Thoughtful column by Professor KC Johnson in Inside Higher Ed on the question of intellectual diversity in higher education, Transparency or a 'Selig Strategy'?

As Commissioner Bud Selig and several prominent players attempted to evade subpoenas for recent House of Representatives hearings on baseball's steroid problem, Rep. Henry Waxman observed, "What strikes me is that baseball doesn't want to investigate it and they don't want us to investigate it." The California congressman summed up baseball's policy as "don't know, don't tell."

This "Selig Strategy" could also describe the academy's response to indications that the nation's humanities and social sciences departments suffer from a lack of intellectual and programmatic diversity. Calls for outside inquiries have been denounced as violations of academic freedom, while few if any signs exist that the very internal academic procedures that created the problem can successfully resolve it.

Instead of imitating baseball's strategy of trying to cover up relevant information, the academy should bring transparency to the now-cloaked world of faculty hires and in-class instruction, compiling and publicizing the necessary data, probably through college and department Web sites. Such a response would allow the educational establishment to employ the habits of the academic world, namely reasoned analysis through use of hard evidence, to address (and, when false, disprove) specific allegations of ideological bias. At the same time, the exposure associated with greater transparency might deter those professors inclined to abuse their classroom authority for indoctrination.

Johnson also lays out his view of how this greater transparency could work.

A number of readers have asked what is the deal with bankruptcy exemptions, and homestead exemptions in particular? A quick primer on exemptions and their relationship to bankruptcy.

Even though the Bankruptcy Code is federal, exemptions are primarily a creature of state law. This reflects a deal cut when the first permanent bankruptcy act was enacted in 1898. Basically, representatives of farm states were concerned that big-city bankers were going to foreclose on farms, so to protect farmers, they provided that state law would control what property a debtor could protect from his creditors in bankruptcy.

Today, the pro-farmer roots of the state control over exemptions continues to be reflected in the fact that many of the states that have an unlimited homestead exemption are farm states--Iowa, Kansas, and South Dakota--and even Texas was originally a cattle ranch exemption. Florida also has an unlimited homestead exemption (I'm not sure of the historical provenance) and the District of Columbia I believe does as well.

At least one alert reader has observed that the state-based nature of exemptions appears to violate the Constitution, in that one of Congress's enumerated powers in Article I, section 8 is to enact "uniform" bankruptcy laws. In Hanover Bank v. Moyses (1902), the Supreme Court held that this “personal” nonuniformity in treatment among individuals was permissible, so long as “geographical” uniformity was preserved. Thus, debtors and creditors in different states may receive different treatment, so long as the debtors and creditors within the same State are treated the same. The “uniformity” requirement does, however, forbid “private” bankruptcy laws that affect only particular debtors.

So the bankruptcy reform legislation does several things to limit fraud and abuse of the homestead exemption. First, a debtor who relocates to a new state (such as OJ Simpson buying a house in Florida) would have to wait 40 months before he could take advantage of that state's unlimited homestead exemption. Second, it creates a 10 year reachback period for attacking fraudulent use of the homestead exemption. Third, it places a cap on the value of the homestead exemption as applied to judgments obtained for securities fraud--essentially depriving Ken Lay and Scott Sullivan of the ability to assert their Texas and Florida homestead exemptions against victims of securities fraud by Enron and WorldCom.

The legislation, however, does not place a flat cap on the value of the homestead exemption that an individual can exempt in bankruptcy. Why not?

First, because as noted, historically the primary beneficiaries of the homestead exemption were Kansas and Iowa farmers. A flat cap would apply to these farmers as much as it would to wealth Florida doctors. Once it is recognized that the issue is about both farmers and doctors, for many people it becomes a much more difficult political and policy question, and it certainly is not so clear that everyone would agree that a South Dakota family farmer is abusing the bankruptcy system by using his unlimited state homestead exemption. Indeed, were such a cap to be imposed, I suspect that the critics of the legislation would probably say that it is unfair because it would force farmers off their land just to satisfy their creditors.

