WHERE CRONIES DWELL

Journalists and legal scholars have been decrying "cronyism" and calling for "mainstream" values when picking a Supreme Court justice. But how do they go about picking the professors to train the next generation of journalists and lawyers?

Democrats outnumber Republicans by 8 to 1 at the law schools, with the ratio ranging from 3 to 1 at Penn to 28 to 1 at Stanford.

…Only one journalism school, the University of Kansas, had a preponderance of Republicans (by 10 to 8). At the rest of the schools, there was a 6-to-1 ratio of Democrats to Republicans. The ratio was 4 to 1 at Northwestern and New York University, 13 to 1 at the University of Southern California, 15 to 1 at Columbia.

…Some academics argue that their political ideologies don't affect the way they teach, which to me is proof of how detached they've become from reality in their monocultures. This claim is especially dubious if you're training lawyers and journalists to deal with controversial public policies.

…Journalism attracts people who want to right wrongs, and the generation that's been running journalism schools and media businesses came of age when government, especially the federal government, was seen as the solution to most wrongs. These executives, like the tenured radicals in law schools and the rest of academia, hired ideological cronies and shaped their institutions to reflect their views.

But those views are no longer dominant outside newsrooms and academia.

…I'm not suggesting that journalism or law schools should be forced to have ideological balance on their faculties - this is one of those many problems that doesn't require a solution by government. But it's curious how little the schools seem to care about it.

They keep meticulous tabs on the race and gender and ethnic background of their students and faculty. But the lack of political diversity is taken as a matter of course. As long as the professors look different, why worry if they think the same?