At one point the study states "The most plausible explanation....(for the predominance of democrats on university faculties) ...is the result of discrimination in the hiring process"
I beg to differ.
It appears to me the report is rooted in ideological belief rather than the logical conclusion from an entire body of data. It doesn't help the studies case that it is constructed beginning with conclusion, then marshaling data to support the conclusion. But more specifically, in my quick perusal, I found some glaring weaknesses in the data and logic they rely on:
1. They don't seem to have any data to address how or why the discrimination occurs. I don't think they are suggesting hiring committee's ask the candidates their political affiliation. I imagine they would say the committee's figure out who is Republican and don't hire them. Seems to me the study is pretty useless unless they have some theory with data to explain how Republicans are being singled out.
2. The don't seem to seriously address the problem of self selection -
a. How many Republicans study any of the various ethnic studies programs? I suspect the number is close to 0. So why is it a surprise the professors are Democrats?
b. On the flip side, how many Democrats are professors at the typical School of Business? I don't know, but I suspect it is not many.
c. How many Republican art professors are there. Or have there ever been?
d. They in part are supporting their argument by the fact the number of Republican professors has been falling over the decades. This doesn't surprise me. When I was growing up in the 60's and 70's going into business was an immoral option for many, so people that might have done well in business went into academics. Once that prejudice against business faded away I expect a lot of folks with Republican leanings turned to business rather than academics.
3. The bigger question they gloss over is whether the university community has moved to the left, or is the university community more Democratic because the Republican party has moved to the right, so folks who once would have been moderate Republican's (like me) are now Democrats.
Republicans, please bear with me on this one - Give it a read and think about it. (As a preliminary note, the points I make below also apply to Democrats sometimes, but Republicans are far more serious and capable at enforcing ideological purity)
One of the primary purposes of a University is to teach people to value data over ideology. When there is no data, ideology provides a mechanism for decision making. But I believe the current Republican party, instead of adjusting ideology to fit all the data, picks and chooses data to support the ideology. The result - in order to subscribe to Republican ideology you have to be willing to chose ideology over data. So people (like me) who have learned to value making decisions based on data have abandoned the Republican party.
Want an glaring example?
Only twice in the last 100 years have Republicans controlled both houses of Congress and the Presidency for half a decade or more (1919 to 1933 and 1995 to 2007). Both times they have honored their ideological commitment to cut government, regulations and taxes. These two are the only periods of Republican monopoly in the last 100 years, both ended in the two worst economic meltdowns in the last 100 years and both meltdowns were followed by long periods of economic weakness. This seems to me like any person who cared about facts and data would start questioning whether cutting taxes, regulations and government as a primary economic policy is really a good idea.
On top of the common sense notion one doesn't keep doing what historically has ended in economic meltdown, in the last 20 or 30 years economic studies have developed large bodies of data making it almost incontrovertible that:
1. The only time cutting government spending actually helps the economy is when interest rates are very high In a low interest rate environment such as the present time cutting the size of government reduces both GDP and employment, aggravating the slowdown
2. Trickle down economics through tax cuts to the wealthiest members of society has undermined the consumer base our economy needs to thrive, and aggravated the National debt.
Yet in the face of overwhelming data every current Republican candidate offers a prescription of tax cuts, regulatory cuts and cuts in the size of government to cure our economic ills.
How about civil rights issues? With race, women's rights and gay issues the Republican party fought a rear guard action against data and logic for decades after it became apparent there was no moral support in data or logic for discrimination.
This plays into university hiring because in humanities such as economics, psychology or sociology where there has been an explosion of data in the last 50 years the Republican leaning students face a bit of cognitive dissonance - their ideological inclinations are sometimes contradicted by data. If they don't want to live with that cognitive dissonance they either dump Republican ideology or learn to filter out data that contradicts their ideology. The ones who start filtering data to protect ideology then end up without the credentials to compete with students willing to accept that the data sometimes undermines deeply held beliefs. (Don't worry about the filterers though, they make lots of money as political pundits).
I think our university system is deeply flawed. But a significant level of bias in hiring against Republicans is not the problem.
