PRESTOPUNDIT

The truth about academia begins to leak out:

[DAVID] BROOKS IS GETTING BETTER Yesterday's column was not only strong, it was one Safire would never have written and the Times would never have run by a guest writer. Brook's highlight's what is common knowledge to every conservative journalist I know: post-grad academia is horrendously bigoted against conservatives. I have at least half dozen friends who either have PhDs but couldn't possibly find work in academia or who gave up seeking them for the same reason. One friend of mine whose credentials and scholarship are outstanding is toiling in a fifth-tier school precisely because he's a conservative. Other PhD'd friends of mine are in the administration, at think tanks or in journalism because they'd never have a chance to teach. And, as Brooks notes, it's not merely a straightforward political bias, the barrier also has to do with how loopy academia has become in general. Most conservative would-be academics aren't interested in partisan politics, but they are interested in the classics, the canon, mainstream history, etc -- and that stuff is knuckle-dragging nonsense to the folks who peddle post-colonial studies and the like.

-- Jonah Goldberg

And MORE from ProfessorBainbridge.com:

All too often, applicants [to law school faculties] with conservative lines on their resume -- an Olin fellowship, Federalist Society membership, or, heaven help you, a Scalia clerkship -- are passed over no matter how sterling the rest of their credentials may be. The problem is that at most law schools there is no critical mass of conservatives to act as "champions" for such candidates ...

Law school hiring tends to be driven by the self-perpetuating network of left-leaning senior faculty. Nobody pulls the conservative candidate's AALS form out of the slushpile, while the latest left-leaning prodigy gets the benefit of phone calls from their mentors to buddies of the mentors and having their AALS form flagged or even hand carried around the building. It may not be deliberate bias, but there still is a disparate impact.

My advice to aspiring conservative legal academics? Stick to private law topics (business law is especially safe) and follow Juan's advice: "there are reasons some untenured professors blog under pseudonyms."

(via InstaPundit.com) Who also has this from Juan Non-Volokh.

Today’s David Brooks column struck a chord. When I was an undergraduate at Yale, I had several long discussions with my senior essay advisor about whether to pursue my PhD. My advisor, who was himself quite liberal, cautioned against it, largely because of my emerging, right-of-center political views. As he described it, succeeding in the liberal arts academy is tough enough as it is without the added burden of holding unpopular views. To illustrate the risk, he noted that one of his colleagues on the graduate admissions committee explicitly blackballed each and every candidate who had ever received financial support (scholarships, fellowships, etc.) from the John M. Olin Foundation because, his colleague insisted, the Olin Foundation only funded people who thought like they did, and Yale did not want any graduate students who thought that way. If I truly wanted to be an academic, he counseled, I was better off going to law school. While he didn’t know much about the politics of the legal academy, a law degree would provide a better safety net than a history PhD. In the end, that’s what I did.