Academic Infractions

Diversity in Law Schools

2006-04-19T20:09:00.000-04:00

On his law school blog, Brian Leiter posts a note from a staffer at a top-10 law school about the lack of socio-economic diversity in the elite law schools. You can read it here. One interesting thing the staffer says is:

Despite all of the focus on diversity, it seems that there is a great deal of homogeneity among the students when it comes to the socio-economic makeup of their families--most come from affluent backgrounds--at least at the school I work at.

Now, the staff member is not implying that somehow, the admissions systems are stacked unfairly against those with under-privileged backgrounds. Rather, diversity is the staffer's concern because he/she comes from a socio-economically disadvantaged background.

But I've often seen this sort of argumentation as evidence of a deliberate bias, for example with the SAT's (but you can apply this argument to LSAT's as well, since they tend to measure intelligence more directly). Often the argument goes like this: "SAT scores are highly correlated with socio-economic background. This is prima facie evidence that the SAT's are unfairly biased towards those who are socio-economically advantaged."

This is the kind of reasoning that I would like to challenge here. It essentially says that the fact that wealthy kids tend to do better and poor kids tend to do worse, is evidence that the SAT's themselves (rather than just being proxies for some other underlying problem like bad schooling in rural and inner-city areas, where there tend to be more poor people) are biased against those who are socio-economically disadvantaged. But this argument implicitly assumes one of two things. Either, children's intelligence and work ethic is not at all correlated with parents' intelligence and work ethic or in our society, wealth is not at all correlated with intelligence and work ethic. These are highly suspect claims.

First, most of the evidence seems to point to correlation between parents' IQ and that of children, either because of genetics or due to environmental factors (e.g. intelligent parents tend to speak well at home, use proper grammar, read to their children, etc). I do not know about studies on work ethic, but just as a casual thought, I would imagine children at least learn by example from their parents.

Second, the assumption that wealth is distributed more or less randomly (as far as intelligence and hard work is concerned) seems almost economically-determinist in a way. It would have to mean that intelligent and hard-working people would not be able to obtain wealth very easily because it is in some sort of immutable possession of the Old Guard. This Old Guard may or may not be intelligent and hard-working, but in any case, obtained the wealth through family connections, inheritance, etc. First, the entire concept of "New Money" in our society seems to indicate that this is not true. Jews in this country are a primary example of people who, through hard work and possibly natural intelligence, have been able to rise up above their humble beginnings. On the other extreme, if a person is not at all intelligent, certain lucrative careers (e.g. banking, law, medicine, architecture) are closed off to him, so that leaves him with few lucrative options and most likely reduces him to a lower class or middle-lower class life.

So my point is that it does not seem all that surprising that SAT scores would be correlated with socio-economic status, since it seems highly plausible (and probable) that 1) wealth is correlated with intelligence and good work ethic in our society and 2) intelligence and good work ethic tend to run in the family and this is why children of the socio-economically privileged tend to do better. Even if we take work-ethic out of the equation since it's much more difficult to quantify and thus study in "scientific" settings, it seems as though the correlation with intelligence alone would be quite high.

I am not claiming that all those who are wealthy "deserve" their wealth because they are smart and hard-working or that all those who are poor must deserve to be poor because they are either dumb or lazy. I am merely claiming that one would expect, on face, a pretty substantial correlation. I have not read any studies attempting to correlate intelligence with wealth, but if anyone has any relevant material, I'd be interested.

P.S. This entirely leaves aside the substantial body of evidence that points to a reasonably good correlation between SAT's and IQ's.

It's the culture, stupid!

2006-03-28T03:04:00.000-05:00

Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson writes quite convincingly in the New York Times about social scientists' inability to explain pathological and self-destructive behavior among black males. He believes that people need to rely less on socio-economical explanations and more on those that are based on the actual culture of black men.

What's most interesting about the recent spate of studies is that analysts seem at last to be recognizing what has long been obvious to anyone who takes culture seriously: socioeconomic factors are of limited explanatory power. Thus it's doubly depressing that the conclusions they draw and the prescriptions they recommend remain mired in traditional socioeconomic thinking.

What has happened, I think, is that the economic boom years of the 90's and one of the most successful policy initiatives in memory — welfare reform — have made it impossible to ignore the effects of culture. The Clinton administration achieved exactly what policy analysts had long said would pull black men out of their torpor: the economy grew at a rapid pace, providing millions of new jobs at all levels. Yet the jobless black youths simply did not turn up to take them. Instead, the opportunity was seized in large part by immigrants — including many blacks — mainly from Latin America and the Caribbean.

His op-ed is not without its faults, however. For example, he writes, in attempting to defend studies of culture:

Likewise, a cultural explanation of black male self-destructiveness addresses not simply the immediate connection between their attitudes and behavior and the undesired outcomes, but explores the origins and changing nature of these attitudes, perhaps over generations, in their brutalized past. It is impossible to understand the predatory sexuality and irresponsible fathering behavior of young black men without going back deep into their collective past.

Why would it be impossible? It is pretty well-known that even during slave times and Jim Crow, blacks married at very high rates, children had two parents who were married, and fathers did not shirk their responsibility at the rates that they do now. Certainly the rates weren't as high as for whites, but not nearly as bad as they are now. A recent op-ed in the Washington Post by Joy Jones underscores this point. So, if slavery or the collective consciousness of blacks is somehow a central explanation for the current problems facing black men, why did these factors creep into the collective consciousness 40 years hence?

Despite this small disagreement, his op-ed is quite good and highly recommended reading. (Via Ann Althouse)

Limits of Tolerance

2006-03-28T02:09:00.000-05:00

As revealed in a New York Times magazine cover story several weeks ago, Yale has been harboring the former Deputy Foreign Minister (and mouthpiece in chief) of the Taliban as a "special non-degree student". John Fund of WSJ's OpinionJournal has been on the story since day one, asking Yale to explain its inexplicable decision to admit Hashemi. His latest contribution includes an interesting revelation:

A small effort to help build a modern economy in Afghanistan was launched by Paula Nirschel in 2002, when she founded the Initiative to Educate Afghan Women. Her goal is to match qualified women with at least a GPA of 3.5 or more with U.S. colleges, where they can pursue a degree. The initiative grants all its women full four-year scholarships. They come to college prepared; none need remedial classes. (That's something that can't be said of all U.S. students. Last year, only 52% of entering freshmen in the California State University system passed the English placement test.)

As The Wall Street Journal reported in an editorial Friday, Ms. Nirschel sent a letter to Yale in 2002, asking if it wanted to award a spot in its next entering class to an Afghan woman. Yale declined, as did many other schools. Today, the program enrolls 20 students at 10 universities.

I guess Yale's love of opressed women ends at the point where their hatred of America begins. I'm glad that my alma mater, which I loved while there, has made the conscious decision that in the battle between America and America's enemies, it will take the side of the enemies. This is what the banality of evil looks like.

