This whole conservatives in academia thing

Andrew Stuttaford writes at The Corner, regarding Duke philosophy prof. Robert Brandon's rise to notoriety, due to the late conservatives in academe kerfuffle:

What really is nonsense, however, is this claim:

“Typically, we know nothing about the candidates' politics until after they are hired.”

Oh come on, professor. In your discipline, a quick glance at a candidate’s publications, fields of interest and so on will be more than enough to reveal his or her political leanings. You don’t need to look for a bumper sticker.

I've been sort of meaning to weigh in on this issue myself. Tonight let me make a start by duly noting that the notion that you can discern a philosophy job candidate's politics from his/her CV is nonsense.

Let me soften that blow a little. I know what the man is thinking and, although it is utterly mistaken, it is not wholly mad. Thinks Stuttaford: there must be dozens of little clues - little whiffs of partisanship, wafting up from the page for the orthodoxy sniffers to delectate or disapprove. But just look at Brian Weatherson's paper blog. Or poke around via Dave Chalmer's page. Look at Kai von Fintel's semantics web page. Logic, philosophy of science, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, epistemology and metaphysics. Here's your meat and potatoes, and it is not politicized. (It isn't like all Dems favor weak supervenience of mental events on physical events, or something.) You do history? That tells me precious little. And the analytic/continental split, such as it is, is not a partisan split. (Maybe continental philosophers are somewhat likelier to be lefties? But I'm not even confident about that.) It's even largely true of papers in political philosophy that you can't tell the politics of the author from the title - or even the abstract - because of the high degree of abstraction, and the likelihood that the author is critically examining - hypothetically taking up - a view he/she does not hold. You write "A critique of Rawls' Justice as Fairness". That tells me squat about your politics. You could be a libertarian, an Oakeshottian conservative, a Rawlsian liberal or a communist. What about papers in ethics? You're a Kantian? You're a utilitarian? You're a virtue ethicist? I cannot say who will get your vote. (I've published a fairly long paper on ethics - on moral dilemmas. I'll bet you couldn't guess my politics by reading the whole damn thing, let alone the abstract.)

That said, philosophy departments tend to skew left - I dunno, maybe 80/20 on average? (I just made that number up.) Given the manifest difficulty of hiring in philosophy in a partisan fashion; and given - I honestly believe this - the implausibility of the notion that many hiring committees really are diverting power to long-range sensors to pick up whatever faint hints there may be; well, I'd guess that the left-right ratio in philosophy departments gives you a pretty good baseline for how humanities departments look, politically, when there is damn near zero political bias in hiring.

So what's the explanation for the leftward skew? I myself don't subscribe to the 'conservatives are dumb' line that some favor. I think there are powerful cultural determinants, and ... things related to what Kieran said; and, well, that would be a very long post if I wrote it up. I actually believe that conservatives are often discriminated against in humanities departments, and that this is a bad thing - though it is not high on my personal list of wrongs that need righting. But these numbers that some find truly shocking need the following frame around them. In a truly politically-blind hiring procedure (if that is even an intelligible notion) I think lefties would still be pushing 80%. So 90%+ lefty dominance does not suggest to me the sort of vicious, total exclusion that some are alleging, or are on the verge of alleging, or are convincingly pretending to allege even though they may really know better.

UPDATE: I need to respond to some of these comments. No time just right now, but real quick ...

I should make clear 1) that I don't believe that conservatives are discriminated against in philosophy at all. 2) I agree with Brian and Matthew that the cut is made before grad school; and this is important. And mostly it is a self-selection process. 3) Chun is right that I should support my claims that conservatives are often discriminated against in the humanities more generally. Yep, I should. I'm going to try to write something a bit longer. A lot depends on how you are understanding 'left' and 'right', and I don't have time to sort that out this morning. 4) When I say that it is 'bad' that conservatives are discriminated against, I should have added: my reason for being indifferent to this injustice is not that it doesn't affect me personally - since I'm not conservative, though I have my moments - but because it is a minor injustice whose repair would cause greater injustice. It's also one of those circle of life things. Hakuna Matata and all that. Someday, when the world changes, conservatives will dominate academia and leftists will control Fox News. Also, the victims of this specific injustice are often committed to philosophical views according to which they have either suffered no injustice, or are not entitled to relief if they have. (It isn't right to judge people by their confused moral lights, rather than one's own correct ones. But it is pardonable to ratchet down a notch one's sympathy for the plight of conservative academics, out of sheer exasperation at David Horowitz' hypocrisy. This is a universal moral truth.)

