The Volokh Conspiracy

Professor Bainbridge has an interesting discussion of faculty diversity at UCLA. He cites to a Yale Daily News article covering a talk I gave at Yale in 1996. I well remember the talk, since it was the first time I presented at Yale and the first time I talked publicly about my work on viewpoint diversity. Faculty and student turnout was high, and I later saw a lot of ripples emanating from my then-shocking attempt to quantify who really were the most underrepresented and overrepresented groups in law teaching.

The Yale Daily News story was inaccurate in several details. It is obvious that the reporter was not taping and was inexperienced at taking notes. I considered writing a letter to the editor at the time, but thought that being misquoted in a student newspaper probably didn't merit correction, especially since the misquotations were not that serious. I later learned in the Bellesiles affair that newspaspers and magazines often don't run corrections anyway.

One of the nice things about having a blog is that I can comment and correct them when they come up. [If there were such things then, I could have used it to good effect.]

The headline says "Alum Challenges Affirmative Action . . .," which I didn't. The article itself correctly characterizes the talk as "pro-affirmative action." I did challenge the narrowness of the search for diversity, since political and intellectual diversity is extremely important to viewpoint diversity. I strongly favor affirmative action, and ALWAYS have. At Yale in 1996, I explicitly said that I favored affirmative action for groups that were "still strongly underrepresented" and historically were "traditionally locked out" of the academy, such as Hispanics, women, and African Americans.

The Yale Daily News incorrectly quotes me as saying: "The basic argument for diversity in faculty hiring is incoherent unless there is more hiring of white Republicans and Christians because they are the two groups more underrepresented than women and most minorities." The reporter also incorrectly summarizes my argument with these words: "According to Lindgren, Protestants and Republicans are the most underrepresented among American law professors and Democrats and Jews are the most overrepresented compared to the U.S. population."

I am certain that I didn't quite say either of these things because they are not what my data at the time showed (or now show). Women were represented in law teaching at about the same as proportion of parity with their % in the general population as Christians, so women would have been MORE underrepresented than white Christians. Republicans, on the other hand, were about as underrepresented as Hispanics and more underrepresented than women and Christians, who were in turn more underrepresented than African Americans. So the statements attributed to me are more or less correct about Republicans (and white Republicans), but not about Christians, but even there I was talking about diversity of viewpoint, not other kinds of diversity. Perhaps the reporter was confused by my claims that subgroups such as white female Protestants and white female Republicans were incredibly underrepresented.

Further, I had passed out some of the data tables from my talk (the article incorrectly says that my study itself was passed out). With my tables in front of the audience, I was constantly pointing to data that I was discussing. I couldn't have said what the Yalie Daily attributed to me because I would have been challenged on it using my own data.

I talked about the representation of so many different groups and subgroups that I think that things just ran together in the reporter's mind.

The Yalie Daily quotes then-dean Tony Kronman with some reasonable reservations about my argument, which I don't doubt that he expressed. But Kronman, whom I had never previously met, was so enthusiastic after my talk that he offered to host a conference on ancient law at Yale if I would organize it (in the mid-1990s I had co-organized one at Berkeley). I never took Kronman up on his extremely generous offer (I got too busy with faculty appointments at Northwestern and my Ph.D. at Chicago).

Ann Althouse takes on the Nation, which is becoming a gross parody of its former greatness. She rightly criticizes the seemingly intentional misrepresentations of Brooke Allen about the framers' views of religion.

In the course of effectively fisking Allen, Althouse several times says that James Madison in the 1780s favored Separation of Church and State. As University of Chicago legal historian, Philip Hamburger, has shown in his history of the Separation of Church and State, none of the major framers favored Separation until about the election of 1800, when the Jeffersonians urged Separation to silence Northern clergy. Indeed, in the 1780s some religious leaders who were accused of wanting Separation denied such a misreading of their position. In the 1780s and early 1790s, a few religious dissenters favored Separation, but none of the insiders--certainly not Madison.

What Madison wanted in the 1780s was disestablishment of religion and equal liberty for different religions, not a "wall of separation."

