ProfessorBainbridge.com

Hoisting the Academic Left on its Own Petard

Opinion Journal reports:

The 80 flags that are supposed to be flown at this month's commencement [at Cal State Fullerton] are meant to represent the homelands from which the school's student body is drawn. Given its proximity to Orange County's Little Saigon--which helps make this campus home to the largest number of students of Vietnamese descent in the nation--such a celebration would be incomplete without a flag from Vietnam.

The only question is: Which Vietnam? The members of the Vietnamese Students Association, reports the Los Angeles Times, argue that the flag at issue does not represent their homeland; it represents the regime their families were forced to flee. And they are threatening to walk out on the graduation ceremonies if the flag from the old Republic of Vietnam ... is not flown.

This will present campus lefties with a dilemma of their own making. On the one hand, since American universities are one of the last bastions of Marxist and socialist thought, how can they trun their back on one of the last Communist states? On the other hand, a core tenet of the modern multicultural left is avoiding offense to any underrepresented ethnic group. Personally, I agree with Opinion Journal: "surely universities that would be the first to understand African-American students legitimately offended by the flying of a Confederate flag should have no trouble understanding Vietnamese-Americans who hold equally strong sentiments about a Communist flag. And by accommodating those sentiments, we might give any visiting Vietnamese delegations something they are unlikely to see back home: a taste of how we do things in democracies, where authorities are accountable to the people." But don't count on it.

UC Admissions ... Again

University of California Board of Regents Chairman John Moores is again stirring up a hornets' nest with his on-going complaints that UC is not abiding by Proposition 209's restrictions on the use of affirmative action:

In the e-mail dated March 25, Moores said the university may be considering race and gender when it admits students and that it has withheld several "secret studies" from the regents that would indicate this practice. Moores said he feels an independent party should review university admissions because UC personnel "have demonstrated a continuing bias in the manner." "They seem to have an agenda with respect to outcomes, rather than attempting to be objective in studying and interpreting data," Moores wrote.

Some university officials have criticized Moores for requesting an independent review, saying the two groups currently studying admissions are more than adequate and that the university is not hiding information from the regents.

I've never seen anything that would lead me to believe that there is an official campus policy of undermining Prop. 209 - or even an organized unofficial effort to do so. On the other hand, given the intense opposition to 209 among both students and administrators, it would be surprising if some admissions bureaucrats were not at least subconciously using discretionary slack in the process to achieve the diversity outcomes they favor.

In any case, Moores is doubtless right about one thing - an independent outside compliance review would have more credibility than the current internal investigations. The internal investigations are being conducted by people who work for an organization that has consistently opposed Prop 209 and that from the top down has a stake in the outcome of the investigations. There thus is an inherent conflict of interest, which will inevitably taint even the most scrupulously honest investigation. Ironically, in the complaint the UC filed as lead plainitff in the Enron litigation, the UC strongly criticizes Enron and Vinson & Elkins for not insisting on an independent legal or accounting review of the suspicious related party transactions. Sauce for the goose?

From the "Why Doesn't This Surprise Me?" Department

Richard Neuhaus reports on a recent national survey that asked university administrators and students about the First Amendment (scroll way down):

Only 21 percent of administrators and 30 percent of students knew that the First Amendment guarantees religious freedom. Only six percent of administrators and two percent of students knew that religious freedom is the first freedom mentioned in the First Amendment. Only 41 percent of administrators and 32 percent of students believe that religious people should be permitted to advocate their views by whatever legal means available. On the other hand, 74 percent of students and 87 percent of administrators think it “essential” that people be able to express their beliefs unless—and then come a host of qualifications, all amounting to the condition that their beliefs not "offend others."

Words fail me.

Which one is the stupid party?

A minor brouhaha was triggered when Duke Philosophy Department chair Robert Brandon explained the absence of Republicans in his department with what I suppose he thought was a devastating insult:

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.

Libertarian dummy Eugene Volokh took the high road:

Mill never said that stupid people are generally conservative -- he said that stupid people in the England of his era belonged to the Conservative Party. Mill, as a partisan, wrote a partisan rant about the Conservative Party; he said nothing about conservatives generally. It's hard to see how his comment has anything to do with conservatism in 2004. (Note that the problem can't just be explained as an error on the part of the Duke Chronicle; even if Prof. Brandon said "Conservative" and the reporter wrote it as "conservative," the problem is with Prof. Brandon's using a quote about a particular party as if it were a quote about conservatism generally. Nor is it easily dismissable as an obvious joke, especially given Prof. Brandon's talk about "Mill's analysis.")

