Links for 2/2/10

Daniel B. Klein

why do college professors overwhelmingly lean to the left?...

The pyramidal structure of each discipline means that publication, awards, grants, recommendations will follow the pyramid's apex, and if the apex goes left it tends to sweep leftists/neuters into job posts throughout the pyramid.

If leftists have a lock on many fields, it means that non-left applicants will tend to be screened out. Awareness of that feeds back to the non-left student's thoughts about the future. Self-selection is a function of the screening…

We found that Republican-voting members of the scholarly associations were significantly more likely to have landed outside of academia… 41% versus 25.

Jay Greene HT: Andrew Coulson

A press release from the National Education Association landed in my inbox this morning with the alarming headline: “Teachers Take ‘Pay Cut’ as Inflation Outpaces Salaries…

The only problem is that this is not what the data in the NEA report actually show. In Table C-14 “Percentage Change in Average Salaries of Public School Teachers 1998-99 to 2008-09 (Constant $)” we see that salaries increased by 3.4% nationwide over the last decade after adjusting for inflation…
I can’t find a single table or figure in the report that would justify the headline and claims in the press release. But when the Ministry of Truth speaks who are you supposed to believe — them or your lying eyes?

Edububble

Now that the police have found a healthy and self-sufficient Phil Agre, I can make a snarky comment. He was a professor of information sciences at UCLA and then he just stopped coming to work. Finally after a number of months, his family noticed he was gone and took action…

most plausible one to me is that Prof. Agre didn’t have any responsibilities between exams in December 2008 and May 2009. So no one at the university noticed when he wasn’t around…

taxpayers have bosses that will notice if you’re not showing up for work. I wonder if UCLA cut off Agre’s paychecks yet. Given what I know about universities and tenured folk, Agre’s checks could still be automatically appearing in his account every two weeks. Gotta love academia.

Somewhere there’s a university leader arguing that the taxpayers need to support more excellence like this.

Paul Basken

President Obama is cracking down on some institutions seen as wasting taxpayer money while they sit secure in the fact that they are too important to be allowed to fail.
He means, of course, the nation's banks.

The nation's colleges, by contrast, appear to be entering another year in which Mr. Obama will be doing all he can to ensure education gets the most possible federal support…

most colleges still haven't made fundamental changes, said Charles Miller… They typically respond to tough economic times by seeking new ways of getting government money or simply cutting staff members, Mr. Miller said, rather than finding ways to be more productive with their existing resources...