In second half of the 19th century, the liberal wing of the Republican Party made a failed attempt to add Separation of Church and State as a constitutional amendment to the US Constitution (since it was not there already).

In the early 20th century, Separation became part of the jurisprudence of the KKK and other nativist groups (as well as some mainstream groups), and Hugo Black (ca. 1920) made new members of the Klan pledge to the eternal separation of church and state. Then in 1947, a labor organization with ties to the Klan brought a suit, Everson v. Board of Education, where then-Justice Hugo Black of the US Supreme Court wrote Separation into the US Constitution.

The US Supreme Court has been quietly moving away from Separation as the metaphor in recent cases, with most majority opinions (whether upholding or striking down aid to churches) making no mention of Separation, except in the titles to articles cited in the footnotes.

This fascinating history is told in Hamburger's meticulous book on the subject.

The Chicago Tribune (p. 5.9) today censored a "Prickly City" cartoon. The Tribune ran a "Bizarro" strip instead along with this explanation: "Today's Prickly City does not meet the Chicago Tribune's standards of fairness. Please enjoy this substitute."

This is today's strip, which the Tribune censored:
[Click on the strip itself to enlarge]

©Universal Press Syndicate.

In trying to figure out why the strip is unfair, I can only guess that the Tribune thought that the Mary Jo Kopechne death in 1969 was too old to be fair to use, though their news stories considered George W. Bush's activities from the late 1960s and early 1970s to be fair to use. Or perhaps they thought that bringing up Kennedy's causing Kopechne's death was unfair because it was unrelated to the Iraq War, but political criticism often is based on charges of inconsistency between two events related only by one or more facts--here that they both involve death and alleged lies, misleading statements, and indifference.

Disclosure: The Chicago Tribune (and many of its subsidiaries) are former clients of mine. [Also, this post was edited very shortly after posting.]

My original post on the Hoppe case was already my longest ever, so I am updating it here.

VC reader Gabriel Rossman points me to this article by University of Rochester economist, Steven Landsburg, in Slate, which discusses an NPR story that pointed out that gays in California were 70% more likely to smoke:

I've just learned from NPR's All Things Considered that in California, gay men and lesbians are 70 percent more likely to smoke than the general population. In a sterling example of why I try not to listen to too much NPR, reporter Sarah Varney immediately segued into the perceived need for more anti-smoking ads targeted specifically at gays.

In other words, Varney implicitly assumes that gays are either too stupid to have gotten the message that smoking is bad for you or too irrational to have modified their behavior accordingly. A more inquisitive reporter might instead have raised the obvious question: What good reasons might gays have to smoke more than other people?

In four minutes of air time, the closest Varney came to addressing that question was to suggest that for gays, stepping outside for a cigarette can be a good way to meet people—as if the desire to meet people somehow differentiates gays from straights. At the same time, she managed to overlook the blindingly obvious: Gays are disproportionately childless, and childless people are more likely to smoke.

As a matter of fact, childless households (whether gay or straight) spend, on average, 56 percent more on cigarettes and alcohol than their childbearing neighbors. (Among households where the parents have some education, the discrepancy is even larger.) Nor is there anything mysterious about why. First, parents have extra reasons to live long and stay healthy, both so they can be there when their kids need them and so they can enjoy the company of their grandchildren. Second, parents have extra expenses—starting with diapers and continuing through college tuition—that leave less disposable income for cigarettes. Third, a lot of parents don't like the idea of smoking in front of their children.

As I stated in my original post, this is the way that economists talk. Some people may find it offensive, but it is completely unremarkable in the discipline.

A check of GSS data on smoking shows borderline significance (1-tailed p=.086) for those having same-sex experience in the last 5 years: 38% of gays and bisexuals smoke compared to 30% of others, so any differences nationally are probably less than in California. If I do a logistic regression, controlling for education and region, then the 1-tailed significance equals the .05 threshold, meaning that (with controls) gays do appear to smoke more in the GSS data. When being gay is measured by the gender of sexual partners since age 18, the effect is not significant.

