Kleins in the News

1 December 2006 at 9:34 am Peter G. Klein Leave a comment

| Peter Klein |

As noted previously, Ronald Coase has serious disagreements with UCLA economist Benjamin Klein. A few years ago, Coase and I had an extended, and pleasant, conversation about his work. He concluded by announcing, with evident satisfaction: “I see all Kleins are not alike.”

Indeed, I tend to disassociate myself from some Kleins, but am enthusiastic about others, such as George Mason University economist Daniel Klein. Dan has done outstanding research on the ideological profile of university professors. Dan’s work is challenged in the current issue of Public Opinion Quarterly by sociologists John F. Zipp and Rudy Fenwick, who deny the existence of “liberal bias” in the academy. Dan and Charlotta Stern have written a reply, currently under review at the same journal. Here’s the abstract:

In a recent Public Opinion Quarterly article “Is the Academy a Liberal Hegemony?,” John Zipp and Rudy Fenwick pit themselves against “right-wing activists and scholars,” citing our scholarship (Klein and Stern 2005a; Klein and Western 2005). Here we analyze Zipp and Fenwick’s characterization of our research and find it faulty in three important respects. We then turn to their “liberal v. conservative” findings and show they concord with our analysis. If one feels that it is a problem that humanities and social science faculty at four-year colleges and universities are vastly predominantly Democratic voters, mostly with what may called establishment-left or progressive views, then such concerns should not be allayed by Zipp and Fenwick’s article.