Via more-or-less libertarian dummy Glenn Reynolds we learn that politicaly hard to identify dummy James Lindgren has actual statistical data on "conservatism in 2004":

Republicans in the general public tend to be better educated than Democrats. In the 1994-2002 General Social Surveys (GSS), Republicans have over 6/10ths of a year more education on average than Democrats. Republicans also have a higher final mean educational degree. Further, Republicans scored better than Democrats on two word tests in the GSS--a short vocabulary test and a modified analogies test.

If one breaks down the data by party affiliation and political orientation, the most highly educated group is conservative Republicans, who also score highest on the vocabulary and analogical reasoning tests. Liberal Democrats score only insignificantly lower than conservative Republicans. The least educated subgroups are moderate and conservative Democrats, who also score at the bottom (or very near the bottom) on vocabulary and analogy tests.

Political Correctness Run Amok at Gonzaga

From FIRE:

Gonzaga University's president, Father Robert J. Spitzer, S.J., has permitted the School of Law's Student Bar Association (SBA) to refuse to recognize a Christian student organization. According to the SBA, the Gonzaga Pro-Life Law Caucus's requirement that its leadership be Christian is "discriminatory."

"We live in a strange age, indeed, when a Catholic, Jesuit university would deny a Christian pro-life group recognition because its religious nature is considered 'discriminatory,'" said Greg Lukianoff, director of legal and public advocacy for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). "It is sad enough when secular institutions do not recognize the value of religious freedom. Gonzaga University, a Catholic institution, owes its very existence to America's commitments to religious liberty and voluntary association."

Yep. Gonzaga's attitude might be compared to the profile in courage exhibited by Villanova law school dean Mark Sargent:

The law school's six-year-old Villanova Public Interest Fellowship Program provides $4000 fellowships for a select group of students. This year, some students who had been awarded the fellowship expressed a desire to work at the Women's Law Project, a Philadelphia organization that advocates for abortion rights among other issues, and the reproductive rights project of the ACLU. In response, citing the church's "totally unambiguous" position on abortion, Dean Mark Sargent declared that these funds may not be used for internships at such organizations.

... At [Villanova], he said, "we combine two basic elements—a complete commitment to academic freedom, while at the same time being a Catholic institution committed to Catholic values. We believe there isn't a tension between these two."

The Rasmusen Controversy is Back in the News

Surely by now everyone in the blogosphere has heard about the controversy around IU Professor Eric Rasmusen's blog. (Critical Mass had a very good wrap-up post back when the flap seemed to be winding down.) It's back in the news, with the Chronicle of Higher Education reporting that:

The controversy has prompted questions about free speech, about what restrictions universities can place on material on their Web servers, and about whether faculty members should limit comments, even outside the classroom, that might make certain students uncomfortable.

Even though my friend and colleague Eugene Volokh said that IU violated Rasmusen's first amendment rights by taking down the blog (later put back up), I would be prepared to let a university deny a professor use of its computers to host a blog and even to do so selectively (as Ronald Reagan once said, "I paid for this microphone"). The idea that faculty should self-censor outside the classroom, however, is just the worst kind of PC nonsense. It's fundamentally counter to the whole idea of academic freedom, let alone free speech.

The enemy of your enemy is not always your friend

Erin O'Connor is criticizing Vanderbilt University for changing the name of "Confederate Memorial Hall." I'm no fan of campus PC, but on this issue I'm on Vanderbilt's side. First, Confederate symbols have been appropriated by those who oppose desegregation and equal opportunity. Those who complain that the battle flag, in particular, has been hijacked for use as a symbol of racism and violence have a legitimate point. Second, regardless of whatever modern meaning the symbols of the Confederacy have come to possess, there is one meaning for which they have stood since 1861 -- treason. I stand with Lincoln, who said that the United States "is the last best, hope of earth." In their blind rage to defend the indefensible, the confederates very nearly extinguished that hope. When one thinks of the dire consequences a confederate victory would have had not just for we Americans but for the whole world, a righteous anger against those who marched under the battle flag is the only appropriate response. O'Connor calls what Vanderbilt did "tradition-destroying, illiteracy-inducing censorship." So what? Not even Burke or Kirk would say that all traditions must be defended. I fail to understand why we should prepetuate a tradition of celebrating treason.

