WHY IS HIGHER EDUCATION SUCH A CESSPIT OF DISCRIMINATION? Stanford Law School study finds conservative profs shunned by elite schools.
The study, “Testing a Beckerian-Arrowian model of political orientation discrimination on the U.S. law professor labor market: Measuring the ‘rank gap”, 2001-2010,” sheds light on the suspicion many conservatives in the labor market have, “am I being discriminated against?”
The study finds that “conservative and libertarian law professors are underrepresented in top-tier legal academia, whether compared to the American population overall, those who graduate from law school, or elite lawyers who look most like law professors,” later adding that the issue is likely “not discrimination against conservatives and libertarians so much as discrimination against anyone who is not liberal.”
“To the extent the legal academy is concerned about diversity, given the significant role politics plays in the law, few types of diversity could be more beneficial to legal education than increased political diversity among law school faculties,” Phillips surmises. “Ironically, liberal students and law professors will arguably benefit the most if the percentage of conservative and libertarian faculty members increases.”
Phillips argues that, in some academic fields, graduates are “less harmed” by a lack of intellectual diversity, but for law school graduates, the inability to “candidly and accurately assess the weaknesses in their own views and the strengths in opposing views” is akin to “professional suicide.”
“Law school graduates who are ill-equipped to make persuasive arguments in front of half of the judiciary are ill-equipped to be lawyers,” the study reads. “Likewise, an environment that is subtly or openly hostile to or ridicules conservative or libertarian perspectives will have a chilling effect in the classroom, harming students of all political views.”
The study finds that, when analyzing the hiring practices of law schools between 2001 and 2010, three categories of professors, “liberal,” “unknown,” and “conservative/libertarian,” appear to be unevenly distributed, “indicating that law schools were not equally hiring across rankings over the decade studied. But the distribution of conservatives/libertarians and liberals was relatively similar.”
Phillips argues that having a lack of politically diverse professors has a direct impact on law students who go on to affect legal policy.
I agree.