2nd UPDATE: Oh, and quick response to David. In a sense it is precisely the fact that philosophy departments have resisted postmodernism, etc., etc. that make them a good test case. Critics of academe allege that postmodernism is responsible for the strong leftwards lean. (This is too simple, but you see what I mean. And I'm not going to touch the whole postmodern thingy itself today.) Philosophy departments are a counterexample. We are more conservative than most humanities departments, since conservatives are welcome in philosophy, though they don't usually apply; we are mostly raving rationalists, and we are - to an impressive degree - not voting Republican. So we are a baseline of sorts. (I don't really know what I'm talking about. I'm just making this stuff up over coffee.)

Comments

[Brian Weatherson]

You're right that a quick glance at a CV won't tell you much about people's politics. Nor will reading through their papers. But before hiring someone you normally talk to a lot of people about that person, what they'd be like as a colleague etc. (Or at least I do.) And any surprising (i.e. strongly held not centre-leftish) political commitments will normally come out then. So if we wanted to discriminate, we could.

What you can't normally do is tell the political affiliation of someone before they enter grad school. Then you are just working off a paper trail, and a pretty small paper trail at that. In my (unscientific) observation, graduate students tend to lean more left-wing than faculty. And of course all hiring is from the pool of grad students. So I think (based on a vanishingly small observation!) most political discrimination (if there is any) takes place before applications to grad school are considered.

This isn't to say there couldn't be a problem. Maybe conservative undergrads get systematically biased references. That would be a very very bad thing. Or maybe conservative undergrads just don't want to spend 5 years in relative poverty in grad school. That's also possible, and I think more probable. But there are a lot more facts we'd need to know before making judgments on root causes.

[Chun the Unavoidable]

I don't know if this would be an example of confirmation bias or not, but Brian might think that graduate students are more leftist than professors because they are more leftist than he is.

If you make such a startling claim as "conservatives are often discriminated against the humanities," you really should try to support it, lest it be interpreted as mere sensationalism. I think it's far more likely for leftists to be discriminated against--are there watchdog sites for rightist academics, e.g.?

[PZ Myers]

And if Weatherson is actually correct, and grad students are more left-leaning than faculty, doesn't that suggest that there is some selection AGAINST leftists when hiring for faculty positions?

I've written a fair number of recommendations for students trying to get into grad school, and I have to say that I have far less knowledge of undergraduate political leanings than I do of past grad students. Even if I were to go on an active crusade to block the careers of young campus conservatives, I wouldn't have the information to do so. I know their grades. I know how well they write and discuss. I usually get a CV listing their various endeavors. I suppose if one mentioned being in the campus Republicans, I might see it -- but since I'm not on a crusade, it wouldn't be one of the factors I'd use in writing the rec.

[Matthew]

I was a conservative undergraduate philosophy major who will be a conservative graduate student in philosophy come fall. I certainly knew that I was often the minority opinion when in many of my ethics and political philosophy courses. However, I didn’t think that I was treated like I or my ideas were stupid. Professors often thought I was wrong, but it never affected our relationship or my grades. There were a few other conservative undergrads in our program but I’m the only one that chose to go to graduate school for philosophy. The others all chose seminary or law school. So I think the problem is much more one of self-selection. I think we’d see more conservatives in humanities if there were more interest in that as a career route. I don’t have any conservative friends who thought that the left bent of our professors was a real problem.

[David Velleman]

The field of philosophy is not a good test case. Our discipline has resisted the trends that have politicized other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Those disciplines have spent 10 - 15 years hiring "scholars" whose work is explicitly political -- primarily work inspired by identity politics of race and gender. Students may be getting straight philosophy in our courses, but in English and Anthropology and many other disciplines they are being force-fed a heavy diet of political doctrine.

