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).
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