IHE reports on papers to be released at an AEI conference today. The papers find that the professoriate is overwhelmingly dominated by the left. Nothing much new there.
If you read through the comments, many of them evidently written in the white heat of rage, you spot an intriguing idea. The defenders of the status quo think they have a sharp argument in saying, “Well, you don’t find intellectual diversity at Merrill Lynch either.” If you’ve ever studied logic, you’ll recognize the tu quoque fallacy.
We don’t know anything about the politics of the people who work at Merrill Lynch, Citicorp or other big businesses, although the as a whole, business donates about as much money to Democrats as to Republicans. The employees there, however, have jobs to do that have little or nothing to do with political beliefs. Even if any Austrians or Chicagoites working at such businesses were replaced with Keynesians or Marxists, the firms would hardly change because they aren’t debating clubs.
Furthermore, and most fatally for the analogy to business, the employees don’t instruct young people.