Second, the bill does target what most people do think of as unquestionably bankruptcy abuse--borrowing money in a low-exemption state then relocating to a high-exemption state on the eve of bankruptcy. Moreover, it allows targeting of special claims that don't involve farmers, such as fraudulent use of the homestead exemption and securities fraud. This also explains why the abuse we usually hear about usually involves Texas or Florida--fat cats are more likely to buy a beach house in Florida to evade creditors rather than a wheat farm in South Dakota.

Third, although reasonable minds can disagree, it appears that most of the costs of the unlimited homestead exemption are borne by individuals within that state. According to a paper a few years ago by Gropp, Scholz, and White, residents of unlimited homestead exemption states have higher interest rates, are more likely to be denied credit, and get access to less credit than residents of other states. Thus, it appears that the ability to protect more property ex post in bankruptcy is factored into the risk assessment ex ante at the lending stage. Much of the cost thus appears to be kept in state and there is not much evidence of interstate spillovers. Given the apparent lack of interstate spillovers, it can be reasonably argued that this particular decision is justifiable on federalism grounds--combined of course with the limitations that the reform legislation imposes on relocating right before bankruptcy (before the creditor can adjust its lending behavior to take account of the heightened risk).

Fourth, the potential for abuse appears to be unique to the unlimited homestead exemption. As I suggested in my post earlier today, Bankruptcy Courts have long had the power to attack debtors who attempt to use trusts, exemptions, and other vehicles to try to protect excessive property in bankruptcy. In a famous case (Northwest Bank Nebraska v. Tveten), the court denied the bankruptcy discharge of a doctor who cashed out all of his non-exempt assets and converted them to an exempt annuity purchased from a fraternal organization, which at the time had an unlimited exemption under state law. Notwithstanding this legal status, the 8th Circuit permitted the exemption, but then denied the detor's discharge (he had almost $19 million in debts and $700,000 in assets). Courts can also attack these sorts of schemes as fraudulent transfers and have a variety of tools at their disposal. This is the reason why it is so unlikely that the hypothetical concerns about the asset protection trust will turn out to be real--because bankruptcy courts can easily attack those naked efforts to protect assets.

In contrast to other exemptions which have generally been subjected to an implicit reasonableness requirement, the unlimited homestead exemption has often been treated as sacred, especially in Florida where it appears that it may even protect property even for someone convicted of fraud or criminal behavior (for a discussion see here and here).

So, as noted in the discussion earlier today, the bankruptcy reform legislation is designed to target real, documented abuses of the system, and not willy-nilly chasing made-up or hypothetical bankruptcy abuses. Congress never amended the code to place a flat exemption on abuse of the unlimited exemption for annuities purchased from fraternal organizations, because existing law worked just fine to take care of that problem. It seems pretty clear that courts will also take care of the problem of asset protection trusts if the situation arises--just as they have taken care of foreign asset protecion trusts.

I personally don't have strong views on the specific weighing of the federal bankruptcy concerns for uniformity versus the federalism concerns and I think either position is reasonable--so long as the forum-shopping problem is alleviated, which it is by the bill.

So next time you hear someone ranting about how the bankruptcy reform legislation does nothing to crack down on the unlimited homestead exemption, mentally substitute "Kansas family farmer" for "Florida millionaire" and see if you still feel that the bankruptcy reform legislation's failure to close this "loophole" is an unfair sop to the rich.

Pretty funny: "Antitrust Controlled by Jerks, Says New Evolutionary Biology Report".

Since I just recently left the FTC, I wonder what this says about my evolutionary fitness?

I have another new article posted, this one on the antitrust state action doctrine, co-authored with a former colleague at the FTC, "The FTC and State Action: Evolving Views on the Proper Role of Government" which is available for download from SSRN. It was written for the symposium on the 90th Anniversary of the Federal Trade Commission, which will be published later this year in the Antitrust Law Journal.