As to driniking, gays and bisexuals (measured by activity since age 18) are more likely (45%) to report ever getting drunk than others (35%), though the effect is not significant for gays measured by activity in the last 5 years.

As to the evidence in this post, it provides some (but far from conclusive) support for Hoppe's claims that gays engage in higher risk behavior and that differences in child-rearing is a related cause. So now, four pieces of evidence provide some support Hoppe's claims: a greater reported number of sex partners (as I linked in my earlier post), a higher rate of smoking in some studies (but not others), a higher rate of getting drunk (by some measures but not others), and some plausible evidence that child-rearing is related to smoking and drinking rates. The direct evidence of less planning for the future is not shown in these studies, but is consistent with some of them. The evidence that I pointed to against Hoppe's thesis is mostly attitudinal, not behavioral, and economists (though not sociologists) tend to discount attitudes.

The caveats that I mentioned in the prior post apply to my analyses here as well, including the absence of adjusting the sample size for a design effect. I'm off to see a movie; I'll probably post more when I get back today--or post tomorrow.

UPDATE: For more, see David Beito, Ralph Luker, Kenneth Gregg, and Tom G. Palmer. Palmer, a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, considers Hoppe a bigot, not for the statements attributed to Hoppe in class (which he finds unobjectionable), but primarily for other comments made elsewhere about Palmer. Nonetheless, Palmer has written to UNLV in support of Hoppe's academic freedom.

INTRODUCTION:

I read about the problems of Professor Hoppe, an economist at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas (tip to Instapundit):

Hoppe, 55, a world-renowned economist, author and speaker, said he was giving a lecture to his money and banking class in March when the incident occurred.

The subject of the lecture was economic planning for the future. Hoppe said he gave several examples to the class of about 30 upper-level undergraduate students on groups who tend to plan for the future and groups who do not.

Very young and very old people, for example, tend not to plan for the future, he said. Couples with children tend to plan more than couples without.

As in all social sciences, he said, he was speaking in generalities.

Another example he gave the class was that homosexuals tend to plan less for the future than heterosexuals.

Reasons for the phenomenon include the fact that homosexuals tend not to have children, he said. They also tend to live riskier lifestyles than heterosexuals, Hoppe said. He said there is a belief among some economists that one of the 20th century's most influential economists, John Maynard Keynes, was influenced in his beliefs by his homosexuality. Keynes espoused a "spend it now" philosophy to keep an economy strong, much as President Bush did after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Hoppe said the portion of the lecture on homosexuals lasted perhaps 90 seconds, while the entire lecture took up his 75-minute class.

As with so many of these stories of supposed academic misconduct, one must be careful not to assume that the whole story has been told, since usually only one side is talking publicly. But if Hoppe indeed said what he says he said and no more, then I think that it is the administrators at UNLV who deserve reprimands. They should have explained to the student that such claims are clearly within academic freedom, whether true or false. I have no doubt that what Hoppe said would be offensive to some students—and indeed, he is probably wrong on the merits of most of his claims—but his claims are empirical ones. The proper response of someone who is angry with Hoppe is to gather evidence tending to show that he is wrong, and to challenge Hoppe to offer his own evidence to support his claims.

Both Eugene Volokh and I have previously contributed to debunking the apparent myth that gay males have a median of 250 sexual partners. But every representative study that I've seen does find substantial differences between straights and gays, so IF on average one can equate having more partners with taking higher risks, then in that very limited sense, one claim of Hoppe may be at least partly true. I have no reason to think that Hoppe is right more generally on risk-taking by gays. [But see evidence supporting Hoppe in an updated later post.]

As someone who has watched Richard Posner, Gary Becker, and others at the University of Chicago Law School Workshop, I have seen lots of generalizations about how groups act. A claim such as Hoppe made would be quite unremarkable in that classroom setting, however correct or incorrect it might be. Post-Gary Becker, it is common for economists to attribute motivations, beliefs, and behavior to people in different family or sexual situations. Some of the claims are based on assumptions of rationality, some are meant as empirical claims to be supported or rejected by evidence from the real world. I shudder to think what students at UNLV would think if Hoppe had read the claims about how gays think, act, and rationally calculate in Posner's 1992 Sex & Reason, which spawned a lot of vigorous criticisms from both straights and gays, but no calls for academic punishment (at least that I heard). The book still has its defenders and detractors.

