This was just posted up on Inside Higher Ed. A new study is claiming that law schools lean left in their hiring. The data is based on a sample of 149 hires.
They could only get political ideologies for 40% of the sample. And here’s something weird; there is no information provided on distibution of political ideologies of the applicant pool. It would be interesting to know if it’s a liberal bias, or if fewer conservatives are applying for entry-level law professor positions.
I didn’t see anything in the Inside Higher Ed article or the article they linked too. They may discuss this in the original research article.
But if they don’t have data on the distribution of applicants, it seems premature to suggest that there is a bias in the hiring process.
UPDATE: I re-read the article linked to from Inside Higher Ed here. It notes at the end that the authors note that their study does not indicate that ideology plays a role in highering since they do not have any data on candidates who were not highered…but then it seems very misleading to say things like the hiring skews or leans left.
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