Opening Statement of Tim Groseclose for the Constitution and Civil Justice Subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee September 27 2018 Good afternoon My name is Tim Groseclose I currently am a professor of economics at George Mason University I am also the holder of the Adam Smith Chair at the Mercatus Center a think tank affiliated with George Mason I joined George Mason and the Mercatus Center in July 2014 Before that for eleven and a half years I was a professor of political science at UCLA Later I’ll discuss some incidents that I’ve witnessed of bias toward conservative professors Most of those occurred during my tenure at UCLA Before UCLA for approximately four and a half years I taught at the Stanford Business School Before that I taught at Ohio State and before that I taught at Carnegie Mellon Along the way I have held visiting positions at Caltech Harvard and MIT Two of my research projects are especially relevant to the bias I’ll discuss One is a method that I created to measure quantitatively the slants of news outlets That is the method gives a number that says how liberal or conservative a news outlet is The method also gives numbers to describe how liberal or conservative congressional speeches are Consequently the method can make conclusions such as i the average New York Times article has about the same slant as the average Joe Lieberman speech and ii the average story on Fox News’ Special Report has about the same slant as the average Susan Collins speech In the project I defined “unbiased” as having the same slant as a speech by the average member of Congress By this definition my method concludes that by and large all mainstream media outlets are left of center and conservatives who for decades have been claiming a liberal bias of the media have been largely correct on this claim The second research project sprang from some administrative work During 20052008 I was a member of UCLA’s faculty oversight committee for undergraduate admissions During that time there was widespread belief that the UCLA admissions staff was giving racial preferences to black and Latino students which violated Proposition 209 a clause of the California Constitution Near the end of my term on the committee I asked admission staff members for a random set of 1 000 applications They refused I asked several more times and they continued to refuse Eventually I resigned in protest and several media outlets reported my resignation The incident led eventually to my writing a book which is entitled Cheating An Insider’s Report on the Use of Race in Admissions at UCLA I’d like now to discuss the bias against conservative professors in academia I can’t say that I have proof I have not done any sort of systematic statistical study like I did with my research on media bias or my research on UCLA admissions Instead I’d like to report a series of anecdotes—specifically eight anecdotes Although again not proof they give some strong circumstantial evidence of the bias I think they give readers a good feel for the environment that a conservative professor faces at a typical American university Anecdote 1 When I was at UCLA a political science professor from another university presented his research at a seminar His research examined campaign contributions from senior executives at major corporations His goal like my media bias research was to compare corporations to members of Congress and answer questions such as “Is the average senior executive at Disney more or less liberal than say Joe Manchin ” “Is the average senior executive at Google more or less liberal than say Chuck Schumer ” He found that the bulk of corporations were fairly liberal about as liberal as the average Democrat in Congress He even found that the vast majority of financial corporations were left-of-center After his talk I told him “You know who would love your results Ann Coulter I kind of know her Would you mind if I sent her an email I bet she might write about your research ” He quickly replied “Oh please don’t do that That could only hurt my career ” Anecdote 2 Around spring 2012 UCLA reviewed me for what I thought would be an automatic promotion UCLA however denied me that promotion 1 Specifically I was reviewed for a promotion from “Professor Level IV” to “Professor Level VI ” Originally the recommended raise for a “step” at UCLA was 8% However because of financial difficulties at UCLA at the time of my review raises for step promotions had dropped to around 4% Since my potential promotion was two “steps ” my total expected raise was two times the latter amount or about 8% According to several senior colleagues the following was the rule of thumb for a step promotion If a professor published a book then that merited a promotion of two steps If a professor published three articles at peerreviewed journals then that merited a promotion of one step If a professor had made serious progress on a book including giving to the review committees a significant fraction of a completed manuscript then that also merited a promotion of one step Since my last step promotion I had published a major book Left Turn 1 I was appalled and shocked and my wife was even more appalled and shocked “If they’re going to treat you like that ” she exploded when I told her the news “you should become deadwood ” By that she meant I should follow the path that some professors adopt once they receive tenure—they stop doing research and only do a bare minimum amount of teaching Shortly after a professor friend from George Mason called “We have a job opening for a senior professor ” he said “Would you be willing to apply ” “Yes ” I responded “And you happened to pick the exact right time to ask ” I added How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind The book I think nearly everyone at UCLA would agree had much greater impact than the average book from a UCLA professor For instance it was a minor best seller—at one point it was ranked among the top 250 books on Amazon It had been the focus of several media stories including approximately a dozen reviews a couple dozen radio interviews and about a half dozen television interviews An associate editor of Perspectives on Politics—the leading political science journal for reviews of books—had announced that an entire section of an upcoming edition of the journal would be devoted to my book Thus it was reasonable for me to expect a “two step” promotion All the initial stages of my review were favorable UCLA had asked several scholars outside of UCLA to write letters All the letters recommended that I be promoted at least to Professor Level VI One letter even recommended that I be promoted to Professor Level IX which came with a new title “Distinguished Professor ” A committee of professors from the political science department gave me a favorable review So did the chair of my department So did my dean But at the next stage I did not receive a favorable review UCLA’s Committee on Academic Personnel an anonymous