UPDATE: John at the Discriminations blog responds to my argument:

I spent part of today in northern Virginia, including some time on U.S. Highway 50, also known as Lee-Jackson Memorial Highway. When I left the area I started out out on U.S. 29, known only in those parts as Lee Highway. I assume Prof. Bainbridge thinks the Federal Highway Administration should erase these monuments to treason.

... [T]here are good arguments — indeed, Prof. Bainbridge makes them — why the FHA should rename those roads. My only point here is that such renaming can’t be done in the name of enhancing “diversity.” Even if one were to accept his argument that all those who oppose erasing the word “Confederate” from a building built in part with UDC funds oppose “equal opportunity,” it would not follow that sandblasting words that evoke their position contributes to “diversity.”

Observant readers will have noted that the word "diversity" does not appear in my post; nor do any of the reasons I advanced in support of Vanderbilt depend on the modern university notion of diversity. Nor did I mean to say that all those who oppose what Vanderbilt did also oppose equal opportunity. I said that those who do oppose equal opportunity have hijacked a lot of Confederate symbols. I do not doubt that some can balance an affection for those symbols and an embrace of equal opportunity, but why should such folks not be pained by those who have used those symbols for noxious purposes? And, why should they not be equally pained by the fact that those symbols were originally created by men who sought to tear the Union asunder?

Although I was born in Pennsylvania, my parents eventually settled in a small Virginia town located on Route 29. I went to law school up the road at UVa. Not too far away is Lexington, Virginia, home of Washington & Lee University and VMI. I have frequently visited W&L;'s chapel, where I am always touched by the tradition VMI cadets have of leaving sugar cubes on Traveler's headstone. I've therefore often thought about the issue John raises -- no doubt, they are difficult ones. Is there not a difference, however, between saying that a university should be allowed to change the name of one of its buildings and saying that the government should expunge every trace of the Confederacy? At the end of the day, however, I am glad that the stretch of US 29 near my family's home is known as the "29th Infantry Division Highway." Virginia National Guard troops from the famous "Blue and Grey" division helped lead the assault on Omaha Beach. If General Lee had prevailed, would they have been there?

Law school hiring; the anti-conservative bias as institutional phenomenon

Over at Instapundit, Professor Reynolds has an excellent concise description of the law school hiring process. You will note from his discussion that the bulk of the process consists of winnowing down well over a 1000 applications to a list of 25 or so candidates to meet at the so-called "meat market" convention. Those 25 are then further winnowed down to 3-5 for on campus interviews.

This is the institutional background necessary to understanding the recent blogosphere debate over bias against conservatives in the academy. Regular readers will recall my take is that the absence of conservatives in the academy is a combination of at least three factors: (1) conservative preferences for the private sector; (2) deliberate bias in hiring; (3) disparate impact caused by the nature of the hiring process. Reynolds' description of the process should help you understand the last point. 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 member is enough to exclude someone. At the early stages of the process, they barely need to posit a reason.

This is where the critical mass problem comes in. As I explained in an earlier post, for a candidate to survive the 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.

UPDATE: Brian Leiter of UTexas tries fisking my post here. There's a key concession from Prof. Leiter, though: "I am inclined to agree that law school hiring is more politically driven than hiring elsewhere in the academy ...." (Emphasis in original.) His criticism, moreover, is mainly directed at demonstrating that my "explanation of the institutional basis for the bias phenomenon is [not] generally applicable." In contrast, Professor Sollum of the Legal Theory Blog calls this a "nice post," which "is especially interesting for its accurate and insightful description of the law-school hiring process." (Emphasis supplied.) Even if Leiter's right, however, he still needs to explain the disparate impact shown by the Lindgren and McGinnis studies, and I'm not buying the stupidity explanation.

Prior Posts:

Conservatives in the academy: An update

Field conservatives in So Cal academy

Coming clean for my readers: "What kind of conservative are you?"

Conservatives in academia