Here's the abstract:

Abstract: The state action doctrine was born in an era of exceptional confidence in government, with governmental entities widely regarded as unbiased and conscientious defenders of the public interest. Over time, however, more cautious and skeptical theories of government began to gain sway. In particular, the school of thought known as "public choice" - which holds that governmental entities, like private firms, will act in their economic self-interest - began to influence both legal theory and competition policy. Indeed, a close examination of recent state action case law suggests that public choice thinking has driven a slow, but consistent, evolution of the doctrine toward less deference to state regulators and more careful assessment of the actual incentives that drive their decision-making.

This evolution in thinking, however, has not been accompanied by the development of a systematic, analytical framework to guide the application of the state action doctrine in particular cases. Developing such a framework should therefore remain a top priority of leading antitrust policymakers, including those at the Federal Trade Commission.

I haven't followed the Schiavo case that closely, but I gotta say that Tom Smith's brillian satire on the Right Coast, Michael Schiavo in Hell (A Play in One Paragraph) hits home.

Update:

On reflection, and after reading some sound criticism from Mark Kleiman and others I now recognize that the word "brilliant" isn't the right word to capture what I was trying to express in my original post, especially because I'm honestly conflicted about where I come down on the whole thing. I still don't know the exact right word, but something about Smith's piece provoked me to think about the event in a bit of a different way.

Gail Heriot has uncovered a previous study by some of the authors of the much-criticized study claiming that 50% of bankruptcies are caused by medical problems. Gail observes:

I learned today that this was not the first time lead author David Himmelstein and co-author Steffie Woolhandler, both Harvard University associate clinical professors of medicine, weighed in with an unusual medical perspective on a hotly contested political issue. In 1996, when Massachusetts was considering abolishing rent control, Himmelstein and Woolhandler protested with the argument that (as Woolhandler put it), "If rent control vanishes, dozens will die." Noting that stress and social isolation can and sometimes do result in heart attack and death, she stated, "One-third of our heart attack patients at Cambridge Hospital live in rent-controlled apartments. By allowing landlords to force them out, the governor and state Legislature are implementing the death penalty--a social policy sure to kill."

Only heart attacks by rent-subsidized tenants were considered in this curious analysis. One could, of course, spin out similar tales of heart attacks by landlords who are unable to make ends meet because they can't charge fair market rents or of would-be tenants falling ill when they can't find an apartment at all, because nobody is willing to build apartments buildings that will only be rent controlled when completed. But evidently the good doctors were not inclined to go that far.

She has some other good reporting from that time.

A few weeks ago, I posted on the purported problem of bankruptcy reform and so-called "asset protection trusts." I noted at that time that I had been unable to find any actual cases of these trusts being used to shield assets from creditors in bankruptcy (I still haven't found any). I also asked for examples from readers, but no one has provided me with any examples (the only examples I received were for third-party "spendthrift" trusts, not self-settled asset protection trusts where the debtor retains substantial control over the proceeds of the trust).

Moreover, it is very doubtful that one of these asset-protection trusts would actually hold up in bankruptcy. Bankruptcy law already contains numerous applicable ways of preventing debtors from using these to abuse bankruptcy. First, courts can, and likely would, attack them as fraudulent conveyances under sections 544 or 548 of the Code. Courts could also deny the discharge to any debtor that tried to use an asset protection trust, which is exactly what courts have done when confronted with offshore asset-protection trusts.

So at this point, the entire debate about the possibility of debtors using asset-protection trusts to shield assets in bankruptcy appears to be wholly hypothetical--there does not appear to be a single case where a bankrupt has used an asset protection trust to shield assets from his or her creditors. Nor is there any reason to believe that under current law a debtor could use an asset-protection trust to get away with bankruptcy abuse. In fact, most people I have talked with about these trusts indicate that they are primarily a vehicle for tax evasion rather than a bankruptcy-proofing vehicle.