university-wide committee recommended that I not be promoted The next step was decided by Carole Goldberg UCLA’s vice chancellor of academic personnel My understanding is that if she had followed CAP’s recommendation I would remain at Professor Level IV She chose a compromise decision to promote me to Professor Level V This was actually a worse outcome for me than if I had stayed at Level IV The reason is because it would mean that my book would only count for one step I would have been much better off if I had asked to be promoted to Level V when I had finished approximately half the book and then use the remaining half to apply for my review to Level VI In essence Goldberg’s decision meant that approximately half my book would be wasted Instead if I had remained at Level IV I could have applied again the next year to reach Level VI Because of Goldberg’s decision I would consequently need to produce much more work—approximately three peerreviewed articles or half a new book—and have to wait approximately three years before I could be reviewed for Level VI I eventually was offered that job As my wife and I considered the offer we concluded that UCLA discriminated against me because of my research on media bias and UCLA admissions We are convinced that—if the data instead had produced results that would please progressives or perhaps if I had fudged the analysis to produce such results—then UCLA would have given me the promotion My wife and I also concluded that the discrimination would likely continue and that consequently my salary would not keep pace with inflation We estimated that no matter how hard I worked and no matter how outstanding my research and teaching might be my inflation-adjusted salary would likely drop by 25 percent or more by the time I would retire We decided to leave UCLA and move to George Mason In fairness to UCLA I must admit that I have no proof that UCLA discriminated against me Further I suspect that reasonable people will believe that UCLA may have had legitimate reasons for denying me the promotion However I hope such skeptics will consider the following facts First UCLA is a much more prestigious university than George Mason For instance organizations that rank universities typically rank UCLA at around 25th and George Mason at around 150th Second after eleven and a half years in Los Angeles my wife and I had many friendships and other deep connections to the area The same was true of our two children who at the time were in first and seventh grade Third the weather in Southern California is much much better that the weather in Northern Virginia Given those facts why would a family make such a move Even if you doubt that UCLA really discriminated against me I hope you’ll consider that my wife and I must have believed that UCLA was discriminating against me It’s weird for a family to choose such a move Some extraordinary events must have occurred to cause a family to make such a decision Anecdote 3 I witnessed even worse discrimination against James Enstrom a UCLA colleague friend and fellow conservative Several months before my review Enstrom had published an article showing that diesel particulates do not have the mortality effects claimed by many previous studies In fact his article showed that the best evidence is actually consistent with a nil effect This angered many in the environmental establishment and it led I’m convinced to Enstrom losing his job as a research scientist at UCLA although he eventually sued UCLA and the court forced UCLA to re-hire him Enstrom had long been something of a gadfly to environmental scientists Before his work on diesel particulates he had published a study showing that the effects of secondhand cigarette smoke are not nearly as harmful as many other researchers claim In another incident Enstrom blew the whistle on illegal activities by some of his UCLA colleagues which caused them to lose their positions on the scientific advisory board to the California Air Resources Board Specifically Enstrom noted that some of the advisory board’s members were violating a California law that limited the number of years that they could serve on the board In addition to all these things Enstrom did the scientific equivalent of an end zone dance Around the time that he published his work on diesel particulates he criticized a report that was sponsored by the California Air Resources Board Part of his criticism was to expose that the report’s lead author Hien Tran had lied about receiving a PhD from UC Davis Instead Tran received his PhD from Thornhill University an online diploma mill At a presentation at a scientific conference Enstrom flashed a power-point slide illustrating Tran’s Thornhill diploma and then he flashed a slide of his own diploma—a Ph D in physics from Stanford University Soon after Enstrom’s department at UCLA held a quasi-secret meeting The leader in organizing the meeting was John Froines Now a tenured professor at UCLA Froines is perhaps most famous for being the bomb expert of the Chicago Seven the group charged with inciting a riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention The attendees of the meeting voted not to renew Enstrom’s contract which meant that in effect Enstrom would be fired from his job at UCLA Anecdote 4 For decades political scientists have worried that their research underestimates the degree to which racism affects voting decisions One major problem is that if a voter is racist then he or she is unlikely to admit that to a pollster One way to counteract the problem is to use a “list experiment ” an innovative technique devised by James Kuklinski Michael Cobb and Martin Gillens Just after the 2008 election political scientists Simon Jackman and Lynn Vavreck used the list-experiment method to estimate the number of people who voted for or against Barack Obama because he is black Perhaps surprisingly they found that more people voted for Obama because he is black than voted against him because he is black That is Jackman and Vavreck’s research suggests that on net Barack Obama’s skin color helped him during the 2008 election Around 2010 Vavreck and Jackman completed a draft of a paper and presented it at a panel at the American Political Science Association meetings According to many accounts the audience was extremely hostile to them “Basically the whole room turned against them ” a political scientist told me I read the draft paper and I thought it was methodologically sound and I found no reason to doubt the accuracy of their results Further I am aware of no scholar who has proposed reasons to doubt the accuracy of their findings Yet Vavreck and Jackman it appears have abandoned that research It has now been eight years The research has not been published and the researchers no longer list the working paper nor any version of it on their web sites Perhaps it is unfair to speculate on their motives But I strongly believe that part of the reason they abandoned the research is because of the leftwing bias in academia