Bias in Postdoc Hiring

[sanantone]

would that be a good thing for education? 

it might help alleviate the student loan problems 
it might also help stop for profit colleges from preying on students

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Indians are Asian. 

oh come on, nobody refers to Indians as Asian 
the common way to use Asian is for Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia and maybe Philippines  

grouping Indians with Asians is like grouping Indians with "people of color"  ?
nobody does that 

"oh, this test is unfair to POC" 
really ? because Indians and Asians don't seem to have a problem with it 

"POC are under represented at Harvard" 
really ? I thought Harvard had lots of Indians and Asians

Wrong! This guy on Twitter was talking about Indians and Asians, and a bunch of Indians clowned him because they call themselves Asians. They are also counted as Asian in the Census. Asia does not only refer to East and Southeast Asia, and some Indian ethnic groups are related to East Asians.

[jsd]

there's no more straws left in this thread to grasp at.

[mysonx3]

Uh...the census classifies Indians as Asians. India is in Asia. This is a strange line of reasoning.

[dfrecore]

Liberals and others in academia are.  I'm going to guess that being surrounded by them has filtered down to everyone working on campus.

If you were put into a workplace of thousands and given an intense and specialized job, how likely you be to start adopting political views you wouldn't have otherwise, because they're held by employees with different jobs in different departments in different buildings?

People make hasty generalizations about politics in academe. They overread data points from a few elite schools, and many of those data points are provocative outliers not even representative of those schools. Among the things they overlook, they overlook the departments that lean right or apolitical, the entire types of college that lean right or apolitical, and the parts of the country where the right lean or the broad right-left mix of the general population is also seen in colleges.

I know 2 biology professors, both liberal.  So that's what I was going on - I don't think any department is exempt.  And, it's harder for conservatives to even get hired at all on many campuses.  So it gets filtered down just by who gets hired.

In general, liberal professors outnumber conservatives 12:1 across the country, and it will only get worse because the ratio is 10:1 for older professors but 22:1 for younger ones.

[Jonathan Whatley]

In general, liberal professors outnumber conservatives 12:1 across the country, and it will only get worse because the ratio is 10:1 for older professors but 22:1 for younger ones.

What is your source? Is it the 2016 Econ Journal Watch article cited here and available here? If so, you're significantly misrepresenting it. Registered Democrats outnumbered registered Republicans by 11 1/2 to 1 in the population studied. But the population studied wasn't like the population of professors "across the country" "In general."

For starters, the authors looked only at 40 universities drawn from the top 60 in the U.S. News ranking category "National Universities." These are all a certain type of elite research university. Exclusions include no schools in the U.S. News categories Regional Universities, Regional Colleges, or National Colleges, no community colleges, no schools specialized in business or occupational training, no bible colleges, and no military schools.

Why only 40 from that top 60? They excluded universities in 20 states that don't publicly disclose the party of each registered voter: Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, Washington, Wisconsin, and Virginia.

Notice something? Most of the states so omitted from the count are red states. 14 of the 20 omitted states voted for Trump, included the most populous state of the 20 by far, Texas. Just 6 voted for Hillary Clinton: Hawaii, Illinois, Minnesota, Vermont, Washington, and Virginia. Even with that: For subtle reasons, you'd expect to find conservative professors relatively well represented in Virginia, and perhaps Illinois, home of the Chicago school of economic thought which has been highly influential in the conservative movement.

The study authors could have reached out directly to survey professors in states that don't disclose party registrations. They chose not to.

What else did they exclude? They looked only at professors in five subject areas: Economics, History, Law, Journalism/Communications, and Psychology. I'm not seeing any rationale for including only these five fields. Business, the most popular undergraduate major, and its direct subfields aren't included.

Finally, D and R party registrations aren't a great proxy for "liberal" and "conservative," especially in and since 2016.

[sanantone]

A study of undergraduate science students found that most maintained their political and religious beliefs from before they started college. Naturally, scientists are less religious.

When applying for your first tenure-track position in biology, chemistry, or physics, how would anyone know your political affiliation? The only way you could be blacklisted is by teaching creationism as a science or that climate change isn't real.

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In general, liberal professors outnumber conservatives 12:1 across the country, and it will only get worse because the ratio is 10:1 for older professors but 22:1 for younger ones.

What is your source? Is it the 2016 Econ Journal Watch article cited here and available here? If so, you're significantly misrepresenting it. Registered Democrats outnumbered registered Republicans by 11 1/2 to 1 in the population studied. But the population studied wasn't like the population of professors "across the country" "In general."

For starters, the authors looked only at 40 universities drawn from the top 60 in the U.S. News ranking category "National Universities." These are all a certain type of elite research university. Exclusions include no schools in the U.S. News categories Regional Universities, Regional Colleges, or National Colleges, no community colleges, no schools specialized in business or occupational training, no bible colleges, and no military schools.

Why only 40 from that top 60? They excluded universities in 20 states that don't publicly disclose the party of each registered voter: Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, Washington, Wisconsin, and Virginia.