Yet, amazingly, many have criticized the Senate for rejecting an amendment that would have closed this "loophole" as the New York Times has called it (more on the Times in a moment, as it appears to be source of all the confusion on this issue).

Instead of pursuing all of the possible hypothetical abuses of the bankruptcy code, Congress has sensibly enough decided to focus on attacking real, documented abuses of the bankruptcy system, such as secretly hiding assets, homestead exemption abuse, and requiring high-income debtors to repay what they can as a condition for discharge.

Nonetheless, the legislation has been roundly criticized for the failure to "do something" about self-settled asset-protection trusts. (Of course, the Senate did place some limits on fraudulent use of these vehicles through the Talent Amendment.) A search reveals, for instance, roughly two dozen newspaper editorials critizing the Senate for the failure to adopted a proposed amendment closing the imaginary loophole. Professor Elizabeth Warren invoked the same criticism when I appeared with her on CNN. Paul Krugman invoked it as well is his confused criticisms of the legislation.

How did so many people get caught up in a feeding frenzy over such a phony issue? As is so often the case, it appears that it can be traced back to the New York Times, ever-gullible when it comes to perceived efforts by the Republicans to befriend big business and the wealthy. Beginning with an article in the March 2 New York Times, "Proposed Law on Bankruptcy Has Loophole" the Times started its intrepid reporting of asset-protection trusts. My research indicates that this is the first mention of asset-protection trusts in connection with the bankruptcy reform legislation. Note--although the bankruptcy reform legislation has been around for eight years, and the trusts as legal vehicles have been around since 1997, concern about them appeared this year for the first time. In that article, Gretchen Morgenson writes:

The bankrutpcy legislation being debated by the Senate is intended to make it harder for people to walk away from their credit card and other debts. But legal specilaists say the proposed law leaves open an increasingly popular loophole that lets wealthy people protect substantial assets from creditors even after filing for bankruptcy.

The loophole involves the use of so-called asset proptection trusts.

Hmmmm, "increasingly popular"? Interestingly, the Times provides no examples nor any statistics to support this conclusion that this is an "increasinlgy popular loophole that lets wealthy people protect substantial assets from creditors even after filing for bankruptcy."

In that article, the Times quotes among others, Professor Warren:

This is just a way for rich folks to be able to slip through the noose on bankruptcy, and of course, the double irony here is that the proponents of this bill keep pressing it as designed to eliminate abuse," said Elizabeth Warren, a law professor at Harver Law School. "Yet when provisions that permit real abuse by rich people are pointed out, the bill's propoents look the other way."

"Real abuses"? Now might be a good time for at least one example of the "real abuse".

The Times returned to the issue on March 4, again pretending like this was a real, rather than purely hypothetical abuse under current law, but once again citing no examples of an asset-protection trust holding up in bankruptcy (and ignoring the tools that bankruptcy judges have used to police abuse of foreign asset-protection trusts), then referenced it again on March 9.

A Westlaw search in the Allnews data base indicates that most of the newspaper editorials around the country then picked up the story and followed the Times over the cliff, running with it after the biased reporting by the Times first alerted them to this supposed rash of abuse. Reading those stories, none of them as far as I can tell have provided any evidence either.

In the end, it seems like a pretty specious criticism of the bankruptcy reform legislation that it doesn't chase down every hypothetical possible abuse that someone could dream up, especially when it is pretty clear that the possibility of the hypothetical abuse becoming a real abuse is really quite slim. The strength of the bankruptcy reform legislation is that it provides practical, workable solutions to real bankruptcy fraud and abuse. It is incremental rather than radical, building on the institutions that we already have in place. It is balanced and pragmatic. The abuses it targets are supported by facts and reality, not these sorts of silly distractions.