The results although accurate are not pleasing to the progressive consensus in political science Jackman and Vavreck in my view are very smart talented and prolific researchers In 2010 I believe that they and others could see that they were on a trajectory for much success including the strong likelihood of being offered endowed professorships and being named to honor organizations such as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Indeed now in 2018 Vavreck holds an endowed professorship and Jackman has been named to the AAAS If they had continued their 2010 research however those honors would have been jeopardized and possibly not occurred at all Anecdote 5 As I neared completing my book on UCLA admissions I asked several conservative professor friends if they would write endorsement blurbs for it Most refused however It’s possible that their reasons were related to the merit of the book—that they simply didn’t think the book was very good But none offered any doubts about its accuracy nor mentioned any other reservations about its content Instead I strongly suspect that their reasons were because they feared retaliation As one friend admitted “I’d love to write a blurb But the problem is that I have a very distinct last name and my daughter is applying to colleges this year I’m afraid that I’d hurt her chances of getting into a good school ” Many studies have documented the underrepresentation of conservatives among American professors This anecdote illustrates how the underrepresentation is magnified and can feed on itself That is conservatives in academia—much more than liberals I warrant—fear retaliation if they endorse the work of their fellow conservatives Liberals in academia don’t face the same fears—at least not to the same degree as conservatives This is simply because of the numbers—there are fewer conservative professors to retaliate against them As a consequence not only are there fewer conservatives in academia their research is less effective because it is less likely to receive favorable endorsements—even from their fellow conservatives Anecdote 6 In the previous anecdote I suggested that my conservative friends would face retaliation if they endorsed my book I do not have proof of that however I at least have some suggestive evidence One friend after I asked him to write a blurb told me “I started writing the blurb but it got longer and longer I think I can do even better I’d like to write a fulllength review of your book ” He did The review offered much praise of my book and it was eventually published in an academic journal Several months later he told me “I’m not sure I should have written that review I was recently nominated to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences But then I was turned down by a vote of the membership I always thought the vote by the membership was pro forma I’ve never heard of anyone being voted down at that stage At any rate something weird happened I don’t have proof but I suspect that my review of your book was the cause ” Anecdote 7 While most of my anecdotes document bias against conservatives I don’t want to overstate the case I believe there are pockets of academia that are genuinely fair to conservatives and largely free of bias As this anecdote helps to illustrate the field of economics comes close to that ideal Before I describe the anecdote it is useful to provide some more background about my media bias research One aspect of the research that I believe is a significant innovation is my idea to compare media content to congressional speeches Although now that idea may seem simple and obvious no one had thought of it before my research Before my research thousands of media studies had been published But none compared media content to congressional speeches Since my research was published however I would estimate that something like a quarter of all media-bias studies compare media content to congressional speeches I don’t believe any of those studies would exist if I hadn’t introduced the idea Another aspect that I believe was a significant innovation was my statistical method To compute the estimates I couldn’t use any of the “off the shelf” statistical routines like say a regression Instead I had to create my own This involved writing a computer program that was more than 500 lines long My method involved “maximum likelihood estimation ” a technique I learned in a class during my second year in the PhD program at the Stanford Business School That class required as a pre-requisite an entire year of PhD-level econometrics courses Those courses in turn required many undergrad-level math and statistics courses including an entire year of calculus In short my method required not just creativity but several years of specialized training Among the leftwing political scientists who commented on my research almost all focused on petty criticisms Very few if any mentioned any the innovations involved with my method The opposite was true in economics One incident helps illustrate this Just after I’d written a draft of a paper describing the research I presented it at a seminar at the Stanford Business School One of the attendees was Justin Wolfers a young Australian professor with extremely leftwing views His views—I think he would admit—are not just standard-American-Democratic-party liberal but more like European-socialist liberal He is more liberal I would warrant than every or at least almost every member of Congress He asked some questions during my presentation that made clear that he was skeptical of my results But after the seminar he approached me and congratulated me “This is rock star material mate ” were the first words he said to me His praise was echoed in other corners of economics For instance a prestigious economics journal the Quarterly Journal of Economics eventually published the results A few years after the results were published I was invited to be a member the 400or-so-member committee that is responsible for nominating scholars for the economics Nobel prize I have good reason to believe that the main reason for this honor was my research on media bias Anecdote 8 Once while I was a professor at UCLA some colleagues and I were chatting in the political science mailroom We noticed an academic economics journal on the table in the center of the room Like many academic journals its front page listed the titles of its articles One title was something like “Was Americorps a Success ” I announced to my colleagues “You know the great thing about economics journals is that we don’t know the answer to that question We have to actually read the article to find out If that were a political science or sociology journal we’d already know the answer If the authors found that Americorps was not a success there’s no way the article would be published In fact the authors would probably bury the research before even trying to get it published ” Everyone in the room although they were all political science professors seemed to agree