The bias of self-selection

The “leftist domination of college faculties,” sighs David French of the Alliance Defense Fund in a post at National Review Online, is “by now inarguable.” The argument has shifted to its cause.

Two new studies by academic sociologists have found that “self-selection” rather than bias accounts for the scarcity of conservative professors on university campuses (h/t: French). “There are just many more liberals than conservatives in the ranks of graduate students," the sociologist Neil L. Gross told the Chronicle of Higher Education. The fact that there are few academic conservatives “does not seem to be the result of bias or discrimination against them,” but appears rather to be the effect of self-selection among those who consider academic careers.

What is left out of account, though, is the way in which self-selection on the part of college faculties is a function of their power. Another term for it is faculty governance, which places exclusive responsibility for hiring and promotion in faculty hands. It is the faculty itself that is self-selecting, and with no outside checks on its power—sometimes the deans who are appointed to oversee the personnel decisions of departments are in collusion with them—why then should it occasion much surprise when the faculty selects more and more of its own kind?

The distinction between bias and self-selection, in other words, is without a difference. Let me illustrate from my own experience in the English department at Texas A&M University.

Every year the professors in the department are evaluated by a committee of their peers on a scale from 1 (lowest) to 5 (highest). A mid-range score of 3 is defined as “meeting departmental expectations.” In 2004, Paul Hedeen and I published Unrelenting Readers, an original anthology of contemporary poet-critics (the first of its kind), with a historical introduction, detailed biographical notes, and a comprehensive index. The next year, the evaluation committee, which was chaired by a full professor notorious in the department for his contempt for conservatives, gave me a score of 2 in research.

Now, perhaps a new co-edited book fails to meet “departmental expectations” in English at Texas A&M. Yet the same year that Unrelenting Readers was published, a leftist colleague co-edited a collection of conference papers with the University of Delaware Press. He received a 5 in research.

When I asked for an explanation, I was told that the presses were not comparable, even though Story Line, which has since gone out of business, was the leading publisher of the New Narrative poetry at the time, with writers like Bruce Bawer, Donald Hall, Mark Jarman, Frederick Morgan, Louis Simpson, and Richard Wilbur on its list. (I hadn’t realized that the University of Delaware’s was such a distinguished press.) When I threatened to file a grievance, the department head bumped my rating to 2.5 and promised me a raise commensurate with an even higher rating. Like a fool, I backed down and took the money. Fool? More like a whore.

There is more to the story. The chairman of the evaluation committee had already divorced his wife of twenty years and married one of his own PhD students at Texas A&M. Although two or three of us voted against her, she was hired on tenure track when she finished her dissertation, and though the same two or three of us voted against her again, she was duly tenured six years later.

Another example of self-selection rather than bias, I suppose.