If the standard for attacking real, documented banrkutpcy fraud and abuse is that Congress also needs to close every hypothetical loophole even when current law appears to do the job fine, then yes, the reform legislation fails to close a lot of other loopholes--it does nothing about the possibility that someone might be able to protect real estate acquired on Mars, for instance, and does nothing to address the possibility that an alchemist might develop a machine that turns lead into gold and wants to exempt the machine in bankruptcy. It seems to me that Congress can better spend its time cleaning up real abuse in the system rather than chasing imaginary rabbits.

If this was a real problem, then Congress could and should act on it. But to criticize Congress for a failure to attack something that doesn't even appear to be an actual problem--get real.

And, of course, it more than a bit ironic that critics of the legislation simultaneously criticize it as a gift to the consumer credit industry, yet we are supposed to believe that they were unable to close this supposedly notorious loophole for the wealthy that just leaves money sitting on the table? It seems like at some point one of these two mutually-incompatible theories have to give.

A final word--I fear that the bankruptcy bar and bankruptcy industry has really harmed its credibility over the past few years through its scorched-earth attacks on the bankruptcy bill, starting with playing the bogus "women and children" card out of the box, moving onto the Schumer abortion amendment, and now the phony asset-protection trust attack. Like the boy who cried "wolf" too often, the complicity of the bankruptcy bar in schemes to mislead and confuse Congress had, I fear, forever tarnished its credibility on bankruptcy legislation.

A brief and useful summary of the caselaw on asset protection trusts is provided by Melanie Leslie, 231 New York Law Journal (Feb. 14, 2005).

Posner provides straightforward explanation of the Bankruptcy Reform Legislation, echoed by Becker. A useful overview of the basic economics involved, and along the lines of which I testified in more depth in the Senate Judiciary Committee I haven't said before.

Je also fails to note the empirical evidence that demonstrates the trivial payouts made to unsecured creditors in chapter 7 (about 95% of cases pay nothing, and the others generally only pay a couple of pennies on the dollar), so that the model that contemplates an actual surrender of nonexempt property in chapter 7 is not really a very realistic description of how the world actually operates in practice.

His punchline is right on though:

Behind the Bankruptcy Reform Act, as behind the President’s proposal for social security reform, is an ideology of giving nonwealthy people greater responsibility for their own economic welfare, which entails subjecting them to additional financial risk. Under the present system, the prudent and the imprudent consumer pay the same high interest rates, assuming creditors can’t readily determine which consumers are prudent and which are imprudent. By lowering interest rates on credit-card and other consumer debt while at the same time discouraging default, the Bankruptcy Reform Act will encourage consumers to exercise greater care in borrowing—yet at the same time, because interest rates will be lower, the Act will enable prudent consumers (who do not face a high risk of bankruptcy) to borrow more and by doing so will increase their consumption options. The Act will not redistribute wealth from the poor to the rich, but from the imprudent borrower to the prudent borrower.

As I have said before, this bill is at bottom about rewarding personal responsibility.

Dartlog reports that ISI has announced its 2005 Polly Awards for Campus Outrages. Harvard's attack on Larry Summers finished fifth.

The other day, I posted on a new study regarding the ideological imbalance on college faculties. There is a huge amount in the blogosphere, including of course, a few things right here by Juan. It appears that this time around, at least, no one is actually denying that the imbalance exists. I'll just comment on one key question that has been raised, which is, if there is such an imbalance, does it matter (as implicitly raised here)?

Intellectual diversity matters because it goes to the core of a liberal education. My remarks here will focus on colleges, because the underlying study doesn't address law schools. Also, this is a long post already, so I venture no speculation on the causes of the imbalance or opinions on rectifying it (the trackbacks to my first post have some interesting views on those matters especially this one), just my views on why I think it is an educational problem.

The way I see it, college education exists for three purposes: (1) to develop human capital, (2) to educate and develop critical thinking skills and intellectual self-discovery and character in students, and (3) to develop individuals who can participate as responsible citizens in a free and democratic society.

(1) Developing human capital: Ideological diversity has little to do with this really because it is just developing skills, such as in engineering, science, computer science, and business administration. Clearly this is an important part of education, but not the only thing, because otherwise we wouldn't offer English, Philosophy, etc., in universities. So I will set this aside.

(2) Educating critical thinking skills and intellectual self-discovery: Ideological diversity has a lot to do with this. The purpose of education should be to teach students how to think, not what to think. I don't know how you can teach students to analyze arguments and determine the truth value about claims about the world if you don't expose them to a variety of ideas. As Greg Ransom observes the presence of an intellectual orthodoxy on campus can severely hamper student's critical reasoning skills. Ransom's experience is that many students do in fact absorb some degree of indoctrination at a very superficial level, and that the virtual absence of any serious counterarguments leaves them at this very superficial and unreflective mode of analysis. I think this is probably right--for instance, I am amazed at the shallowness of analysis that I hear from ostensibly educated students. Comments I hear about environmental issues, in particular, come to mind.

UPDATE: I added as an update after my initial post "intellectual self-discovery" for students in response to a perceptive reader comment. I did mean to include this as well as part of this point--in addition to developing individual critical reasoning skills, it is also important to develop individual student intellectual skills to understand themselves and the world better as well as guiding ethical and character attributes. Obviously this requires students to wrestle with various ideas in coming to their own world views.

(3) Educating citizens for a free and democratic society: One of our major goals as educators is to educate individuals who can participate as citizens in the governance of a free and democratic society. If not, then I can't understand why the taxpayers of many states subsidize colleges. If so, it seems to me that it is imperative that students be exposed to all viewpoints about the world and to learn to evaluate the truth and resonance of competing world views. Living together as citizens in a free society, and having the kinds of connections and conversations that make that possible, requires developing a depth of understanding that cannot be created in an atmosphere of one-sided intellectual orthodoxy. It is a pretty short road from the impoverished discussions in modern universities to the idiocy of Michael Moore and red v. blue America. I don't pretend that American political discussion was ever that exhaulted, but surely we used to hold educated people to a higher standard of discourse then we see today, especially on university campuses? I personally would add to this that as part of educating free and responsible citizens we should make sure students understand the intellectual and historical foundations of the western world, but I recognize that this is a more controversial proposition.

So if the purpose of education is to educate students to think for themselves and to develop critical thinking skills about the world, as to become good citizens, leaders, and self-reliant individuals, does this require a diversity of opinion on the faculty? Or is it sufficient to leave up to individual professors on the honor system to try to present all sides of an issue in class and to make sure that students engage the various arguments on all sides of an issue?

While there are many good professors who create an open and balanced forum for a true exchange of ideas, there are many situations where this plaintly is not the case. Most obviously, the entire point of many courses today is to present a particular viewpoint, not to create a balanced discussion, such as Women's Studies, African-American Studies, and GLBT Studies (for instance, when Dartmouth added a GLBT Studies program a few years ago, its first course was taught by a local activist, rather than a properly-qualified professor).

Second, many professors do abuse the power of the podium in order to proselytize for their particular ideological views and to attack competing ideas. When I was in college, for instance, my required introductory class for my major on international politics consisted of a sustained rant by the professor against Ronald Reagan and the Strategic Defense Initiative and why we needed to maintain the policy of Mutually Assured Destruction (this was in 1984). My "History of the American South" class was a one semester narrative by a Marxist professor on how rich southern whites had conspired to manipulate racist sentiments among lower-class whites to keep them from banding together in the "natural" economic alliance of poor whites and blacks to plunder the property of rich whites. He was the only one who taught it, so if I wanted to take it (I was from South Carolina, so I was interested in it), I had to take it from him. I could go on, but I'm sure everyone has their own similar horror stories. The clear purpose of those teaching these classes it to proselytize and try to tell students what to think. Add political correctness into the mix and this is a pretty potent stew.