This trend is due, in part, to the intellectual vacuum created by post-modernism. If there are no objective intellectual standards (which is what the post-modernists believe) then hiring may just as well be guided by the political sympathies of the recruitment committee -- in particular, by their desire to promote racial and gender equality. We therefore have an entire generation of tenured professors who were hired, not because their work was intellectually superior or even moderately good, but because it purported to uncover racism and sexism in previously unsuspected places, or to recover the cultural contributions of previously neglected minorities and women.

One can be a strong proponent of racial and gender equality and yet deplore the influence that identity politics has on these disciplines. One can be a feminist and still think that commitment to the cause of feminism is not a qualification for academic employment. One can be an anti-racist and yet deny that sloppy scholarship can be excused on the grounds that it serves the cause of fighting racism. Unfortunately, most of us have hesitated to draw these distinctions -- partly out of fear that we might undermine causes that we support, and partly out of fear that we might be labeled racists or sexists ourselves. Our hesitations have gravely endangered the independence of the academy.

I do not support any efforts to enforce ideological balance in universities. But I also believe that our grounds for resisting such efforts have been seriously undercut by the politicization of the academy over the past decade or two. The main reason for allowing us to govern ourselves in the academy is that we are applying intellectual standards that we are best qualified to apply. If we are not applying such standards , if we are instead hiring people because their work is feminist or anti-racist, then we lose our grounds for insisting on self-governance.

In any case, those who deny that academic hiring is political simply aren't looking in the right places. The point is not that recruitment committees are checking up on candidate's political party affiliation; the point is that explicitly political research programs are dominating many disciplines in the humanities and social sciences.

[Chun the Unavoidable]

Professor Velleman, a philosopher, should know better than to make hasty generalizations about things he apparently knows little about. No department anywhere (including those at Michigan) has hired strictly "identity theorists," and to describe research into race and gender as necessarily "political" and consequentially unworthy when what he means is that he doesn't like or understand it is not "A"-level argument.

While it may be true that some research on "neglected minorities" is intellectually inferior (as is, doubtless, some work on modal logic), it does not follow that it all is. Since the claim that all hiring in English and Anthropology is based upon this narrowly construed definition is obviously false, there is no reason to conclude that those scholars hired in these disciplines whose work does concern race and gender were hired for that reason alone rather than the intellectual merit of their work. (Another factor is always going to be the curricular needs of the department, but this is a different matter.)

[Adam Kotsko]

or to recover the cultural contributions of previously neglected minorities and women.

I'm not sure what's wrong with this. Surely part of the job of literature departments is to find more literature to assess and study. If certain factors other than literary quality have previously excluded certain works from serious study, then recovering them seems like a very good idea that will only enrich our knowledge and enjoyment of literature. Right?

No one accuses T. S. Eliot of having had a political agenda in recovering the metaphysical poets or the late Elizabethan playwrights (Webster, etc.) -- and no one accuses the early 20th-century literary scholars of having a political agenda for recovering, say, Melville.

They were neglected figures; they're good; let's read them. That's the "agenda." Instead of insisting on a closed literary canon, as though it's some kind of modern scripture, let's just read and study as much literature as we can get our hands on. And if you want to study the old stuff, that's cool, too -- there are Milton and Chaucer scholars aplenty.

In short, calm down.

[David Velleman]

I didn't say that departments shouldn't hire people who work on racism and sexism or the contributions of its victims. Those are worthy programs of research. Nor did I say that all such scholarship is inferior. I have no investment in defending the so-called canon, or in painting whole areas of scholarship with a single brush.

All I said is that departments have allowed themselves to appoint people, not because of the quality of their work, but because of its appeal to their (perfectly laudable) political commitments to fighting racism and sexism. Political correctness has been allowed to substitute for intellectual rigor.

These two responses to my posting display precisely the sort of knee-jerk hostility that confronts anyone who dares to question the agenda of race- and gender-politics in the academy. If you want to know why conservatives (of which I am not one) feel the atmosphere to be hostile, you need read no further.

