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

To me, there are two surprises.  The first is Chicago.  I would have expected a lower ratio.  Or maybe it just shows that either (i) Horowitz’ numbers are inaccurate; or (ii) they don’t actually correlate to anything.  Which brings me to surprise number two:  that you would give credence to anything published by Horowitz.  As a securities lawyer, I very much enjoy reading your blog.  Although I often disagree with your politics, I think you are generally fair and state your arguments honestly.  Neither of those can be said for Mr. Horowitz.

Horowitz’s organization is actually called the Center for the Study of Popular Culture.  ("Study" rather than “Student”, which is how the post reads as I write this)

I think this is a big “so what”. If we polled corporate lawyers in this country we would find a similar finding but in the Repubs favor. In short, this may well be another form of self selection. A more important survey would seek to discover whether this is the result of some sort of discrimination. Given that the Prof is a conservative, I would like to ask if he has seen any type of discrimination against conservatives. Does he believe that his colleagues are even subtly rejecting good conservatives to the faculty at UCLA? Are there consequences to having that many Democrats on the faculty? Are the classes being taught in a biased manner?
This bumper sticker types of analysis is just typical Horowitz garbage. I want to know why these numbers are the way they are and what is their importance.

As much as I sympathize with Prof. Bainbridge’s concerns, good luck finding a chancellor with any track record at all “of attracting and maintaining a diverse faculty and student body” that reflects political/ideological variety.

Interestingly, if my memory doesn’t fail me, then the relative numbers of democrats and republicans don’t look all that different when one polls professors in mathematics and the hard sciences. Since political ideology plays most likely no role in hiring decisions for these kind of positions, this speaks against the discrimination hypothesis.

What that leaves is either self-selection (which I believe to be a big factor) or the hypothesis that there are simply a lot more democrats at the very top end of the analytical intelligence distribution. I have a suspicion I know which explanation our gracious host would prefer .

While I believe that this is mostly attributable to self-selection, I would state that it comes from the goals of either ideology, rather from any tendency for democrats to be more analytically intelligent.  For example, many professors would rather “help the greater good” by teaching, rather than by earning a living in the private arena. I would guess that if you polled republicans and democrats, far more republicans would value personal success (monetary and otherwise) higher than helping the greater good.

Explain, then, the high number of Republicans in alternate (and still low paying) academic arenas, such as the think tanks, or, in the case of the law, places such as the Department of Justice.

The nut left chimes in here, even though it’s got 8 out of 9 law profs doing its real dirty work.

Angry Clam: The number of republicans in think tanks doesn’t really tell us much since many policy-oriented think tanks select for people with certain political views. Put differently, if there is funding for five republican and five democratic think tanks of roughly the same size, then we would observe equal numbers of republicans and democrats working in think tanks. I don’t think we could infer much about how many of either group would be interested in working in such think tanks.

My very personal (but pretty close-up) impression is that there are a lot more democratic-leaning public policy think tanks than there are republican-leaning ones. There has been something of a shift over the last fifteen years with the AEI, the Heritage Foundation, and so on, but I think my impression is still valid.

The use of the think tanks was to show that there were people of that ideology that are willing to accept the meager (and not really upwardly mobile) salaries associated with academia, since there was the argument that, as a general matter, conservative types are more likely to be greedy evil corporate whores, while liberal types are more likely to want to be involved in “helping the greater good.”

I understood your point, and my point was that even with all the republicans working for Heritage et al., it is still perfectly possible that there are ten times more democrats who are keen on working for what they perceive as “the greater good” than republicans. Your correct observation about the presence of republicans in think tanks does simply not show much about the relative number of people from either side of the spectrum keen on working in such an environment.

Isn’t the next logical step to determine the number of republican and democrat law students?  After all, one has to graduate from law school before one becomes a law professor.  Also, unless a prospective student freely volunteers their political affiliation on their application, (not smart), it is unlikley they will face discrimination during the selection process.  Personally, I think there are just far fewer conservatives and/or republicans that choose legal careers, let alone legal academic careers.  On a less scientific level, ask yourself who relishes lawyer jokes more, your republican friends or your democrat friends?

There’s two Republicans at Columbia?

There are 64 faculty members at Chicago?  Well, I guess if you count all the adjuncts and clinical faculty, maybe. Odd to see only 52 Harvard faculty, then, given it’s roughly triple the size, at least by students.

As an openly right-wing law school professor do you personally feed discriminated against?

Have your strong political leanings hurt your career?

Do you feel that your colleagues bias their teaching.  Or even more, how do your political leanings bias what you teach?

If the answer to these question is none, then isn’t it simply a question of self-selection that does not really make much difference?

As a Chicago Law student, I immediately noticed the numbers cited by Horowitz about our school, and that they are somewhat misleading. 

First, 64 faculty members is a improperly high number, one I think he arrives at by counting adjunct faculty and Bigelow fellows.

More importantly, however, many of the faculty members here who are on the ‘right’ do not self-identify as Republicans but rather as Libertarians. Richard Epstein, for example, is a founding member of the Federalist society, but he doesn’t call himself Republican. 

So I think the numbers are skewed somewhat by a.) adding Democrats in peripheral positions; b.) underrepresenting the libertarian wing of the faculty, which is considerable.

People tend to forget that economics-oriented scholars may seem very conservative on economic issues (abolish social security, say), but also are either libertarians (legalize heroin) or garden-variety liberals on anything they haven’t studied in grad school (pro-affirmative action, pro-abortion, hate to be called conservative, feminist).  Thus, I would not be surprised if they are less Republican than the general population, and certainly less conservative.

I was at a small conference of *just* law and economics scholars once, and someone demonstrated a conservative-to-liberal questionnaire he was designing on us.  As I recall about 8 out of 12 profs fell in the most liberal 10% of the population, about 3 were between there and the 50th percentile, and 1 was at the 80th or 90th percentile (all heads turned in my direction immediately, correctly).  Law-and-economics is regarded as the far right wing of the legal academy.

To say that politics does not infiltrate law school teaching is a typical, but expected, high brow attempt by the Liberal Cultural Elite to ignore what they are actually doing in a class room setting.  It’s like reading the New York Times and seeing the word, “conservative” branded on every conservative quote but no use of the word, “liberal” when liberal such as Ted Kennedy is quoted.  What’s more, the journalists don’t even realize that they are doing this because they are writing the articles from their viewpoint which they consider to be “moderate” and therefore normalized and anything right of them is extreme.  I am a conservative and I have had many professors in my law school career either (a) openly bash a Republican policy or politician or (b) openly disagree with a conservative Court Justice.  The pressure, if you will is so intense, to dare allow such diversity as a conservative viewpoint that I have actually suppressed my actual thoughts and discussions whether in papers that I have authored or in class comments, in order to not raise the wrath of the professor.  I thank God our final tests are turned in with my name replaced with a random generated number to hide the student’s identity but nonetheless, I have more than once spun an essay on a final to be in line with my professor’s political viewpoints instead of taking the risk of trying to frame an alternative argument.  Maybe if I were a better law student, this wouldn’t have been a problem.  But that comment in of itself is interesting isn’t it?  Because I’m not a 4.0 level student, I’m forced to argue a viewpoint that I don’t agree with simply to get the better grade.  Am I arguing with the numbers of Democrats or Republicans on any particular campus?  No.  Merely stating that let’s not fool ourselves in thinking that the viewpoints are not being preached to a captive audience.  Through choice of books, reading assignments, comments, and arguments, they are.  What’s even worse?  I don’t think the professors even realize what they are doing.  After all, they are “normal” and everyone else is extreme.