Leaving aside these obviously biased courses and professors, even the best professors are going to have a tendency to teach to their strengths and what they know best and are most interested in. And, I believe, this is perfectly natural, and probably is the way it should be because that is what makes for the best educational experience. But this is why you need to have professors with a variety of interests and strengths. Even something as simple as putting together a syllabus reflects a professor's views about what is important or interesting. I don't think that my experience as a Government major was unique--I read Marx in almost every class (often even in classes where he didn't even seem relevant). But for the fact that at the time Dartmouth had a Burkean and a Straussian on the faculty--both now retired--I don't know that I would have ever read Burke, Locke, or The Federalist. Fortunately I stumbled across the Institute for Humane Studies while I was in college, and so was exposed to classical liberal and conservative thinkers. But this requires taking the effort to look beyond the campus.

Intellectual diversity, therefore, is crucial in that exposes students to a variety of ideas and perspectives, and through that developes critical thinking skills and an understanding of different ways of seeing the world which is necessary for living in a free and democratic society. I think the failure to have a serious representation of libertarian and conservative professors on campus, and the resultant tendency of the left to trivialize that world view (which is, after all, held by roughly 50% of students!), breeds a cynicism in students about the whole intellectual enterprise in which we are engaged. If the university itself doesn't take ideas seriously and doesn't care about free, open, and informed discussion of ideas, why would we possibly think that students would be any more interested in it? And if we aren't going to teach them critical reasoning skills and to search for truth, they may as well major in Computer Science or Business Administration.

When universities fail to do their job, it seems to me that we get one of two results. First, we can get the shallow indoctrination phenomenon described by Ramson--opinions without serious intellectual support. Or second, we can the "tuning out" effect that I described in my earlier post (also noted here), where students simply ignore what happens in class and just regurgitate the mantra that they are fed. Either way, we have failed at the task of education.

Update:

To clarify, when I say "they may as well major in Computer Science or Business Administration" I do not intend to denigrate those majors in the slightest--I am just saying that if we don't accomplish the other two goals of a liberal education, then we should just treat colleges and universities as trade schools that just develop human capital, rather than developing good citizens, critical thinking skills, and intellectual self-discovery.

I share David Brooks's dilemma--what to do about the Washington Nationals (hat tip The Corner). Unlike any other sport, baseball is, and remains, a truly local game. The rhythm of the day-to-day summer game and the local social atmosphere and conversation that surrounds it tends to pull you toward following and supporting the local team. In this way, baseball strikes me as being very different from, say, football, which is more of a once-a-week event, where the enjoyment of the game is self-contained. Much of the appeal of baseball, I think, surrounds the ongoing conversations and commentary of the games from day-to-day, making it more of an ongoing local news story than a once a week event.

So while I've been a Braves fan for 20 years I can already feel the pull that Brooks describes.

Howard Kurtz reports today on a new study on the lack of intellectual diversity on campus College Faculties A Most Liberal Lot, Study Finds. I haven't been able to find a copy of the actual underlying study, so if someone knows where it is, please point me to it. So I'll rely on Kurtz's summary here.

According to Kurtz's summary:

By their own description, 72 percent of those teaching at American universities and colleges are liberal and 15 percent are conservative, says the study being published this week. The imbalance is almost as striking in partisan terms, with 50 percent of the faculty members surveyed identifying themselves as Democrats and 11 percent as Republicans.

The disparity is even more pronounced at the most elite schools, where, according to the study, 87 percent of faculty are liberal and 13 percent are conservative.

Broken down by departments:

The most liberal faculties are those devoted to the humanities (81 percent) and social sciences (75 percent), according to the study. But liberals outnumbered conservatives even among engineering faculty (51 percent to 19 percent) and business faculty (49 percent to 39 percent).