[Chun the Unavoidable]

But this "those disciplines have spent 10 - 15 years hiring 'scholars' whose work is explicitly political -- primarily work inspired by identity politics of race and gender" (delightfully bitchy scare quotes there) and this "but in English and Anthropology and many other disciplines they are being force-fed a heavy diet of political doctrine" aren't kneejerk hostilities or anything.

I've always enjoyed this philosopher-king rhetorical strategy of being grossly inflammatory and then complaining about a lack of civility when someone responds (mildly) in kind.

And it's not a duumvirate; class is still kicking ass.

[Neil]

The question why certain areas are dominated by certain political views which (prima facie) are not directly relevant is an interesting one. But it certainly isn't the product (as David, and perhaps John suggest) of certain departments hiring along explicitly political lines because they are sceptics about truth. Po-mos are (mostly) confused about truth: they argue there is no such thing or any valid argumentative standards, but of course that's an incoherent thing to do. As this suggests, they don't live their scepticism, and they certainly don't hire on its basis: they hire on perceived quality of the candidates. That isn't to say that political agendas don't play a role, but the role is indirect: entering into assessments of quality of work and the selection of topics pursued.

I suspect that self-selection is almost the entire explanation of the political leanings of disciplines. Philosophy in Germany in the 1920s was a bastion of the far-right; I suspect that similar swings in orientation could be documented in other countries. And this kind of self-selection phenomenon is not limited to the humanities. Researchers at my old university (Monash, in Australia) did a study of the religious views of students. Belief in God was very much higher among science students than among humanities students or among the general population. More alarmingly, creationist views were well represented among science students - and remained just as strong after a one semester course on the evidence against creationism.

BTW John, though the day when the right dominates the academy might come, the day the left controls Fox never will. The right will always have the money; that's almost a platitude.

[Adam Kotsko]

I have yet to read a piece of literary analysis, no matter what the theoretical perspective, that concludes by saying, "And therefore, the House of Representatives should pass such-and-such a bill" or "Therefore, our highest priority should be making sure President So-and-so doesn't get reelected" or anything of the kind.

They are "politicized" to the extent that they advocate, in very big words with a lot of annoying allusions to French people, basic human decency. Let's try to make society less oppressive for women. Let's try to make it so that people aren't so grossly unequal in power. Let's try to make it so that people aren't dismissed or put at a disadvantage due to their race. Let's try to correct the inertia of past injustices and work toward a more just future. If people are part of specific cultural traditions that give them meaning, let's try not to impose another, supposedly better tradition upon them (within certain limits).

What exactly is supposed to be objectionable about the so-called "politically correct" agenda? Seriously! Are lit professors calling for an overthrow of the United States government? Are they even spending a lot of their time developing specific, detailed policies and then dogmatically insisting that everyone give lip service to them? I guess the closest we have to that is affirmative action, but even that is just an idea that can be implemented in a variety of ways (although conservatives like to pretend that it's always and everywhere implemented in the stupidest possible way, with quotas).

[Adam Kotsko]

These two responses to my posting display precisely the sort of knee-jerk hostility that confronts anyone who dares to question the agenda of race- and gender-politics in the academy.

I think that what you're thinking of isn't so much "knee-jerk hostility" as "fervent disagreement." "Knee-jerk hostility" would be something along the lines of, "Shut up, butt-nugget." Fervent disagreement would consist in saying that your argument is invalid and pointing out the reasons -- which was the actual response your posts generated.

Unless there's been a change in the rules of etiquette and it's now considered deeply rude to disagree with another person's opinion, especially in a forum specifically intended for the open discussion of controversial issues -- in which case, I'm terribly sorry.

[David Velleman]

My initial posting was "inflammatory" only to those who are inflamed by dissent from the political orthodoxy.

I invite you to visit the "faculty interests" page of the English Department at the University of Michigan:
(http://www.lsa.umich.edu/english/faculty/fib.asp)

By my count, the page lists 79 faculty members. Of these 37 -- very close to half -- list interests in minority literatures ("African American", "writers of "color", etc.), "post-colonial" literatures, "women writers" (none list "men writers"), gender, feminism, or sexuality.

