One of the questions for Lawrence Summers now apparently is why only 4 of 32 tenure-track offers in recent years have gone to women. A seemingly obvious question–I wonder how many offers were made to conservatives/libertarians/Republicans during that same period? If Dan Klein’s data on other elite universities is accurate for Harvard (and there is no obvious reason why not), the most likely number is zero (or at least less than 4), notwithstanding the fact that according to last year’s election, some 51% of voters appear to be right of center (roughly the same percentage as there are women in America).
More fundamentally, if a faculty of say 100 members only had 2 or 3 women on the faculty, surely there would be little hesitation by many in ascribing this to disparity to pernicious discrimination against women, and that “more needs to be done” (as President Summers is hearing in the current howls of outrage). And, fact, presuming discrimination from such a gross disparity will frequently turn out to be correct, especially in setting such as nonprofit universities which are insulated from market pressures (one reason why unions historically discriminate so much). Certainly the numbers give rise to a presumption that is correct often enough to put the burden on the other side to show that it is being responsible and applying the same standards and efforts to the recruitment of women as men.
But if this is so, why is it that if a faculty has only 2 or 3 conservatives/libertarians, a similar presumption does not apply? Surely such a gross disparity at least gives rise to the same prima facie case of ideological discrimination, doesn’t it?
Note that the difference cannot be that sexual discrimination is obvious but ideological discrimination is not, in that the nature of academia is that the centerpiece of the academic exercise is the ostentatious display of ones’ ideas, so everyone knows your ideological views.
So, President Summers, while you are looking at faculty diversity issues …
Update:
It has been pointed out to me that if President Summers is reading, I hope he doesn’t take my observation to be evidence of the innate inferiority of conservative and libertarian scholars.
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