Summers: Conservative Professors Are Like Black Baseball Players

Some very interesting results of a survey of the political leanings of university professors conducted by Neil Gross of Harvard and Solon Simmons of George Mason. (Yes, the average prof is more liberal than the average American.) I've reproduced some of the most intriguing tables below, for a longer recap go to this Inside Higher Ed article.

But what caught my eye (HT: Mankiw) was this bit from the IHE piece on Larry Summers' view on the imbalance between liberal and conservative views among professors:

Summers wondered if the situation isn't like it was in the early days of baseball's racial integration, when people trying to say equality had arrived could point to the relatively equal performance of black and white stars. "But it appeared that there were not any African-American .250 hitters," Summers said. "The only [black] players who played were stars."

Comparing the plight of conservative professorship with integration era baseball is ludicrous. Before Jackie Robinson broke the "color" line in 1947 there was something called the Negro Leagues that had existed for 50 years. Where is this untapped supply of conservative professors hiding out these days?

Now, to Summer's credit the population he's referring to are elite university professors, so the untapped supply could come from lower-tier universities. But as Simmons and Gross's study implies, the imbalance persists across all levels, not just elite universities.

Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a pool of conservative professors to recruit, because, as Summers himself says, they probably don't exist. Not because they're being discriminated against, but because they have other priorities:

To date, Summers said, he has largely viewed the political imbalance as one of "able people making choices." He said that if you are a smart individual, and you like the market, profits, and "striving for profits," you have "a wide range of choices in life," of which an academic career is but one. If you are a smart person who doesn't like the world of markets and profits, "you have a much narrower range of choices," he said, and academic careers may be quite desirable. In this way of thinking, he said, it's not surprising to find more liberals than conservatives on college faculties.

And now for the tables: