Brian Leiter: Another Advantage Aspiring Law Teachers on the Right Have Over Others It’s programs like this, which employ ideological criteria for eligibility. The American legal academy is already quite far to the right on a range of economic and policy issues by comparison to both the rest of the U.S. academy and the legal […]
Archive | Academia
The Return of ROTC to Elite Universities
By Ilya Somin on June 1, 2011 1:04 pm in Academia, Don't Ask, Don't Tell (DADT), Military, War and Armed Conflict, War on Terror
The LA Times has an article describing how ROTC programs have returned to many elite universities in the wake of the abolition of the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy: Helped by the recession, more active recruiting and a sea change in student perceptions of the military, enrollment in ROTC programs on college campuses is booming. […]
The UCSD Committee on Academic Freedom Report
By Eugene Volokh on May 27, 2011 5:10 pm in Academia, Freedom of Speech at Colleges and Universities
A colleague pointed me to the report, which also quotes the don’t-publish-your-article letter from the dean. (For more on the matter, see this post from earlier today.) Here’s the substance of the report: The charge of the Academic Senate Committee on Academic Freedom (CAF) is to “report to the Division any conditions within or without […]
Did Dean Order a UC San Diego Professor Not to Publish an Article Critical of a Colleague?
By Eugene Volokh on May 27, 2011 2:58 pm in Academia, Freedom of Speech at Colleges and Universities
So alleges the UCSD faculty assembly, “after hearing a detailed and strongly worded report from its Committee on Academic Freedom,” according to the San Diego Union-Tribune: The issue involves Richard Biernacki, a professor of sociology, and Jeff Elman, dean of the Division of Social Sciences. In June 2009, Biernacki submitted a manuscript titled “Inside the […]
Are Republicans Tougher Graders?
Inside Higher Ed reports on a new study purporting to find differences between how self-identified Republicans and self-identified Democrats grade their students. A forthcoming study finds that there may be notable differences. Democratic professors appear to be “more egalitarian” than their Republican counterparts when it comes to grading, meaning that more of the Democratic grades […]
An End to Minimum GPAs for Merit Scholarships?
The recent NYT story on law schools’ use of grade-contingent, merit-based scholarships to recruit 1Ls has prompted substantial discussion in the blawgosphere (including here and here). At some schools, a substantial proportion (if not a majority) of the incoming 1L class may receive merit scholarships that are contingent upon the maintenance of an above-average […]
How Twentieth Century
I received a promotional postcard from X Law School, bragging about one of its professors. The text of the card starts, “It would be wise to add [Professor ___] to your Rolodex. Because nobody knows more about training a new generation of lawyers than she does.” Rolodex? I half expected the postcard to conclude with […]
More on Law School Scholarships
Paul Caron of TaxProf links here to various reactions to the purported scandal that not all 1Ls who receive scholarships can expect to maintain a high enough GPA to retain them. Let me throw my two cents in. I think part of the problem is that incoming law students are unaware of how law schools […]
The National Jurist Ranks Law Schools on “Diversity”
In the National Jurist, Rebecca Larsen has an article ranking law schools on the basis of “diversity.” At Balkinization, lawprof Jason Mazzone makes some cogent criticisms of her approach. Larsen ranks schools on the basis of the percentage of students and faculty who are African-American, Hispanic, or Asian, with a bonus if that percentage is […]
New US News Law School Rankings Are Now Out
This year’s US News law school rankings are now available. For what it’s worth, George Mason has moved up slightly to number 40, while UCLA – home of senior conspirator Eugene Volokh – ranks 16th. For some of my past criticisms of the US News rankings see here and here.
Law School Rankings and Application Advice
I agree with much of the advice that co-blogger David Bernstein offers on law school rankings and admissions. I don’t think that the US News rankings are completely useless, but their utility is indeed limited by various methodological weaknesses, such as those that I pointed out here and here. The most fundamental problem is that […]
Environmental Substance Abuse
Speaking of errors by economists, environmental attorney Mark Atlas has authored a substantial tome dissecting over 500 social science studies of environmental policy, and it’s not pretty. The 700-plus-page paper, “Environmental Substance Abuse: The Substantive Competence of Social Science Empirical Environmental Policy Research” is available on SSRN. Here is the abstract: In a 2002 article, […]
Harvard Allows Return of ROTC
A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about the question of whether elite universities will allow ROTC programs to return to campus now that the don’t ask don’t tell policy has been repealed and gays and lesbians can serve openly in the military. I am happy to report that Harvard University has now agreed […]
What Bias Looks Like
Megan McArdle explores the causes and consequences of academia’s liberal skew. In her concluding section, she notes that one problem with excluding conservatives from academia is that it “makes scholarship worse.” Unless we assume what to many liberals is “proven” by their predominance in academia–that conservative ideas have no merit–leaving conservatives out means that important […]
Will the End of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell Lead to the Return of ROTC Programs to Elite Universities?
By Ilya Somin on February 1, 2011 2:35 am in Academia, Don't Ask, Don't Tell (DADT), Law Schools, Military
At the Weekly Standard blog, Cheryl Miller asks whether the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell will lead to the return of ROTC programs to elite university campuses [HT: here]. In recent years, university officials have defended the exclusion of ROTC from campus as a way of countering the military’ discrimination against gays and lesbians, […]