Could there be a pattern here?

[Chun the Unavoidable]

A question for Neil: if I were to comment on an article about say, David Lewis, and start talking about how "Elusive Knowledge" is consistent with Plotinus's epistemology, at least I'd be making a lot more sense than whatever in the hell it is that you think "pomo" means. Can I blame David Stove for this?

Furthermore, the other professor was talking about identity politics, which is by no means synonymous with postmodernism, unless you just are using it as a catch-all term for whatever nonsense the larger and better-funded English departments propagate, stupid rich English departments.

[Chun the Unavoidable]

It's 2004, Professor Velleman. We've moved past only talking about Keats in a port-induced stupor. Jean Rhys, Ishmael Reed, and Chinua Achebe also get some attention nowadays.

[Ted H.]

I think there's an obvious and in its way 'innocent' explanation for why humanities departments skew left, and it's illustrated by my own recent experience.

A lifelong Democrat, I supported the war last spring (for more or less Paul Berman's reasons) and caught hell for that support from nearly all my academic colleagues at two institutions -- especially those with whom I had the most intellectually in common. My colleagues seemed to think I'd gone insane, and told me so regularly. At some point this past fall I changed my position on the war -- it was not only this barrage of criticism but realities in Iraq that wore me down -- and now colleagues and I talk pleasantly about politics nearly every day. Though it wasn't the reason I changed my mind (at least, it wasn't the normative reason!), no longer being a war supporter has made my professional life much easier.

The experience makes me wonder whether those on the left who think conservatives are merely whining when they complain about bias have any idea what it's like to hold a 'conservative' or 'right wing' view on campus. I tried (though I continue to insist that my support for the war was neither conservative nor right wing -- hence the scare quotes). I can attest that it leads your colleagues to worry you've lost your mind. This isn't only a political disagreement. To regain your colleagues' respect, you have to prove, again and again, that you haven't really "gone over to the dark side" -- a phrase I heard repeatedly.

Now that I am once again an angel of political light (i.e. an undiluted Bush-hater), I have to fight the temptation to put others in the position that I was in. The other day, a colleague said he'd heard the Kerry rumor on right-wing talk radio. "You listen to right-wing talk radio?" I asked incredulously? "Oh, merely to understand the enemy," he quickly replied. See? There I was reinforcing the assumption we all share -- that Republicans are not just wrong but crazy. It's second nature. Before my five or six months on the "dark side" I must have made this move several times a day.

No doubt the social conformity takes root in grad school, or even earlier, so there's no weeding out left to be done at the hiring stage...

What explains the phenonemon under discussion, then, is that learning how to converse with academics -- how to engage in their form of life -- is indistinguishable from learning how to demonstrate that one is not 'conservative' or 'right wing.' (The scare quotes give libertarians some wiggle room, since they aren't 'right wing' on every issue. Hence you do find libertarians in philosophy departments.)

It should be no surprise that many academics are willing to come right out with "conservatives are stupid." In an academic context, social anxiety comes packaged in the thought "I'd be an idiot to let them label me a conservative." Brandon's faux pas was just the anxiety talking.

P.S. In light of Leiter's post today, I hope Holbo will permit me to add this. Brian, please do not wonder aloud in front of the profession why I am "committing professional suicide" by admitting that conservatives have a point when they complain about bias against them. You may disagree with my characterization of our profession, but please do not express your disagreement by predicting that it will bring about my professional ruin. That sort of rhetoric makes the reality on the ground in philosophy departments look even worse than it is in this respect. In fact, I do not expect to get fired for writing this comment on Holbo's blog. Nor do I expect that the guy whom you were criticizing today -- with the substance of whose piece I do not at all agree, by the way (his argument was different from mine in crucial respects) -- will in fact meet the career death you so gleefully predicted for him simply by presenting a conservative perspective on academia. Things aren't that bad -- yet.