Follow-up to Stuntz

2006-03-02T04:02:00.000-05:00

One striking comment in the Bill Stuntz (Harvard-Law) article I linked to earlier is his argument that while universities are decidedly leftist in some sense, they are conservative in a sense that is really important:

Most Americans think of universities as a bastion of the political left, and in one sense they are. But in a deeper sense, institutions like Harvard embody a particularly blind sort of conservatism: All change causes discomfort, and so must be resisted. In this deeper sense, Summers was and is very much a man of the left--the best kind of left. Good for him. Harvard's governing board has now chosen, publicly and emphatically, the status quo. Bad for them, and before long, bad for all of us.

This is exactly right. And I think that it actually cuts partially to the heart of the debate about whether academia is decidedly liberal or not. Many on the Right (and Left, such as Peter Schuck of Yale Law) argue that is while many who can speak from the comfort of tenure say "move right along, nothing to see here." This is the impression I get from many academics. They don't even want to acknowledge the problem despite the overwhelming evidence (e.g. from the empirical research guys at Northwestern Law), and usually without any bad intentions on their part. A friend of mine told me recently about the debate between Peter Schuck and Jack Balkin at the Yale Federalist Society on Tuesday about conservatives in legal academia. Balkin apparently seemed quite reluctant to admit that there is a problem.

Now, I don't mean to pick on Balkin here. He's a good guy. But, I think that his reluctance to admit to a problem that seems evident to almost everyone on the outside of the academy is a reflection of the exact thing that Stuntz was talking about in the TNR piece. I am not sure that Stuntz intended his commentary to apply to this particular issue as well, but I think it does quite well.

Harvard as the new GM

2006-03-02T03:54:00.000-05:00

As much as I want to relish in the fact that my alma mater's sworn enemy is in decline according to a piece in The New Republic by Harvard Law Prof Bill Stuntz, there's nothing to celebrate here. To quote:

Harvard is the General Motors of American universities: rich, bureaucratic, and confident--a deadly combination. Fifty years from now, Larry Summers's resignation will be known as the moment when Harvard embraced GM's fate. From now on, the decline will likely be steep. And not only at Harvard: Among research universities as in the car market of generations past, other American institutions will follow the market leaders, straight to the bottom. The only question is who gets to play the role of Toyota in this metaphor.
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When one sees a large competitive opportunity, it's usually a good bet that someone else has seen it already. Universities in other parts of the world now enjoy an enormous opportunity. And the competitive position of American schools is worse than GM's in the 1950s. Then, Germany and Japan were still prostrate; no one could imagine that within a generation their economies would seem poised to overtake America's. Now, it's easy to imagine that a generation hence, Chinese or Indian universities will dominate the world, or perhaps that some intellectual entrepreneur will bring Oxford or Cambridge back to the top of the heap.

As Instapundit says, read the whole thing.

A SIDE NOTE: Notice the part in the article about the academic life of graduate students. While I am and have never been a supporter of graduate student unionization, is it any wonder that graduate students have been trying to unionize? Especially given that the movement is essentially led by humanities grad students for whom it is not uncommon to spend 7 or 8 years in grad school, this trend should be no surprise.

A New Award

2006-01-13T01:47:00.000-05:00

Today, I hereby announce the creation of the Bruce Ackerman Award for Political Advocacy Disguised As Scholarly Authority. We dedicate this award to the Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale University because he has perfected the art of using his academic position and stature to engage in political advocacy disguised as learned scholarship. The best specimen I have ever seen is his brilliant piece in the London Review of Books claiming that Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia, and Robert Bork are Neo-Conservative jurists! So with that, look forward to the very first award. A hint: like Ackerman, it will be a Yale Law Professor.

Alito and the Concerned Alumni of Princeton

2006-01-09T23:39:00.000-05:00

Supposedly, Sam Alito included the CAP on his 1985 application to work in the Reagan administration as part of his conservative credentials. It has been alleged that the purpose of the CAP was to turn the tide against coeducation at Princeton and oppose the admission of blacks and other minorities. I don't know enough about CAP to say whether this is true or false, and certainly opposing the admission of blacks and other minorities sounds problematic. I also don't know enough about Alito's specific involvement with the group (did he just send a yearly check for a year or two, or was he plotting with the main guys what the strategy should be? are the bad-sounding statements made by the group's leaders indicative of the positions taken by CAP or did CAP have other official goals?).

I am simply commenting on the outrage that the coeducation bit has generated here and here.

Now, recall that until the late 1960's and early 1970's, some schools such as Princeton and Yale were all-male. Imagine now for a moment, that Bryn Mawr or Smith (which are currently all-female) decided now all of a sudden, to go co-ed and some powerful alumni were vocally opposed to that move. Would these alumni be in the wrong and should they be condemned for their sexism? After all, the number of men in colleges has been declining rather precipitously in recent years. Again, I am not saying that coeducation has been bad for Princeton and Yale. In fact, in hindsight, I think that it was a great idea. But, would it be wrong for alumni to want to maintain the distinctive character that defined their colleges? I don't think that nowadays, anyone would lambast Bryn Mawr or Smith alumni if they were opposed to co-education, nor should they. But why should CAP be criticized for their desire to keep Princeton all-male at the time?

Misoverestimating Europe

2006-01-08T23:37:00.000-05:00

Katerina Apostolides, over at my old haunts, the Yale Free Press blog, writes up an interesting review of Robert Kagan's book Of Paradise And Power. I haven't read the book, so I cannot comment on Kagan's work, but I have some serious issues with Katerina's analysis of the relationship between European and American conceptions of power.

First, there are several problems with her facts. Among them, she writes:

Of course, during the Cold War, America had reasons for wanting Europe to arm herself (and take responsibility for self-protection), but in the aftermath of the Cold War, it has been to America's advantage to be able to establish world hegemony.

Umm, if that's true, then America has not been very succesful at it. Before the expansion of NATO in recent years, the ratio of North American defense expenditures (US and Canada) to those of Europe, has been essentially constant. You can go here to see the figures (I'm using the 1988 and the 2001 charts) for yourselves. So either, America was not particularly succesful at getting Europe to fund its own defense back during the Cold War, or it is not succesful now at supressing their military expenditures. And remember, that Germany, one of Europe's largest economies has a neutered military and so can not arm itself too much, even if it wanted to, or was asked by the US. So, I find it hard to believe that the US was attempting to drive up the European military industrial complex back in the 1980's.

Second, she seems to misrepresent the Bartholomew Telegram from 1991 in response to European desires to create a European defense alliance within NATO. I am no expert on the matter, but my cursory studying of the issue seems to indicate that Europe was sort of confused itself as to what role it wanted to take and the US, likewise, had a confused response. For example, later, President Bush the Elder said that if Western Europe wanted to take a more assertive role in its defense, it better make that decision soon. Again, I am not an expert on this, but my understanding of the issue is that it was a time of general confusion on both sides and that both sides sent rather mixed signals about European identity.

Later, she writes:

Among other things, Europe succeeded in getting Iran's support for the invasion of Afghanistan.