For example, consider this paragraph from Martha Ertman's review of Posner's 1992 book in the 1993 Stanford Law Review:

Posner apparently believes that lesbianism is a matter of choice rather than genetic predisposition. He recognizes that there are two contrasting viewpoints on the genesis of lesbianism: (1) it "is biologically determined"; or (2) it is "either a second-best choice by 'mannish' women who are unattractive to men or a political choice by angry feminists." Although he states that given the discrimination visited on gay men and lesbians, "the idea that millions of young men and women have chosen it . . . seems preposterous," Posner seems to prefer the choice theory regarding lesbians. He reasons that any genetic basis for "lesbian preference would have tended to be selected out" in the "evolutionary era." Posner states that this era "apparently was characterized by a high degree of interpersonal violence, [and having] additional male protectors may well have done more for a child's chances of survival than to have additional female protectors." Posner also asserts that "[t]he rarity of lesbianism among animals" negates a genetic explanation of lesbianism, supporting his sociobiological theory. Therefore, assuming lesbians are made rather than born, Posner expects "opportunistic homosexuality to be more common among women than among men, at least relative to 'real' homosexuality."

I can't vouch for whether Ertman's account of Posner's arguments is a fully fair one, but I think you can get a feel for how easily Posner's economic journey into sex could generate the sort of offense that the UNLV student experienced with Hoppe.

As someone who works a lot on diversity issues, where people's backgrounds (including specifically their sexual orientation) are supposed to lead them to have different experiences and different viewpoints, I find it strange that people would rule out viewpoint differences without inquiring into the evidence. The line between a generalization and a stereotype is a fine one. The primary problem with stereotyping is in failing to treat someone who could be treated as an individual as an individual, just assuming when you have individual evidence that the person is guided by his race, gender, sexual orientation, or politics. But it should be permissible to describe average differences between groups, such as that African-Americans tend to vote for Democrats.

I have been working a bit on differences in gay views over the last year (I'm director of Northwestern's Demography of Diversity Project). There is very little published work in the field—and it often conflicts. A recent study found no differences in reported happiness between gays and straights, while perhaps the leading study (Laumann et al.) found that gays are somewhat less happy. Would Ed Laumann, former provost and former chair of Sociology at the University of Chicago, be reprimanded if he were to present his data at UNLV? I could imagine some people being offended to hear Laumann's claim that gays in his sample reported being less happy, though one might attribute such a feeling (if true) to discrimination. If Laumann is wrong (or if his findings are not generalizable to more recent years, as more recent data hints), collecting and analyzing additional data is the way to refute him.

Certainly, stereotypes about gays can be used against them. Peg Brinig and I have been kicking around the idea of examining the claim sometimes made in custody cases that gays are more selfish or less altruistic and thus less likely to make good parents. My preliminary exploration of the data suggests that this stereotype of gays and lesbians is probably false.

SOME DATA ON HOPPE'S HYPOTHESIS:

(To read about the results of my data analysis on questions relevant to Hoppe's general planning claim, click here)

CONCLUSION ON DATA ANALYSIS:

There is good evidence on one GSS question about the future (GRNECON) that gays and bisexuals on average have different views from straights and celibates. Of course, one of the premises of the diversity rationale is that gays and bisexuals have different views on some issues, so this is hardly surprising. Yet the results on the GRNECON question show gays being relatively more concerned about future environmental issues (not less as the Hoppe hypothesis might suggest).

On a more relevant question about planning for the future, there are no significant results using usual scholarly standards. But if you mine the data fairly aggressively (and without a theoretical justification for doing so), there is one specification in which the data point to gays and bisexuals planning less. And the significance of that model disappears if you control for marital status, which would also fit Hoppe's claims.

