Toward an Institutional Model of the Academic Labor Market

What is it about?

Institutional rather than personal choice or demographic characteristics drives much of the Democratic-to-Republican partisan imbalance in universities. Because individual colleges' cultures are intolerant of Republicans, Republicans and conservatives are reluctant to become college professors. Hence, using findings that Democrats have demographic and personality traits that are associated with becoming a college professor as an explanation of why most professors are liberal is subject to several classical flaws in research design. These include conflating correlation with causation, confusing cause and effect, endogeneity or embeddedness, and heterogeneity or unobserved characteristics' driving statistical findings. As well, the historical portion of the Gross argument misconstrues the history of foundation and New Deal influence on higher education and its political orientation.

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Why is it important?

Gross's work, which claims that demographic characteristics associated with the current professorial workforce are explanatory variables, received significant media attention, but it is based on faulty statistical reasoning and omission of demand (institutional) variables from his statistical models. The historical portion of Gross's argument fails to grasp that most colleges were Christian and socially conservative until the 1920s and that most honorary degree recipients and many college presidents, such as Nicholas Murray Butler, were conservative and Republican through the 1930s.

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