I can't imagine that it would have required much arm-twisting on the Europeans' part since Iran's ruling Shiite crypto-fascists hated Afghanistan's ruling Wahhabi crypto-fascists. In fact, the Iranian mullahs endorsed George Bush for president over John Kerry, among other things, thanking him for getting rid of its two sworn enemies, the Taliban and Saddam Hussein.

But the problems about the facts are the least of them, in my opinion. She can not provide one iota of evidence how the "soft" approach of the Europeans can achieve anything. After the Iran zinger, she writes:

This may be true, and yet it denies that there is a place for diplomacy, soft power, and negotiation that Europe--uniquely--offers. For example, when Pres. Bush identified the 'axis of evil', including Iraq, Iran and North Korea, Europe understandably reacted to this language.

Does she have any insight or ideas as to why it is "understandable" that Europe would react to such language? Just because it's mean to say someone is evil?

She writes that "There needs to be an alternative to 'confrontational, coercive politics' and Europe embodies precisely that." But confrontational, coercive politics achieves results. I agree that starting random wars for no reason is a bad idea (and reasonable people can disagree about the wisdom of the Iraq War), but confrontational, coercive politics involves using both the carrot, and the stick. Because if there is no stick to back up warnings to rogue regimes to change their behavior, then these regimes will have no interest to change.

Finally, I think that part of her argument is somewhat incoherent. She first argues, as above, that the US wants Europe to be weak militarily now, because it's in our interest to become a global hegemon. But she then writes:

While it may benefit America in the long run for Europe to become stronger, it will not benefit her for Europe to embrace the full implications of the 'ideology of power.'

So which is it? Do we want a powerful Europe or don't we? Which will benefit us more, a powerful Europe or a weak Europe?

I am not saying that the Europeans are worthless and that we should not be partners with them. To the contrary, our partnership is important. It will only work, however, if both Europe and the US are in agreement as to the consequences to be faced by rogue states and actors who do not abide by civilized norms of behavior. There is a longer post waiting to be written here somewhere, but that will have to wait for another time.

Bolick vs. Underkuffler Rounds 2 and 3

2005-06-15T17:44:00.000-04:00

On Monday, I wrote some critiques of Duke Law Prof Laura Underkuffler's arguments in her debate with Clint Bolick over school vouchers.

It turns out, that in Rounds 2 and 3, Clint Bolick in fact, made the same criticism as I have. Universities, of all religious stripes currently accept federal Pell Grants and there is no Establishment Clause violation. Schools like Bob Jones University whose racial intolerance is counter to the state's public policy goals, do not accept the Pell Grant. Bolick writes:

At the post-secondary level, students are free to use their aid at public, private, or religious schools. Your school, Duke University, probably couldn't survive if students could not use Pell Grants, the G.I. Bill, and other public funds to attend. I'll bet if we looked over Duke's course catalogs over the years, we'd find some courses that would not win any societal popularity contests. That's fine: the point is that it's the students who choose where to spend the aid. Society has decreed in enacting such aid programs that any education is better than no education, and that individual autonomy over where to spend the money is better than government compulsion.
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Likewise, you fail to address the much larger choice system in higher education. Students may use Pell Grants, the G.I. Bill, and other forms of college aid at virtually any school. Overtly racist schools like Bob Jones University are excluded. But every other type of religious school is included, even if they teach things that offend some people, whether it is the sins of capitalism or the sins of homosexuality. Amazingly, still no rioting in the streets. That is because America is a pluralistic society that values the rich diversity of religious beliefs (or lack thereof).

Of course, Bolick is right. What is Underkuffler's response? Well, she seems to shift the terms of debate. On Monday, she wrote that eventually, we will have Establishment Clause problems as we would be in a bind where the public would have to fund schools that teach religious values it doesn't agree with:

We could say no—that such schools should be excluded, on the basis of the content of what they teach. We might be able to do this if the schools are completely secular in nature (although, of course, content-based exclusion contradicts the ideal of parental choice). However, if the schools are religious in nature, exclusion would be far more difficult. Exclusion which turns on the nature of the sponsoring institution's religious beliefs would undoubtedly contradict the Constitution's guarantees of free religious practice and equality of all religious sects.

Today, however, she argues that SCOTUS has ruled (in Locke v. Davey for example) that states are free not to fund certain religious instruction if it goes against their own state Establishment Clauses:

Perhaps even more to the point, states remain free to reject the Zelman fiction, and to conclude that vouchers are "state funding" as far as they (and the public) are concerned. In Locke v. Davey, very recently decided, the Supreme Court held exactly that. In Locke, it was held that although the federal Establishment Clause does not (under Zelman) prohibit voucher programs, states are free to bar them under their own anti-establishment guarantees.

(By way of background, in Locke, a student sued because the state of Washington would not let him use a scholarship to study theology.) But doesn't this expressly contradict her original argument, that we would not be able to close the Pandora's Box once opened to funding of religious institutions? Meaning, that if we gave vouchers for students to attend Jesuit, Methodist, and Episcopalian private schools we would also have to give vouchers for students to attend Wiccan, Wahhabi, and Shiite schools, something the public might find objectionable. The entire point is that the Supreme Court has already set boundaries and states themselves have set boundaries (which SCOTUS has allowed them to use) over the teaching they will fund and that which they will not. We can argue about where that boundary ought to be, but it clearly is there. The state of Washington said that students can use the scholarship at a religious institution (for example, the college where Davey wanted to enroll, Northwest College, was church-affiliated, but was nonetheless eligible for the scholarship) as long as they do not study devotional theology. And the Supreme Court said that there was no Establishment Clause or Free Exercise Clause [UPDATE: Free Exercise Clause inserted after the original post was published] violation by their policy. There is no Pandora's Box, as she herself admits by using the Locke argument.

Furthermore, she still fails to address the question of why there is no serious concern about giving Pell Grants to students attending Gonzaga University (Jesuit), Southern Methodist University (Methodist), Calvin College (Calvinist), and Christendom College (Catholic).

She then makes the argument that the outrage over UNC-Chapel Hill forcing incoming freshmen to read the Koran is indicative over the fragility of our society's tolerance for different religious groups (as Bolick had asserted existed):

Take, for instance, a recent episode in North Carolina. In the summer of 2002, in a stated effort to "stimulate discussion and critical thinking around a current topic," incoming students to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill were directed to read Approaching the Qur'an: The Early Revelations, a book translated and introduced by a Haverford College professor. News reports recount the controversy. When the assignment of this book was publicly discovered, a furor followed. The choice of the book was denounced by a campus activist as offensive on the ground that this country was founded on the principles of Christianity, not the Qur'an. A lawsuit was filed in federal court against the University, alleging that the University was promoting Islam and encouraging students' conversion. As a result of the book's assignment, the North Carolina House Appropriations Committee voted 62-10 to bar funding for the University's summer reading program during a state budget hearing. Counsel for the plaintiffs in the federal lawsuit stated that "[w]e think that what we've uncovered so far is just the tip of the iceberg." Whatever one might think of the merits of such controversies, it is impossible to dismiss the dangers of religious divisiveness in this country as mere "histrionics."

