Thread by @JeffreyASachs

In this piece, Sam Abrams follows up on some off-the-cuff research by Musa al-Gharbi and myself on whether political geography might account for the partisan lean of university personnel. It reads as a corrective, but I don't think it really is.

heterodoxacademy.org/finding-higher…

In short, I argued that since the average top 60 higher ed institution is located in a heavily Democratic part of the country, the faculty and/or administrators of that institution might drift leftward through community socialization.

heterodoxacademy.org/viewpoint-dive…

Here's Musa making a similar point in his review of recent scholarship by Stephen Gavazzi and Gordon Gee on land grant universities.

heterodoxacademy.org/campus-communi…

Anyway, here's the key paragraph from Abrams's piece. I...agree with it completely. In fact, I think it proves my point: the extent of an institution's partisan lean is associated with its geographic location.

My focus was on elite schools because that's where future faculty get trained. Abrams looks at a larger slice of schools (n=299) drawn from across the country and finds wider variation. Good stuff, but I think it strengthens, not weakens, my argument.