P.P.S. Hi David. Sorry to interrupt your debate with Chun with this off topic rumination. And don't worry. I'm really really really not a conservative or rightwinger. I swear. Andrea can back me up... ;)

P.P.P.S. Chun can call me whatever he likes. After all, he called me 'troglodyte' not too long ago. Let's see if he can top it.

[Neil]

Off topic now (every one but Chun please ignore). Chun, you should David Stove for many many things. He was exactly the kind of racist and sexist we do not usually encounter in humanities depts these days - and that's a good thing. I think there is a case for discriminating against anyone who thinks that women do not usually have the intellectual capacity to do academic work. As these remarks indicate, you can't blame DS for my views on what I called po-mo (which, I admit, I'm using as a catch-all term, for those views which deny that there is anything like truth or argumentative standards - the view that David had in his sights). I know this stuff from the inside out (I hope you noticed my qualifier before confused, BTW. Close reading is an important skill).I have an undergraduate degree in literary theory and a PhD in French philosophy. And believe me the general (notice qualifier) standard of debate on topics like truth and the criteria which must be met before we accept a truth-claim is abysmal. Clever philosophers like Foucault, who actually made important contributions to knowledge, are partly to blame, because he (and Derrida, and many others) is confused on this topic himself (in at least most of his work). Unfortunately quality control in continental philosophy is lax, which means that the standards are lower and clever people do work that is less good than it might be (because quality control enhances everyone's work, including the best: we all make mistakes, we're all confused sometimes, and we all benefit when this can be pointed out in ways we cannot help but accept). Second-hand continental philosophy, which has been swallowed by many humanities depts, is even worse precisely because the quality control is watered down further.

[Chun the Unavoidable]

I don't remember calling you a troglodyte, Ted. Are you a state legislator? (That was easy, eh?)

Neil, your conflation of "pomo" with theories of identity politics, which was based off of Velleman's remarks and which, if you didn't agree with (the conflation), you at least did not say so, was what I commenting on. Well, that and the whole no valid argumentative standards thing. I believe that the standards are lower in what's called "continental philosophy," but I also believe that they have to be if you're going to do anything broadly interesting. This is a structural consequence, not an intellectual defect.

I'm actually not much of a pomo or identity person at all, but I just can't stand to read my entire discipline being ignorantly slagged-off on the basis of chimerical versions of either (and my materialist speculation above on the true source of such slagging should not be passed over in silence).

I actually don't care much for postmodernism or many o

[David Velleman]

Just to clarify my early remark about the UM English Department. I was not counting faculty who listed an interest in writers who are, as it happens, women or members of minority groups. I was counting only those who listed an interest in "women writers" so described, or "writers of color" so described -- in other words, an interest in writers specifically on the grounds of their gender or race. Reading Chinua Achebe or Jean Rhys or Ishmael Reed is one thing; reading them because of their gender or race is another.

[Neil]

I don't see anything wrong with having a research interest in women of color (or whatever). There are several good reasons for such an interest: (1) we each need to find a patch of earth to cultivate, and Shakespeare and Milton have been done (2) it is permissible to wonder whether women members of other oppressed groups have been unjustly ignored in the past (esp since, whatever your views on truth, subjectivism in aesthetics is very plausible and respectable) (3) even in these enlightened times, most of the verbiage we consume comes from middle-class males and it is permissible to wonder whether other people might write from a viewpoint which is colored by different experiences. In any case, what's wrong with academic fashion? Today women of color might be in; is this any more objectionable than imaginative resistance in philosophy or evolutionary explanations in law and anthropology, or whatever? Each discipline has its fashions, doesn't seem anything wrong with that.

[Chun the Unavoidable]

I remember when they didn't have those silly designations because they didn't need them. Old-school English profs. were far too good of stylists to use "white" or "male" as adjectives to describe writers when they were redundant.

[Sheesh]

BTW John, though the day when the right dominates the academy might come, the day the left controls Fox never will. The right will always have the money; that's almost a platitude.

Come on, the Beatles don't have any money? Barbara S doesn't have any money? Leftists don't have any money. Guess Oprah just went broke too?

Anyway ....