But from my understanding of the issue, the controversy is that UNC-Chapel Hill is wholly a subsidiary of the state of North Carolina, rather than merely a service provider like a private school would be. The controversy is that this is UNC forcing freshmen to learn the Koran. If it were Duke, the legislature of North Carolina could do nothing (even though some students at Duke receive aid from the state to attend the school). I think that the public can discern the nuance between the state paying for a service provided by a religious institution and one of the state's own institutions promoting a religious view.

Her argument over the past two days is that the tolerance in our society is fragile as evidenced by all of these disputes about what the government can fund and what it cannot. But, the existence of controversy is not a problem. Controversies help us set boundaries. Her original argument is that there is NO boundary that we can set. Clearly, the existence of controversies shows that there are boundaries that we can set that are still within the Establishment Clause's guarantees of religious non-discrimination.

School-Voucher Play-by-Play

2005-06-13T21:36:00.000-04:00

This week's Debate Club over at Legal Affairs is between Clint Bolick of Zelman v. Simmons-Harris fame and Laura Underkuffler of Duke Law School over the idea of school vouchers.

Since I largely agree with Bolick, and I think that his argument stands on its own two feet just fine, I will focus here on Underkuffler's remarks. She makes a strong case against vouchers on the grounds that it will force our society to make uncomfortable choices as to what kinds of views the taxpayers would have to support. In the end, however, I think that her arguments fail for the precise reason that she holds private schools that will receive vouchers to a different standard than she hold public schools. Let's examine her stance closer.

She starts by writing:

Let's be very clear about what we are talking about here. Vouchers are public money, used for education of children as chosen (exclusively) by parents. (The fiction that this money is not really "public", because it is "spent by parents" is, to my mind, just that—a fiction.) In the view of choice advocates, if we are true to choice, we (members if the public) should allow parents to make their own decisions about the schools that this public money will fund.

What does this mean? When we think about vouchers being used in private schools, we tend to assume that the private schools are ones with which we, as a society, are comfortable. With that idea in mind, there seem to be few reasons to restrict parental choice. However, we cannot assume that only those schools will seek public voucher funding. What if the private school chosen is one that reflects the teachings of a religious "cult", or that teaches racial hatred, or the inferiority of girls and women, or the denial of civil rights on the basis of sexual orientation, or other values that are at odds with the fundamental principles of our society? The limitation often cited by choice advocates—that the school be required to accept all comers—will not solve the problems that such schools present. The issue is far more fundamental: do we want our tax dollars to fund such schools?

But the public is forced to fund public schools that are often "at odds with the fundamental principles of our society." Public schools often teach tolerance of religions whose views we would find disturbing (e.g. Islam) as well as the virtue of political systems we would find distasteful (e.g. Communism). The fact of the matter is that the public, especially in large urban school districts, has very little control over what is taught in the schools and how it is taught. In New York City, the United Federation of Teachers, led by Randi Weingarten, holds the state legislature hostage at every turn, often to the outrage of the overall public. Yet the public can do very little to keep the UFT from getting its way. In some rural areas like Kansas, local school boards which are elected by the public do have some control over the curriculum in the school system, but by and large, the public has little to no control over the values taught in our public schools.

Even aside from this problem with her argument, we could always say that we will not fund schools that teach Satanism or racial hatred. To this, she has a response:

We could say no—that such schools should be excluded, on the basis of the content of what they teach. We might be able to do this if the schools are completely secular in nature (although, of course, content-based exclusion contradicts the ideal of parental choice). However, if the schools are religious in nature, exclusion would be far more difficult. Exclusion which turns on the nature of the sponsoring institution's religious beliefs would undoubtedly contradict the Constitution's guarantees of free religious practice and equality of all religious sects.

We might think that these problems are far-fetched—that the chance of public voucher funding of schools with which we, as a society, are uncomfortable is low. However, on this we must think again. For instance, governments in the United Kingdom and Europe, which have funded religious schools for years, are now faced with the funding of religious schools whose beliefs are highly controversialËleading to calls for those governments to cease the business of religious school funding altogether.

Essentially, she argues that if we choose to provide funding to Catholic, Lutheran, and Jewish schools, we would also have to provide funding to Wahhabi, Wiccan, and Satanist schools, as required by the Constitution, something which we might find objectionable. But if this is true, why does this not happen with America's colleges and universities, which receive massive amounts of federal aide? Schools that promote religious intolerance, such as Bob Jones University, have had to forgo their federal funding because they do not conform to what the federal government considers an appropriate educational environment. In fact, in BJU vs. United States, the Supreme Court held that BJU experienced no Establishment Clause violation when the IRS revoked its 501(c)3 tax-exempt status for racial discrimination grounds. Warren Burger wrote:

(a) An examination of the IRC's framework and the background of congressional purposes reveals unmistakable evidence that underlying all relevant parts of the IRC is the intent that entitlement to tax exemption depends on meeting certain common-law standards of charity - namely, that an institution seeking tax-exempt status must serve a public purpose and not be contrary to established public policy. Thus, to warrant exemption under 501(c)(3), an institution must fall within a category specified in that section and must demonstrably serve and be in harmony with the public interest, and the institution's purpose must not be so at odds with the common community conscience as to undermine any public benefit that might otherwise be conferred.

We provide federal student loans to students who attend Calvin College (Calvinist), Catholic University (Catholic), Gonzaga University (Jesuit) and SMU (Methodist), provided that the colleges are accredited (which means that they provide an acceptable educational environment for their students) and this seems to not pose much of a problem from a Constitutional standpoint.

It seems that we have drawn a more or less acceptable line with colleges and universities when it comes to federal funding. So, I am not sure why the same cannot be true of primary and secondary education. In fact, it would seem to be a lot easier for primary and secondary education since funding for colleges and universities is often on the federal level (through Stafford and Perkins Loans, the Pell Grant Program, and Hope Scholarship), while funding for schools would be done on the local and state level, where presumably, the knowledge problem would not be as great and the values of the private schools in that locale would more or less reflect the values of the public that provides the funding. Just as Burger argued the IRS could be discerning in the awarding of 501(c)3 status on the basis of "values" grounds, it seems that we could justify discerning on the same grounds when alloting school vouchers. I understand that BJU could be distinguished from the present case in a potential SCOTUS challenge. I am just providing a plausible line of Constitutional reasoning, contra Prof. Underkuffler.

She concludes by making her weakest point:

One person's "autonomous use of voucher money" is another person's (taxpayer's) violation of fundamental values and beliefs.

But isn't this the same exact problem now with the public schools? I know some teachers who teach the virtues of Communism. As someone who lived under the oppressive regime of the Soviet Union and whose great-grandfather spent many years in a gulag, I find that offensive and a "violation of fundamental values and beliefs." I find it extremely offensive that such drivel like Kwanzaa, which was invented by a con (now tenured academic... aren't they all?--Ed.) is shoved down our children's throats. As long as the government is in the business of education on the public's dime (whether that be public or private education), there are ideas that are going to be taught that will be offensive to someone.