Notice something? Most of the states so omitted from the count are red states. 14 of the 20 omitted states voted for Trump, included the most populous state of the 20 by far, Texas. Just 6 voted for Hillary Clinton: Hawaii, Illinois, Minnesota, Vermont, Washington, and Virginia. Even with that: For subtle reasons, you'd expect to find conservative professors relatively well represented in Virginia, and perhaps Illinois, home of the Chicago school of economic thought which has been highly influential in the conservative movement.

The study authors could have reached out directly to survey professors in states that don't disclose party registrations. They chose not to.

What else did they exclude? They looked only at professors in five subject areas: Economics, History, Law, Journalism/Communications, and Psychology. I'm not seeing any rationale for including only these five fields. Business, the most popular undergraduate major, and its direct subfields aren't included.

Finally, D and R party registrations aren't a great proxy for "liberal" and "conservative," especially in and since 2016.

You are correct. Many Latinos and black people vote for Democrats for economic and civil rights purposes, but they're more religious than white people. They can be pretty socially conservative. Almost half of those who are in law enforcement vote blue. That does not mean they're liberal on every issue; they're just pro-union. Before the Republican Party was hijacked by evangelicals and racist southerners who left the Democratic Party after LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act, it used to have a lot of social liberals.

[Sapientes]

 

Why only 40 from that top 60? They excluded universities in 20 states that don't publicly disclose the party of each registered voter: Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, Washington, Wisconsin, and Virginia.

Notice something? Most of the states so omitted from the count are red states.

Yeah... that was footnote #4 on page 423 of the study.
You needed to scroll down just a bit to page 424 to find footnote #5 that lists the universities that were specifically excluded for this reason.

"5.The 20 institutions that were excluded are (1) Northwestern, (2) Chicago, (3) Vanderbilt, (4) Washington University in St. Louis, (5) Rice University, (6) University of Notre Dame, (7) Emory University, (8) University of Virginia, (9) University of Michigan, (10) College of William and Mary, (11) Georgia Institute of Technology, (12) Tulane University, (13) University of Illinois–Urbana-Champaign, (14) University of Wisconsin–Madison, (15) University of Florida, (16) University of Miami, (17) University of Texas–Austin, and the (18) University of Washington—all because their state does not allow the information to go out in such fashion—and (19) Georgetown and (20) George Washington, because they are within 15 miles of Virginia, which doesn’t."

Looking at this list, no one can legitimately argue that the study's authors were deliberately (or inadvertently) excluding Republicans in an effort to skew the results.

However, It can be argued that you were in such a hurry to prove a political point - that had no basis to be made (read footnote 5 again) - that you grabbed only what you thought would prove useful in an argument with someone you disagreed with.

[Jonathan Whatley]

Looking at this list, no one can legitimately argue that the study's authors were deliberately (or inadvertently) excluding Republicans in an effort to skew the results.

That's not a question that's in front of us or that anyone raised. Researchers all the time make well-intentioned surveys of population x that don't represent population x+y.

Where are the professors in fields like general business, construction technology, and bible studies? Where are the colleges like Liberty University, Strayer University, and Texas State Technical College?

Nowhere near this study, a study of five departments not representative of what most American students major in, at forty elite research universities not representative of where most American students go.

[Sapientes]

That's not a question that's in front of us or that anyone raised. Researchers all the time make well-intentioned surveys of population x that don't represent population x+y.

 
Umm ... you raised that point:

"Notice something? Most of the states so omitted from the count are red states. 14 of the 20 omitted states voted for Trump, included the most populous state of the 20 by far, Texas. Just 6 voted for Hillary Clinton: Hawaii, Illinois, Minnesota, Vermont, Washington, and Virginia. Even with that: For subtle reasons, you'd expect to find conservative professors relatively well represented in Virginia, and perhaps Illinois, home of the Chicago school of economic thought which has been highly influential in the conservative movement."

Again ... you're way too quick to try and make a point. You raised that issue to try and invalidate the study.

Where are the professors in fields like general business, construction technology, and bible studies? Where are the colleges like Liberty University, Strayer University, and Texas State Technical College?

Again... all your questions are answered on page 423 of the study:

"The 40 universities we investigated were determined, in early 2016, by starting at the top of the U.S. News and World Report list “National Universities Rankings”.

They literally started at the top and worked their way down the list. They only excluded universities that the Aristotle database (used for the voter registration component) didn't have data for.

The authors also point out that their research didn't break any new ground and only reinforced the findings of other studies previously done.

" This paper, then, was not motivated by a desire to investigate a particular hypothesis, and its findings, as it turns out, only augment and reinforce well-established findings. Other than indicating that Democratic-to-Republican ratios are even higher than we had thought (particularly in Economics and in History), and that an awful lot of departments have zero Republicans, and that, yes, the ratios are higher at more prestigious universities and lower among older professors and among professors with higher-ranking titles, and that there are some regional effects, the paper does not offer new results of any great consequence"

Also, you don't have to major in Economics, Psychology, etc to take a class or two in the subject. They are routinely included as part of the Humanities requirement at all major universities.

[sanantone]

Older, higher-ranking professors are the ones on the search committees for openings. Millennials, in general, are more liberal than Generation X and the Baby Boomers. The oldest Millennials are almost 40, so they're the ones applying. Gen Z is even more liberal.

I thought it was common knowledge that people who choose to study the humanities and social sciences tend to be liberal. I believe people often choose professions based on their personality traits.