On balance, the data that I looked at suggest that there are likely systematic differences between gays and straights on average in some aspects of planning, but the nature of that difference is probably not what was hypothesized by Hoppe. In other words, there is more evidence in the data I examined that Hoppe is wrong than that he is right, but there is some evidence on general planning that he is right, though that evidence does not reach significance using usual scholarly standards for choosing models to test.

From what I have seen, the general Hoppe hypothesis is probably false, though it may be true in some particulars. If it's true beyond the number of sexual partner differences (which are probably substantial, but not huge), the effect is almost certainly too small to explain much. But that should be decided in a scholarly setting, not one that challenges the right of an economist to put forward his economic theories in class.

One statement of the meaning of academic freedom is set out in the 1967 Kalven Report, a statement of policy by the University of Chicago explaining why a university should not take political positions on matters of public policy.

Here is part of the Kalven Report:

The mission of the university is the discovery, improvement, and dissemination of knowledge. Its domain of inquiry and scrutiny includes all aspects and all values of society. A university faithful to its mission will provide enduring challenges to social values, policies, practices, and institutions. By design and by effect, it is the institution which creates discontent with the existing social arrangements and proposes new ones. In brief, a good university, like Socrates, will be upsetting.

The instrument of dissent and criticism is the individual faculty member or the individual student. The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic. It is, to go back once again to the classic phrase, a community of scholars. To perform its mission in the society, a university must sustain an extraordinary environment of freedom of inquiry and maintain an independence from political fashions, passions, and pressures. A university, if it is to be true to its faith in intellectual inquiry, must embrace, be hospitable to, and encourage the widest diversity of views within its own community. It is a community but only for the limited, albeit great, purposes of teaching and research. It is not a club, it is not a trade association, it is not a lobby.

Since the university is a community only for these limited and distinctive purposes, it is a community which cannot take collective action on the issues of the day without endangering the conditions for its existence and effectiveness. There is no mechanism by which it can reach a collective position without inhibiting that full freedom of dissent on which it thrives. It cannot insist that all of its members favor a given view of social policy; if it takes collective action, therefore, it does so at the price of censuring any minority who do not agree with the view adopted. In brief, it is a community which cannot resort to majority vote to reach positions on public issues.

The neutrality of the university as an institution arises then not from a lack of courage nor out of indifference and insensitivity. It arises out of respect for free inquiry and the obligation to cherish a diversity of viewpoints. And this neutrality as an institution has its complement in the fullest freedom for its faculty and students as individuals to participate in political action and social protest. It finds its complement, too, in the obligation of the university to provide a forum for the most searching and candid discussion of public issues.

The members of the committee issuing the report included John Hope Franklin and future Nobel laureate George Stigler, who slightly dissented from a few sentences on the rare instances where the university in its corporate capacity as a property owner, receiver of funds, or member of an organization might take account of politics.

While criticizing the American Sociological Association for taking a public position on Iraq, William Sjostrom called the Kalven Report "the best statement of academic freedom I know of."

Erin O'Connor praised the language of the Kalven Report while discussing an idea I sent her in my pre-blogging days, a proposal that universities adopt an explicit policy that students and faculty have no right not to be offended. My argument then:

Universities should adopt explicit policies rejecting the right not to be offended. As a current graduate student in Sociology at the University of Chicago, I was offended by the way that some of Marx's ideas on economics were taught, particularly the labor theory of value--as if Marx's critique was sound economics, as if we hadn't had fifty million people killed by the collectivism of agriculture alone (a modest estimate not including the tens of millions dying in collectivist wars).

The idea that I had a right not to be offended in class never even occurred to me, and would be one that I would find offensive to be offered.

I was scheduled to have the great Harry Kalven for first-year torts in 1974 at the University of Chicago, but his final illness progressed to the point where he couldn't teach any more, so we had the brilliant young Bob Ellickson (now at Yale) to fill in teaching us torts, a course outside his usual area of expertise (property).

Unfortunately, Don Randel, the current president of the University of Chicago, has given a more confused and confusing statement on academic freedom.