Krugman's Thesis

2005-04-07T00:47:00.000-04:00

Paul Krugman's op-ed in Tuesday's NYT about why there are fewer conservatives than liberals in academia raised a number of questions in my mind. Krugman notes that conservatives aren't just outnumbered in the humanities and social sciences, where measures of academic quality can be subjective, but also in the hard sciences and engineering. This is based on a study that showed that liberals outnumbered conservatives 5 to 1 in the faculties of universities, and that since 1984, the gap has widened. The widening of the gap argument has serious issues as pointed out here (Basically, the problem with the widening-of-gap argument is that the study from 1984 which they use as baseline included two-year colleges and fewer research universities. The new study over-represented research universities, where of course, there are more liberals on the faculties than at two-year colleges.). Still, there are way more liberals than conservatives in academia, particularly at the higher quality schools. This has been true of my experience at Yale and NYU.

But, why are there also fewer conservatives in the sciences where judgements about scholarship quality are much more objective than in the humanities and social sciences and political affiliation is usually unknown to hiring committees? As a scientist, who is on the Right on most political issues, I am rather interested in this question. So, I looked at the study itself and found the following for Liberal/Conservative identifications:

Mathematics: 4.1 to 1

Physics: 6 to 1

Chemistry: 2.2 to 1

Biology: 4.4 to 1

Computer Science: 2.8 to 1

Engineering: 2.6 to 1

Economics: 1.4 to 1

By contrast, humanities and social science departments (except economics, which is probably more scientific than most of the other social science departments) have the following divides:

English Lit: 29 to 1

History: 7.7 to 1

Philosophy: 16 to 1

Theology/Religion: 16.6 to 1

Political Science: 40.5 to 1

Sociology: 8.6 to 1

Psychology: 10.5 to 1

So, yes, a gap does exist in the sciences, and it is a rather large one, but not nearly as profound as in the humanities and social sciences (aside from economics). So, what is going on here? Is Krugman correct that it isn't liberal bias that is driving conservatives away from academia but rather conservatives' preference to go to the private sector to make more money (because didn't you get the memo that all that conservatives care about is money and nothing else... oh yeah, and I forget, oppressing women -- Ed.)? This is a point made by many academic bloggers, for example, here.

1) I think that it is true that part of the reason so few conservatives are in academia is self-selection. But part of it is also that the whole system is a feedback loop. Liberal professors often use the classroom as a personal soapbox and sometimes treat conservative students unfairly (and then sometimes even threaten to keep them from getting jobs). So of course, conservative students will choose not to pursue graduate study, particularly in the humanities and social sciences, if they think that their professors will treat them unfairly in graduate school, and then again in the hiring process for academic posts. This has been true of a number of people I knew who planned on entering academia, but then chose not to because they were too tired of dealing with people who were substituting political opinions and partisan cheap-shots for actual scholarship and fairness.

2) I also think that academics tend to be more liberal in general, because part of the job description is to use reason to arrive at answers to important questions. Of course, this is as it should be. But, it is not a far leap to then conclude that economic central planning is a good idea. If we can use reason to settle questions about Boltzman gases or the true meaning of Joyce's Ulysses, then why not use reason to guarantee employment to everyone or severely regulate commodity prices? This is illustrated by the fact that according to the aforementioned study of political attitudes, 66% of faculty strongly or somewhat agreed that the government should guarantee employment and 72% strongly or somewhat agreed that government should reduce the income gap. This is not a critique of reason, so much as it is a critique of academics who do not realize that it is the assumptions that you put into the reason machine that are important. Centralized rationality has a limit when you are dealing with 250 million humans floating around all doing their own thing (if you want a full discussion on this, read Richard Epstein's excellent piece on Hayek. Or better yet, go read Hayek yourself.).

Finally, even leaving the question of economic central planning aside, academics are used to being handed problems and solving them (that's how they got to be academics, after all). So, if there is a problem in society (e.g. too many poor people), then of course, someone ought to solve it. Who better to do it than the government?

This only helps to explain why academics tend to be liberals, but not necessarily why conservatives are not academics (although certainly these two questions are related since faculty hiring is usually a zero-sum game).

3) Science is an odd case, where the usual conservative arguments of bias may not work out because one can do science in the private sector. If one has a Ph.D. in biology, then one can be a biologist for Pfizer. If one has a Ph.D. in Chemistry, then one can be a chemist for Dow. If one has a Ph.D. in physics, then one can work at Boeing. If one has a Ph.D. in Engineering, then one can go work, well, anywhere really. So yes, money may be a factor, in the sense that private industry pays better, but there is nothing inherently "conservative" about this factor, unless one paints one of the ridiculous charicatures very common amongst various academics. But I would also venture to guess that most people who get Ph.D.'s in the sciences are not conservatives. I would say that many are probably libertarians (based on my experience). To test Krugman's odd theory that the reason scientists aren't conservatives is because the GOP has become the party of creationist loons, I would be interested in knowing the number of academis who have switched their party affiliation in the last, say, 15 years.

4) Even if you are a scientist in academia, you still have to deal with non-scientists! And so, have to endure the constant political activism not only by the students, but also your colleagues and the overall leftism of the faculty (and often the administrations themselves). As a result, many conclude that they're fed up with the academic world. I've had that reaction at various stages of my academic career. So this phenomenon might contribute to that feedback loop seen in reason #1. I don't think it's a very strong one, however.

So, suppose that in the sciences, conservatives are outnumbered and bias did not contribute to it. That doesn't explain, however, why they would be outnumbered in the humanities and social sciences! One can get a Ph.D. in science and still do that science in the private sector, as I discuss above. But, you can't do English in the private sector or history (museums being the exception... though they hire such a tiny portion of history Ph.D.'s as to be negligible). And by "do English" I mean, do serious research, literary criticism, the whole nine yards. Not just teaching, or working in publishing, or advertising. I mean, being an actual literary scholar.

So the explanation that conservatives prefer to go into private industry for more money would only explain conservatives going into private industry for more money in the sciences where one can actually do the same thing one does in academia, without having to put up with the economic tradeoffs necessary for the academic life. The only way that this argument could work is if it is used in conjunction with the argument that conservatives also don't care about studying Shakespeare, Milton, Faulkner, Larkin, etc. whereas liberals do. But that's odd since it is usually conservative colleges like St. John's College in MD (where Strauss once taught) that champion Great Books curricula. Also, is it not conservatives who criticize the MLA for de-emphasizing the Western Canon? Finally, ever heard of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute? For all of its faults, ISI has been at the forefront of promoting Great Books/Western Canon as the basis of education. So, the claim that conservatives are somehow less interested in reflection through study of books, is rather unfounded (remember Strauss, the Left's favorite philosophical bogeyman... after all, he believed that universities are essentially big libraries and professors are sort of like librarians in that they tell you which books to read and guide you through them).

