Chicago's Phantom Professors

Larry Solum's Legal Theory Blog links to a new study by David Horowitz and Joseph Light purporting to demonstrate that the nation's elite law and journalism faculties lack ideological diversity. The study, which Cass discussed a couple of days ago, singles out the "supposedly conservative" University of Chicago Law School faculty for criticism after determining that Democrats outnumber Republicans on the faculty 55 to 8. Curiously, the study finds no registered libertarians on the Chicago faculty. Solum expects "this work will provoke a strong reaction." . . . Uh, yeah. My strong reaction is where the heck did all these Chicago law professors come from?  The study claims to exclude clinical faculty and adjunct faculty, but still manages to find 100 full-time law professors at the University Chicago, or 67 more professors than our own web site indicates we have (show "full-time faculty"). According to the table on page five of Horowitz and Light's paper, Chicago has a larger faculty than Harvard, Columbia, and NYU! Perhaps Saul Levmore has finally succeeded in his secret plan to create an army of Cass Sunstein clones. In any event, Chicago's genuine ideological and intellectual diversity among students and faculty is one of its greatest charms, and Horowitz and Light ought to fact check their own work before jumping to conclusions. (I'll leave it to others to debate whether Democrat v. Republican partisan affiliation is a useful measure of ideological diversity on law faculties.)

Comments

[nunzio]

Everyone's a Democrat in Chicago, even the Republicans, so using this as a proxy for liberal views is really off-base here. Does anyone think Mayor Daley is a liberal?

[Clayton E. Cramer]

There's no question that party registration is a poor proxy for political ideology--but is there some better method of determining ideology of your faculty?

By the standards of American politics, Daley is certainly left of center. He does stand for restrictive gun control for example.

[David Schraub]

Trackback isn't playing nice right now, so here's a manual trackback ping.

http://dsadevil.blogspot.com/2005/10/academic-news.html