[Adam Kotsko]

Reading Chinua Achebe or Jean Rhys or Ishmael Reed is one thing; reading them because of their gender or race is another.

Back in my English days, I was especially "into" British literature. In fact, virtually every paper I wrote in the department was over a British author. Initially, this was because particular authors appealled to me, but eventually I wanted to read authors "because they were British" -- that is, I had stumbled upon a logical grouping of authors through my love of particular authors, and then felt that I would be well-served by reading others who fall into the same group. My grouping was broader, perhaps, than those of your colleagues at U of M, but then, I was working on a bachelor's degree, not a PhD.

I agree with what I take to be your contention that we should not take race into account when judging works of art -- i.e., we shouldn't assume that a book is going to be good "just because" the author is Asian. However, due to historical circumstances beyond any of our control, concepts of race arose that caused certain broad groups of people to have very different social and economic positions (due almost entirely to their race) and thus to have very different experiences and to write from very different perspectives.

If I were in charge and I could go back, I would certainly make it so that that didn't happen and so that skin color or ethnic origin would be qualities as indifferent as hair and eye color now are. We can't start from that zero point now, however. Maybe some day we'll completely get over racism, and I hope we do -- but the way to get over racism is not by making thinly-veiled accusations that anyone who talks about race "as such" is a racist (such as, for example, implying that it is unacceptable to specialize in literature produced by people of a specific race).

[bryan]

"And if Weatherson is actually correct, and grad students are more left-leaning than faculty, doesn't that suggest that there is some selection AGAINST leftists when hiring for faculty positions?"

it could mean that old people are generally more conservative than young people. Perhaps there's some research on this somewhere, maybe some common folk wisdom stating that this is the case, something, anything? Well I'm probably way off base on that idea.

"The experience makes me wonder whether those on the left who think conservatives are merely whining when they complain about bias have any idea what it's like to hold a 'conservative' or 'right wing' view on campus. I tried (though I continue to insist that my support for the war was neither conservative nor right wing -- hence the scare quotes). I can attest that it leads your colleagues to worry you've lost your mind. "

Couldn't this be more like a socially imposed restriction to perceived personality.
I'm sure people who work with Glenn Reynolds don't give him that guff, because they know his opinions pretty well.
In your case your support for the war was outside the bounds of what was expected for your long demonstrated personality. Suddenly everyone was concerned, who is this strange pod person in chun's flesh? Has chun gone insane, he's not acting like chun.

Consider this, if a colleague was a tweed jacket wearing, pipe-smoking eng. lit. stereotype and one day he suddenly changes to a leather jacket sporting, harley-riding tough guy, you might be concerned that a neuron somewhere had short circuited. However, if he achieved this transformation over a reasonable length of time, or went away for a year and came back transformed, you might be more willing to accept the change. This example is of course one of costumary fashion, but perhaps the same thing holds true in shifts of ideological fashion.

[Ted H.]

"In your case your support for the war was outside the bounds of what was expected for your long demonstrated personality. Suddenly everyone was concerned, who is this strange pod person in chun's flesh?"

Just to clarify: it wasn't Chun's comment to which you were replying, Bryan. I am neither Chun nor unavoidable.

And while I wish your explanation were true, I'm sure it isn't. What explains my case is what explains the case recounted on Andrew Sullivan's blog this morning. ("You read the execrable Andy?" -- more data.) Why is it so common for an academic to look right into the eyes of a Republican student with whom she has worked for a long time and say with perfect sincerity that she doesn't know any of those awful Republicans? This happened to me repeatedly last spring -- substituting 'war supporter' for 'Republican' -- and I'm sure I'd put many others in the same position before those experiences awakened me to the insidious presumption.

Yes, I know, it's probably going to corrupt me, this newfound ability to feel conservatives' pain... My point is only that we academic lefties should not deny the basic accuracy of the complaint. I concede that conservatives often overdo it -- I agree with Leiter's assessment of the merits of Feser's argument, for example. (I merely wish he hadn't added that Feser is "committing professional suicide." That makes it look like things are worse than Feser's portrait.)