Finally, as I wrote before, I knew of a number of conservatives who try to keep their political affiliations from becoming public for fear of reprisals. And I know of at least one person (possibly even two) who is almost certain that his/her admission to graduate programs was torpedoed because his/her CV included "conservative" work experience (a year after being rejected everywhere, he/she applied again, but this time didn't include "conservative" work experience on his/her CV and got in almost everywhere, including a number of extremely prestigious departments).

And as even some academics who don't buy the idea of systematic oppression of conservatives in academia admit, there have been a number of instances of liberal academics abusing their power and treating conservatives unfairly.

Unlike David Horowitz, I do not think that there is a systematic oppression of or bias against conservatives. I think part of it is subconscious (e.g. Brian Leiter thinks that it would be hard for intelligent people to be conservative: "Far more plausible, as we've remarked before, is that it is some combination of self-selection and the simple, and so far undisputed, fact that it's hard to be intelligent and informed and take seriously the world view of, e.g., Bill O'Reilly or Tom DeLay, not to mention the pathological David Horowitz."... so if one is a conservative, then obviously one is likely not intelligent... so obviously, one would have a major strike against him/her in the hiring process). Another part of it has to deal with the fact that certain disciplines start out from first-premises with which conservatives disagree (e.g. Ethnic studies). Similarly, because of academia's love for academic fads, this works against conservatives, since conservatism itself is generally not amenable to chasing after academic fads. So, hiring committees looking to make offers in new trendy areas are likely not to find many conservatives applying for these positions. A third is the feedback loop that I mentioned before, no doubt caused by the non-systematic but still sometimes occurring phenomenon of professors misusing their power to intimidate conservative students.

What would systematic bias even entail? I don't think anyone claims that the deans of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, UC-Berkeley, and MIT get together somewhere over brunch on the Upper West Side and plot how to oppress conservatives. Nor do I think that every liberal academic is out to get every conservative academic (the vast majority of liberal academics I know are quite honest, professional individuals). But I do think that bias and unfairness towards conservatives happens often enough (and sometimes in subtle ways) that it helps keep conservatives away from academia.

I am not under the illusion that academia would have perfect ideological balance. But, I would at least expect the situation in the social sciences and humanities to be on par with what it is in some of the sciences (so, say 2.5 to 1), rather than the ridiculously lopsided ratios of 29 to 1 or 40 to 1 as you see now in the important fields of English Lit. and Political Science (a 40 to 1 ratio in Poli Sci would mean that there are entire departments in this country with not a single conservative on the faculty) or an overall lopsided score of 4.9 to 1. As many before me have pointed out, ratios like this alone would trigger instant strict scrutiny by the courts if this was the ratio of men to women. Now, of course, I am not advocating that. I am just saying that most academics support gender-bias legislation and policies for universities. But seem incredibly hostile to these politices in the case of ideological imbalance.

This all comes back to David Horowitz, of course. His Academic Bill of Rights has been lambasted by academics everywhere. In particular, the provision in the Florida legislature which would allow students to sue their professors for indocrination, an example of which could be a biology professor teaching evolution without the caveat that it is only a theory. This proposal is silly and dangerous, for it will place courts as arbitrers of good and bad scholarship. As much as I might dislike what goes on in academia, the courts are not the place for this.

Having said that, however, I do think that state legislatures ought to have closer oversight of their state universities. He who pays the piper picks the tune. For example, they ought to have committees of overseers that submit a report every five years on the status of the state university. That panel ought to consist of liberal and conservative academics. That way, the legislature gets to ensure that faculties who are biased don't declare themselves unbiased and say "well, that's that" and academics get to be judged by other academics rather than politicians. That seems pretty fair to me. The universities (especially public ones funded by our taxpayer dollars) have done nothing to clean up their acts. I think that maybe a cleaning of the augean stables from the outside is in order, though certainly not on the scale suggested by the legislatures enacting Horowitz' Academic Bill of Rights.

***This post has been UPDATED since the original to clarify a couple of things***

Kleiman/Krugman vs. Kerr/Non-Volokh

2005-04-05T22:51:00.000-04:00

Orrin Kerr of the Volokh Conspiracy rightly criticized Paul Krugman's column in the NYT for making broad caricaturish statements about conservatives. In response, Mark Kleiman slams Kerr and Co-Conspirator Juan Non-Volokh:

Orin Kerr twists Krugman's meaning completely out of shape, transforming a legitimate attack on the nutty positions taken by specified Republican officeholders into a character attack on "consevatives" generically.
...
Yes, Krugman's column shifts between explaining why conservatives mostly don't become professors and explaining why professors, even those not liberal by inclination, might refuse to vote for the current crop of Yahoo Republicans. But Krugman never does what Kerr accuses him of doing, and what my post criticizes Kerr for saying that Krugman did: caricature conservatives in general -- as opposed to conservative politicians -- as a bunch of ignorant religious fanatics.
...
Orin Kerr can't figure out why I'm upset about his attempt to portray liberals, and Krugman in particular, as foolish bigots who think that all conservatives are obscurantist religious fanatics. Juan non-Volokh points to one sentence in which Krugman, having pointed to several conservative leaders by name, then makes a general remark about "conservatives," as if that backed up Kerr's original attribution of foolish bias to Krugman, and by extension to liberals generally.

The relevant graf in Krugman's screed is:

Conservatives should be worried by the alienation of the universities; they should at least wonder if some of the fault lies not in the professors, but in themselves. Instead, they're seeking a Lysenkoist solution that would have politics determine courses' content.

But that's not all, Krugman earlier writes:

One answer is self-selection - the same sort of self-selection that leads Republicans to outnumber Democrats four to one in the military. The sort of person who prefers an academic career to the private sector is likely to be somewhat more liberal than average, even in engineering.

But there's also, crucially, a values issue. In the 1970's, even Democrats like Daniel Patrick Moynihan conceded that the Republican Party was the "party of ideas." Today, even Republicans like Representative Chris Shays concede that it has become the "party of theocracy."

Seems to me like Krugman is trying to paint conservatives and Republicans in general, not just some select Republicans who hold public office, as religious zealots, people hostile to science, and people who want to make money in the private sector rather than choose an academic career. I find it odd that Mr. Kleiman didn't get that general gist from Krugman's column. It appears that Krugman is making the general claim about conservatives and the Republican party in general -- that they are obscurantist/Lysenkoist/hostile to research -- and then using particular Republican office-holders as evidence that indeed he is correct. This is a pretty standard method of argumentation and is pretty transparent in Krugman's column. So, I don't understand what is Kleiman's beef here.

But to make things worse, he then continues his post with a gratuitous attack on both Non-Volokh and Kerr:

Wouldn't you expect a pair of lawyers to be a little bit better at reading documents?

Even if he were right, which he isn't, maybe such attacks are a little unwarranted?

I will soon post a general response to Krugman's column. I spent part of the day thinking about why, as Krugman notes, there are few Republicans/conservatives in the hard sciences, where bias based on politics is pretty much nonexistent (since it's more objective what is good scholarship and what isn't and since most faculty's political opinions are probably unknown in those fields to hiring committees).

