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96% of political donations by Cornell University faculty go to Democrats

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Donations by Cornell University faculty
Political donations by Cornell University faculty

I’m going to introduce a lecture by Dr. George Yancey by linking to an article from the Cornell University campus newspaper. (H/T Dennis Prager)

It says:

Of the nearly $600,000 Cornell’s faculty donated to political candidates or parties in the past four years, over 96 percent has gone to fund Democratic campaigns, while only 15 of the 323 donors gave to conservative causes.

The Sun’s analysis of Federal Election Committee data reveals that from 2011 to 2014, Cornell’s faculty donated $573,659 to Democrats, $16,360 to Republicans and $2,950 to Independents. Each of Cornell’s 13 schools — both graduate and undergraduate — slanted heavily to the left. In the College of Arts and Sciences, 99 percent of the $183,644 donated went to liberal campaigns.

OK, now with that out of the way, let’s watch a 28-minute lecture from Dr. George Yancey about bias against religion in academia:

If you watch 5 minutes, then you’ll definitely stay and watch the whole thing. It’s fascinating.

Details:

Join Dr. George Yancey in an in depth discussion of the bias taking place within academia against religion in general, but more specifically Christianity. Within the discussion Dr.Yancey uses brief explanations of his previous book, Compromising Scholarship and many other excerpts of his past research as well as his forthcoming research to give us a new viewpoint on academia and religion.

I found a quick description of Dr. Yancey’s work in this New York Times article from July 2011.

It says:

Republican scholars are more likely than Democrats to end up working outside academia,as documented by Daniel Klein, an economist at George Mason University. Dr. Klein, who calls himself a classical liberal (a k a libertarian), says that the university promotes groupthink because its system of “departmental majoritarianism” empowers the dominant faction to keep hiring like-minded colleagues. And when a faculty committee is looking to hire or award tenure, political ideology seems to make a difference, according to a “collegiality survey” conducted by George Yancey.

Dr. Yancey, a professor of sociology at the University of North Texas, asked more than 400 sociologists which nonacademic factors might influence their willingness to vote for hiring a new colleague. You might expect professors to at least claim to be immune to bias in academic hiring decisions.

But as Dr. Yancey reports in his new book, “Compromising Scholarship: Religious and Political Bias in American Higher Education,” more than a quarter of the sociologists said they would be swayed favorably toward a Democrat or an A.C.L.U. member and unfavorably toward a Republican. About 40 percent said they would be less inclined to vote for hiring someone who belonged to the National Rifle Association or who was an evangelical. Similar results were obtained in a subsequent survey of professors in other social sciences and the humanities.

Dr. Yancey, who describes himself as a political independent with traditional Christian beliefs and progressive social values, advises nonliberal graduate students to be discreet during job interviews. “The information in this research,” he wrote, “indicates that revealing one’s political and religious conservatism will, on average, negatively influence about half of the search committee one is attempting to impress.”

Dr. Yancey’s research was a survey, not a field experiment, so it’s impossible to know how many of those academics who confessed to hypothetical bias would let it sway an actual decision. Perhaps they’d try to behave as impartially as the directors of graduate studies in Dr. Gross’s experiment.

The lecture is a real eye-opener. It turns out that in academia, you are likely to be viewed the same way as blacks were viewed by slave-owners, and Jews were viewed by Nazis.

We have a lot of work to do to correct these perceptions, but that’s not going to happen unless churches and Christian parents start to take the life of the mind more seriously.

UPDATE: Papa Giorgio posts the Dennis Prager audio:

Polemics

Is there any downside to raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour?

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They told me if I voted Republican, we'd lose jobs, and they were right!
They told me if I voted Republican, we’d lose jobs, and they were right!

This article is from the libertarian Reason.com. They’re terrible at social issues, but really really good at economics.

They write:

Raising the minimum wage like this is an idea that’s become increasingly common amongst more liberal Democratic politicians and policymakers: The city of Seattle, Washington passed a law raising its minimum wage to $15 last year, and the Los Angeles city council voted to follow suit. Soon after, New York state announced a plan to raise the minimum wage of all fast food workers to $15, and the state’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, recently said he believes it should apply to all workers.

Many of these plans start from the assumption, implicitly or explicitly, that these minimum wage hikes would be relatively cost-free, pointing to several studies seeming to show that increases in the minimum wage don’t have much effect on jobs.

