of the bad people acting to preserve their power and privilege over the good people. This is not an education.’

— Professor Bainbridge (@ProfBainbridge) November 24, 2017

Few academic ideas have been as eagerly absorbed into public discourse in recent years as “implicit bias.” https://t.co/Olh8KwfCBM

— City Journal (@CityJournal) November 22, 2017

Notable & Quotable: Adventures in Title IX https://t.co/WP5aeR9Y3O via @WSJOpinion
‘It was clear why the Title IX report tried so hard to impugn my collegiality: it was providing the source material for additional complaints.’

— Professor Bainbridge (@ProfBainbridge) November 24, 2017

Revitalizing Catholic Higher Education

Collett, Teresa Stanton, The Urgency of Restoring the Catholic (and Catholic) Nature of Higher Education (2017). Leisure and Labor Conference, Ignatius Press (2017, Forthcoming); U of St. Thomas (Minnesota) Legal Studies Research Paper No. 17-14. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3055458

This essay reflects upon the overwhelming trend of secularization in American Catholic higher education that has led to colleges and universities largely abandoning their liberal arts heritage for a more “instrumentalist” approach to education. This trend is part of what Pope Benedict XVI has identified as the “crisis of cultures” where Western concepts of reason are increasingly detached from their cultural and spiritual roots, resulting in an inability to speak to anything beyond the material world and our current understanding of it. I argue that we must resist the operational atheism that afflicts most American education, including many schools that are identified as religiously-affiliated. This atheism results resulting in what Pope Emeritus Benedict has called “the presumed completeness and use of liberty as the ‘criterion of everything else.’” This absolutizing of liberty with no higher moral criterion leaves us unable to address pressing problems as a community and specifically excludes an contribution from communities of faith.

Brian Leiter's right

How should a Dean who understands academic freedom respond to public controversy about faculty writing? https://t.co/ZIHPQcLSWM

— Professor Bainbridge (@ProfBainbridge) October 2, 2017

The college kids are turning away from free speech and I find that scary

WaPo:

A fifth of undergrads now say it’s acceptable to use physical force to silence a speaker who makes “offensive and hurtful statements.”

That’s one finding from a disturbing new survey of students conducted by John Villasenor, a Brookings Institution senior fellow and University of California at Los Angeles professor.

... when students were asked whether the First Amendment protects “hate speech,” 4 in 10 said no. This is, of course, incorrect. Speech promoting hatred — or at least, speech perceived as promoting hatred — may be abhorrent, but it is nonetheless constitutionally protected.

Somedays I wonder if this is what living in the Weimar Republic felt like.

George Mason Trumping Harvard

Bloomberg reports:

Securities and Exchange Commission nominee Hester Peirce is just the latest George Mason University affiliate to fill a key regulatory position in the Trump administration.

Trump has selected six top officials from the suburban Virginia's law school renamed last year in honor of the conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia after his death and its Mercatus Center. Mercatus promotes itself on its website as the “world's premier university source for market-oriented ideas.”

That's the same number of faculty former President Barack Obama had nominated at roughly the same point in his tenure from Harvard Law School ....

The administration's emphasis on the private sector, markets, growing the economy, and reducing barriers for people to be economically productive is “all within the sweet spot of the law school and Mercatus,” David K. Rehr, senior associate dean and law professor at the Antonin Scalia Law School, told Bloomberg BNA.

John McGinnis on "Why the Academy Will Remain Mostly Unwelcoming to the Right"

John offers four reasons, the middle two of which particularly resonate for me:

Second, many professors who have been hired in part because of the multicultural program of the modern university or are otherwise committed to it will fear that conservatives and libertarians are hostile or indifferent to the preferences that support the program.  Thus, some professors are likely to believe that hiring more conservatives and libertarians threatens a core institutional commitment of the elite university.  And since most faculty hiring requires a consensus, not a bare majority, such a group does not have to predominate for it to block politically diverse hires.

Third, political polarization is on the rise.  For instance, more people than ever do not want to their children to marry someone of a partisan affiliation different than their own. One of the reasons that academics moved left in the 1960s was the polarization created by the Vietnam war that led the left to taking up refuge in the academy where they could more easily attack capitalism and convention.  The Trump era is another polarizing wave and this time it will reinforce the always present temptation of academics to avoid associating with people they believe have distasteful, even immoral views.

I used to think the main factor was not bias but rather a form of networking effect (which ws not to say that bias didn't exist or that it was unimportant).

But nowadays I tend to think John's third factor is becoming dominant. The importance of that factor was rammed home to me during the election when one of my UCLAW colleagues told me it made him "sad" to have to be on the same faculty with someone of my views (and/or, I suppose, my way of expressing those views) on Trump, snowflakes, higher education politics, etc...

You've got to figure a lot of progressive academics feel equally "sad" about having conservatives down the hallway and are becoming more so as society becomes more polarized. If that's right, that it is inevitably going to have a huge impact on faculty hiring (among other things). Conversely, it'll also have an impact on whether conservatives opt to try for an academic career and when those who make start looking for an exit strategy.

Things professors wish they could say

Advice for academics with failed projects on their hands

Sometimes the best thing an academic can do is admit that a project is never going to amount to anything and pull the plug. When that happens, I recommend permanent file deletion of all relevant materials so as to eliminate the temptation to try to resuscitate it. Shred any paper documents.

Kill it. Burn the carcass. 

And move on.