Assertion City

2005-04-04T22:24:00.000-04:00

In an otherwise insightful post about the Democrats' inability to sound sincere on national security, Mark Kleiman includes this gem of an attack on the Republican Party:

The Democrats support lots of policies that are demonstrably contrary to the interests of African-Americans, especially policies that maintain cruddy school systems in big cities and that can't be changed for fear of offending the teachers' unions. When Republicans such as GWB try to make that issue, black voters laugh at them: "As if you gave a rat's ass about our kids."

The fact that the Republicans are obviously and comfortably the party of those who think that black folks have gotten too big for their britches makes them simply not credible when they argue that some particular policy they oppose for other reasons is actually bad for African-Americans. The fact that they often play the race card when it's not there to be played -- as on Social Security -- and never, never, ever support something they would otherwise dislike simply because it's actually good for blacks makes it obvious that their invocations of the needs of African-Americans are insincere and therefore to be ignored. So does the fact that they're so indifferent to the real issues facing black America that they don't bother to learn anything about the details, and therefore often wind up sounding disconnected from reality when discussing race.

Kudos to him for at least admitting that "the Democrats support lots of policies that are demonstrably contrary to the interests of African-Americans." But, I am not quite sure how "obvious" his claim that Republicans are the party of people who think that blacks have become too uppity is. What evidence does he have of this?

The use of Social Security as an example of Republicans playing the race card in contexts where it is inappropriate actually works against him, for he doesn't seem to understand the argument I have usually heard about why blacks ought to favor Social Security reform. One can't collect his Social Security check if he is dead. Only about 55.5% of all black males survive to age 70, whereas 71.5% of white males survive to that age. The life expectancy for black males who are now 30 is 71.6. Contrast this with 76.7 for white males (data courtesy of National Center for Health Statistics). So, assuming a retirement age of 67 (for those born after 1960), white males have more than twice as many years to collect Social Security as black males do, even though both had been paying into the system for the same number of years. This sounds like a raw deal to me. I am not saying that that means that Social Security privatization or any other reform is necessarily a good idea. But to claim that there is absolutely no argument to make that the current system hurts black males is to refuse to look at the numbers. Maybe I am not getting what race card he is talking about, but this is the common argument I have heard from conservative PAC's like BAMPAC about why Social Security harms blacks.

I am not saying that there are no people in the Republican party who use race to their political advantage without actually caring about the plight of African-Americans. But to say that these are the majority or that they dominate Republican Party policy is rather unsubstantiated. In fact, there's plenty of people on the Democratic side of the aisle who do the same. Doesn't Kleiman's own example of the Democats hurting blacks by opposing inner-city school reform because this reform is opposed by the Dems' more important constituency of big labor, sort of demonstrate this point? This isn't to shout, "well they do it too!" But it is to say that the Republicans aren't uniquely guilty of refusing to sacrifice on their core ideological priorities (Wait, I thought that civil rights was a core ideological priority of the Dems? Maybe campaign contributions by the unions has something to do with it --Ed.)

A better explanation I would have for why blacks reject arguments made by Republicans about particular policies that hurt them is that for years the Democrats have successfully painted the Republicans as the party of rolling back civil rights and returning America to the time of Jim Crow (cf. the confirmation fight over Charles Pickering whom the Democrats have successfully managed to paint as a racist despite the facts).

It seems that Kleiman's main argument is that if you care about black people, then you will "feel their pain" and have "good intentions" to help them. Never mind that years of good intentions on the part of Democrats and the American left haven't done much for the black community (affirmative action being a good example). Someone once said, "the road to hell is paved with good intentions." Too few politicians and pundits heed these words today. If Kleiman and other Democrats continue with this condescending and somewhat hateful attitude towards Republicans then -- no matter how many Southern Democrats who don't look like Charlie Brown when riding around in a tank they have running for President -- they will remain, as they are now, without a great deal of political power in national politics.

Why Tim Lambert is Wrong

2005-03-31T01:04:00.000-05:00

Tim Lambert of University of New South Wales (and of fighting John Lott fame) seems to misunderstand the meaning of confidence intervals and Gaussian Distributions when discussing the Lancet study,which used cluster sampling to claim in its abstract that 100,000 excess deaths occurred among Iraqi civilians as a result of the war, here and here.

The study reported that the 95% confidence interval for excess deaths is between 8,000 and 194,000. Lancet picked the midpoint when making the 100,000 excess deaths claim and this has been the source of a lot of controversy. Critics of the study say that it is incorrect to merely pick the midpoint as the most likely figure. Lambert writes:

Yes, the 95% confidence interval by itself doesn’t tell us what the probabilities are. But this doesn’t mean that each value is equally likely. We can also construct other confidence intervals. We can be 67% confident that the number is between 50,000 and 150,000. In this sense the end points of the 95% CI are less likely and the middle is most likely.

In the second link I provide above, he writes:

Not all values in the confidence interval are equally likely. The ones in the middle are more likely and 100,000 is the most likely number.

This seriously misunderstands the point of Gaussian distributions (and Lambert admits earlier in the first post I linked to that the distribution is well-approximated by a Gaussian). First, a Gaussian (a.k.a. Normal, bell curve, etc) distribution is a continuous distribution. As such, any single point has probability of 0 of being attained. The reason is because the "width" or measure of any single point is 0. The only things that have positive measure (or positive probability) in a Guassian distribution are intervals. So, yes, while the "mass" of a Gaussian is mostly "concentrated in the center", it does not mean that a single point in the center is more likely than a single point at the edge. They are both equally likely, meaning not likely at all (this is somewhat of a paradox since every single point has probability 0, but adding them all up, you get 100% probability... this is the result of adding an uncountable, rather than just infinite, number of 0's).

Let me demonstrate with a small example. Take a normal distribution with mean 3 and variance 1. If you look in a statistics table (or compute using Mathematica or Matlab), you'll notice that the interval 0 to 1.04 has about 2.3% probability. On the other hand, the interval between 2.975 and 3.025 has only 2% probability, even though these are clearly closer to the mean of 3 than any point between 0 and 1.04. So, no, points closer to the mean are not more likely. Intervals closer to the mean of the same length are. But that's not what is at question here. The question is which number is more likely, 8000 or 100,000. These two are equally likely in the case of continuous Gaussian distributions.

Here's also why taking the midpoint is a bit silly on just a common sense level. We know for 100% certainty that there are between 0 and 100 billion excess deaths as a result of the war. That doesn't mean that 50 billion is the most likely one.

The point to be made with confidence intervals is that what they mean is if you repeat the experiment many many times, 95% of the time, the real number will fall in the confidence interval given by the experiment. I am not a statistician so I can't comment on the regression analysis that Lancet did (which they don't really make clear... they just refer to a software package they used). I assume that the confidence interval they cite is not a Gaussian interval itself but is a transform of the Gaussian intervals for the standard errors. Again, I'm not an expert on regression analysis, so I don't want to venture into that area. But since my research is in probability theory, I had to correct Prof. Lambert's misunderstanding of the likelihood of specific numbers in a confidence interval.

