A friend sent me a story from the Chronicle for Higher Education (subscription required) which features a study indicating the overwhelming majority of all politically active professors at top law schools are Democrats. The survey is part of a paper that will be published this fall in The Georgetown Law Journal.
The study, which covers the faculties of the top 21 law schools listed in the 2002 U.S. News & World Report graduate-school rankings, finds that just under a third of the professors at those institutions contributed at least $200 to a federal political campaign in the past 11 years. Of that politically active group, 81 percent contributed "wholly or predominantly" to Democratic campaigns, while just 15 percent did the same for Republicans.
The study then sets out to show the effect of those political affiliations on professors' contributions to debates on legal issues. To do that, it cross-references data on political contributions with lists of signatures attached to various "open letters" on legal matters -- from missives supporting President Bill Clinton's impeachment to ones opposing the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Bush v. Gore after the 2000 presidential election.
The result: "People signed according to their partisan leanings," said John O. McGinnis, a law professor at Northwestern University and the lead author of the study.
Mr. McGinnis said that institutions that are dedicated to campus diversity should feel a "logical compulsion to be very worried" about the imbalance he found in political leanings.
"This paper doesn't at all take a position," he said. "It doesn't say that schools should go out and look for conservatives. But if they're interested in diversity, that's what they should do."
The key component of the study is whether a professor's political leanings affect their ability to present material in a neutral manner. Like many of the top schools, the School of Law at USD features far more Democrat than Republican faculty members. What separates USD from many of the universities mentioned in the study is that most of the professors here do an excellent job keeping their political leanings out of discussions. On many occasions the professors play devil's advocate and argue positions inconsistent with their own personal political beliefs for the sake of furthering discussion.
While I have professors here in law school who are good at separating their personal opinions from their in class message, learning in such an environment is not new to me. As I have mentioned on previous occasions while at Northern State University I had the opportunity to take classes taught by two of my colleagues at SDP Professors Blanchard and Schaff. They are excellent at furthering in class discussion by encouraging discussion from both sides of the political spectrum. They also make a conscious effort to take positions inconsistent with their own personal political beliefs if it leads to a more constructive class discussion.
Before insinuating that either professor is inundating students at Northern with their own personal political opinions I would encourage critics to sit in on one of their in class discussions. While both participate in writing for this blog, the opinions in their posts are not manifested in either professor's lectures on a daily basis.
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