Study Finds Conservative and Libertarian Profs Shunned by Elite Law Schools
“underrepresented in top-tier legal academia”
Academia loves diversity, except for ideological diversity. It’s the students who ultimately lose here.
Campus Reform reports:
No. 2 ranked U.S. law school study finds conservative profs shunned by elite schools
A study by a researcher at Stanford University , the No. 2 ranked law school in the U.S., finds that conservative or libertarian law professors are discriminated against largely at top-ranked law schools when compared with their liberal and moderate peers.
James C. Phillips, a non-resident Fellow with the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School, recently published a study which concludes that conservatives and libertarian law professors face discrimination from elite, top-tier schools compared to liberal or moderate professors.
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.”
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Comments
This imbalance will continue as long as schools rate their faculty (and prospective faculty) on leftist criteria, such as “commitment to diversity.” I don’t see any possibility of this attitude changing as long as schools are paying 6-figure salaries to “diversity” administrators whose only job is to encourage racial discrimination.
The only bright spot in this picture will be if SCOTUS will rule unambiguously that you can’t stop racial discrimination unless you stop discriminating on the basis of race. As long as racial discrimination is encouraged, the “diversity” industry will continue to eliminate non-leftist faculty from consideration at colleges and universities.