UPDATE: After a number of email exchanges with Daniel Davies (a.k.a. dsquared) of Crooked Timber and Tim Lambert, I suppose I will have to agree that by looking at a discrete version of a "Gaussian," yes, indeed the mean has the highest likelihood of occuring. However, the Lancet study obtained a confidence interval from their bootstrap procedure, in which, I assume, the parameters are continuous. Again, I am not an expert on bootstrap or maximum likelihood estimators, so I will defer to Davies on this one. As for Tim Lambert, a little less snarkiness is in order.

UPDATE II: Tim Lambert points out in the comments below that my correction was ungracious. I apologize to Tim for being ungracious. As a practical matter, his analysis was more apropos than mine. And I thank him for particularly poignant examples in his email and in the comments on his blog that made me change my views.

Leiter's Hyperventilating

2005-03-30T00:11:00.000-05:00

Brian Leiter continues his hysterics about "Academic Bill of Rights" initiatives promoted by David Horowitz in various state legislatures. Now, I do not know the specifics of the Florida Bill Leiter lambasts. It may very well be a terrible bill. Leiter claims that it would allow students to sue their professors if the professors teach something with which students disagree. Nowhere, however, does he quote the text of the bill. Again, Leiter may very well be correct that the bill will severely damage the work done at universities. But he is dead wrong in his arguments. A general critique of his lunacy is warranted as well.

In this post, he writes:

Unfortunately, in a right-wing country like the United States, most of the serious attacks on academic freedom--i.e., the ones in which people are threatened with losing their jobs--are directed at those on the left: this was true in the 1950s, and it is true today.

What planet is Leiter living on? Does he have any evidence? Could he name names? Also, how many conservatives have been denied tenure because "poor scholarship" became a convenient substitute for being conservative in hiring decisions? Does he have any information on this? Has he not heard of the Jack Goldsmith case in Harvard, where faculty attempted to overturn the tenure offer given to the law prof because he supported Administration policies in Guantanamo? Furthermore, given that academia is predominantly liberal, of course, if there are faculty who lost their jobs because of their views, most would likely be liberal. Does he know of relative percentages of liberal and conservative faculty who were threatened with loss of jobs due to their views? I knew of a number of junior faculty at Yale who were conservatives, but would only admit to that privately because they were afraid that their tenure prospects would be impeded if they made their political views public. Juan Non-Volokh of the Volokh Conspiracy has to post pseudonymously because it might hurt his professional career. I'm sorry, but these people are not just paranoid schizophrenics. There is a reason they fear reprisals.

Next, in the original post I linked to, he quotes an article by a philosophy professor at a small college in Florida. She says that students ought not have a voice on par with faculty because faculty are experts whereas students are not:

Nevertheless, college students believe that they have equal status with their professors. And that is how this movement began—with the absurd notion that students’ opinions, no matter how stupid or wrong those opinions may be, have as much validity as academic scholarship....

But is Ward Churchill an expert on Middle Eastern politics/history? He's barely an expert (and a questionable one at that) in the field of Native American Studies. How many faculty start mouthing off in entirely irrelevant contexts on issues in which they have no specific expertise? Brian Leiter is a Nietzsche scholar. What expertise does he have on International Affairs? Why is his opinion on International Affairs any more valuable than an undergraduate's? Leiter and the professor he quotes argue from authority. They have Ph.D.'s (let me remind you that Ward Churchill has a Master's degree from an eighth-rate college, University of Illinois-Springfield), and so by their twisted logic, they are right and the student is wrong on EVERY matter.

Now, in regards to the idea that peer-reviewed academic scholarship can't be wrong...

1) Have Prof. Leiter or his Florida philosopher friend ever heard of Michael Bellesilles? I seem to recall Mr. Bellesilles having snookered the entire academy to believe made-up research.

2) When many psychologists read a new paper in their field (even for peer review), they usually skip the data analysis section because they don't want to read pages and pages of math. I've seen this first-hand. An acquaintence of mine had a psychology professor who claimed that psychology used more valid methods of inquiry than biology, and thus had a more accurate insight into the functions of human beings.

3) In some fields like Ethnic Studies, Women's and Gender Studies, Peace Studies, etc. what often passes for scholarship is rather laughable.

4) Post-Modernist journal Social Text published a hoax piece by NYU Mathematical Physicist Alan Sokal in which he claimed that the revolutionary new mathematical field of Complex Analysis proves that the Enlightenment was wrong. He later revealed his hoax in the now-defunct Lingua Franca.

5) Law reviews are edited by law students, only a couple of years older than undergrads, with no peer-review whatsoever.

So let's not pretend like official academic scholarship is universally good, factual, or intelligent.

Furthermore, isn't part of the Socratic method having your students engage in a debate with you, the professor. Leiter's philosopher lady writes:

This explains why conservatives are now going after college teachers. Given the massive media control, it’s the last arena left where students are introduced to a humane and rational approach to serious moral issues, where they’ll be exposed to critical analysis, such as examining how the Iraqis, students their own age, feel about the U.S. invasion, an evaluation which has been deliberately ignored from the American corporate media reports from day one of this invasion. Not surprising, my students had never considered what it would be like to be in Iraqi civilian shoes, to be occupied by foreign invaders. It was the first time anyone asked them to think about Iraqi families from an empathic angle.
...

Conservative students have complained to each other: “How can she call herself a philosophy teacher when she doesn’t’ allow students to express their opinions?”

Students labor under the false presumption that philosophy is about the expression of “their” opinions and that all opinions are equally valid. Never mind that most students haven’t read a single philosophy book in their entire lives. Never mind that they do not hold a single college degree on the subject....

Does she then think that undergraduate seminars are worthless? Has she also checked whether her students have read philosophy books or not before disregarding their opinions? I have read philosophy books and I disagree with her. Also, what does her having read philosophy books and having degrees in philosophy have to do with views on international relations, military strategy, polling techniques of Iraqi civilians, sociology, etc.? She might be an expert on Plato, Nietzsche, Kant, etc. She might have read every work by Duns Scotus. So what? I can prove the Weyl Equidistribution Theorem. That doesn't mean that I have more expertise on Iraq than someone who did not study Harmonic Analysis in college.

Earth to Prof. Leiter. The NKVD is not about to break down your office door and take you away. So stop hyperbole that does nothing to further the discussion of academic freedom and bias at universities.

It's 1 a.m. Do you know where your professor is?

2005-03-26T01:18:00.000-05:00

Welcome. This is a new weblog dedicated to deconstructing (and sometimes praising) the public statements made by academics. In response to the complete nonsense uttered and published by many of this country's college and university faculty as of late, we at AI felt it necessary to start a weblog to call them out on it. Scholars have a right to speak their minds in newspapers, magazines, blogs, scholarly journals, etc. In a similar vein, we have a right to deconstruct them on our blog. We don't look to critique any particular ideology: Just silliness.