The most left-leaning departments are English literature, philosophy, political science and religious studies, where at least 80 percent of the faculty say they are liberal and no more than 5 percent call themselves conservative, the study says.

As I said, I haven't been able to find the underlying study, but as reported by Howard Kurtz, the finding here are consistent with the findings of Dan Klein's research, which I commented on a few weeks back. At that time, I was struck by a couple of things. First, that although a lot of people nitpicked at the study, none of them were able to rebut the central conclusion of the study. In fact, most of the criticism seems to have been done by critics who apparently didn't read all of Klein's underlying research which looks at both policy views and party affiliation.

Second, no one has provided any evidence that contradicts the central findings of these studies, whether Klein's or the apparent conclusions of the new study. I'm sure that advocates of the status quo will find something to pick at in the new study as well--but if the findings of these studies are fundamentally flawed, at some point wouldn't someone find something to the contrary? If the evidence was otherwise mixed, then nitpicking at particular studies is one thing, but when the evidence begins to accumulate, at some point it seems like nitpicking is somewhat unresponsive to the underlying issue.

If there is evidence out there that shows a libertarian/conservative takeover of academia, I haven't seen it.

The evidence is mounting that there is an ideological one-sidedness to university campuses today. The relevant question is whether it is having an effect on the education of American college students. Interestingly, one observation in the Kurtz article is striking:

When asked about the findings, Jonathan Knight, director of academic freedom and tenure for the American Association of University Professors, said, *** "It's hard to see that these liberal views cut very deeply into the education of students. In fact, a number of studies show the core values that students bring into the university are not very much altered by being in college."

This is consistent with what I hear from many of my own students--university campuses have become so cartoonishly left-wing that many students are essentially just tuning out their professors. Students report that they just go through the motions of pretending that they are converted, then they just regurgitate the mantra on exams in order to get a good grade. Meanwhile, many students dismiss their professors as risible ideologues (a good example here).

Perhaps the fact that students are largely unchanged by their university experience is the most damning comment of all about what is going on at universities today.

Finally, is anyone else surprised that Religious studies is self-reported as one of the most liberal departments? I would have thought if conservatives were present anywhere, it would be in religious studies.

Update:

I see my co-conspirator literally was simultaneously writing on the same article as I was.

Update:

As for my question at the end--the answer is "yes," apparently I am the only one who is surprised. I heard from several readers who studied religion in college or grad school and they are not the slightest bit surprised and report that most university religious studies departments today are devoutly multiculturalist (many religious university religious studies professors study non-Western religions) and tend to be quite hostile to Christianity. I didn't take any religious studies courses in college, so I wasn't familiar with the sociology of the profession, which was very interesting to me.

Pete the Elder adds:

I for one am not surprised that religion departments are liberal based on my undergraduate experience. Secular biblical studies for instance seems very liberal to me with the focus being on showing that the traditional views about the Bible are way off in areas like original authorship (did Paul write all the letters attributed to him?) and accuracy of the texts (did Jesus say what the Gospels record?). See the Jesus Seminar for a good example of this liberal/post modern dominance.

FIRE is also mentioned in today's Mallard Fillmore comic strip, including noting that FIRE's "Guide to Free Speech on Campus" can be obtained free by students. According to the comic strip (that's a phrase I never thought I would write) FIRE's book discusses student's free speech rights, campus speech codes, and how students can fight them.

FIRE's Greg Lukianoff observes:

[At] the core of the philosophy of free speech is a very beautiful idea: humility. None of us is omniscient and we must at all times recognize that wisdom can arise from unexpected sources.... Professors who remember that their students present a constant opportunity for them to learn and are not merely inductees to be reformed to a “correct” way of thinking better represent the true spirit of both liberty and education. If more professors, students, and administrators approached the views of others with humility and a willingness to learn through the process of debate and discussion we would see far fewer of the types of abuses FIRE fights every day.

Nicely said.