Here is what the author of some of the most influential of those studies, former Obama administration economic adviser Alan B. Krueger, had to say about raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour in an op-ed for The New York Times last week:

15 an hour is beyond international experience, and could well be counterproductive. Although some high-wage cities and states could probably absorb a $15-an-hour minimum wage with little or no job loss, it is far from clear that the same could be said for every state, city and town in the United States.

Krueger goes on to warn of greater risk, and the potential for “severe” trade-offs, if policymakers pursue a $15 minimum wage, warning that it would go beyond what any research supports. Ultimately, he concludes, it is  “a risk not worth taking.”

Krueger wasn’t disowning his own work or abandoning his position. He still supports raising the minimum wage to $12 an hour over a period of years, which he thinks could be done with essentially no job loss.

There are some reasons to be skeptical of that claim too: The Congressional Budget Office, which generally tries to take a moderate approach to economic evidence and put its estimates right in the middle of the consensus range, found that even a more modest hike to $10.10 an hour nationally would most likely cost about a half a million jobs, and while it’s possible such a raise might produce minimal job loss, it’s equally possible that it would cost a million jobs.

Overall, as David Neumark and William Wascher have found, the bulk of the evidence from research into the minimum wage suggests that hikes tend to decrease employment.

Let’s review the facts on minimum wage.

Abstract from a National Bureau of Economic Research study:

We estimate the minimum wage’s effects on low-skilled workers’ employment and income trajectories. Our approach exploits two dimensions of the data we analyze. First, we compare workers in states that were bound by recent increases in the federal minimum wage to workers in states that were not. Second, we use 12 months of baseline data to divide low-skilled workers into a “target” group, whose baseline wage rates were directly affected, and a “within-state control” group with slightly higher baseline wage rates. Over three subsequent years, we find that binding minimum wage increases had significant, negative effects on the employment and income growth of targeted workers.

[…]Over the late 2000s, the average effective minimum wage rose by 30 percent across the United States. We estimate that these minimum wage increases reduced the national employment-to-population ratio by 0.7 percentage point.

That comes out to 1.4 million workers who lost their jobs, thanks to minimum wage mandates. And those are primarily young, unskilled workers who are affected – people trying to get a start in the workplace and build their resumes, so they can move up.

Harvard economist Greg Mankiw explains the top 14 views that a majority professional economists agree on, and here’s #12:

12. A minimum wage increases unemployment among young and unskilled workers. (79%)

This is not controversial. This is the kind of basic “how America works” economics stuff that people used to learn in their civics classes before the schools became so politicized.

News

Senate Democrats block Republican bill to crack down on sanctuary cities

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Map of sanctuary cities
Map of sanctuary cities

Now, you would think that when a 32-year-old woman is shot and killed by an illegal immigrant in a sanctuary city, that politicians would get serious about protecting law-abiding taxpayers from illegal immigrants who have a criminal record.

Well, the leftist Washington Post reports that the Republicans are serious about it, but the Democrats are not.

Look:

Senate Democrats blocked legislation Tuesday that would crack down on local governments that refuse to fully cooperate with federal immigration authorities in order to protect illegal immigrants from deportation.

The bill targeting so-called “sanctuary cities” failed in a 54 to 45 procedural vote. Sixty votes were necessary to advance the bill, which would block such jurisdictions from collecting some federal grants and would toughen criminal sentences for illegal immigrants who are convicted of a serious crime after being repeatedly deported.

The House approved a similar bill in July, weeks after an illegal immigrant allegedly shot and killed 32-year-old Kate Steinle on a San Francisco pier, touching off a national firestorm about the immigration policies of that city and others like it who argue that threats of deportation make it harder to police immigrant communities.

Steinle’s death continues to reverberate on Capitol Hill.

“The city of San Francisco is proudly a sanctuary city. They say to illegal immigrants across the country and across the world, ‘Come to San Francisco. We will protect you from federal immigration laws,’” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said Tuesday on the Senate floor. “These policies are inexcusable.”

Meanwhile, The Hill reports that the Obama White House also threatened to veto the bill, should it pass the Senate:

The White House on Tuesday threatened to veto a Republican bill that cuts off federal funding for so-called sanctuary cities that refuse to help the government crack down on illegal immigration.

Interesting. So, on the one hand, the Democrats are very opposed to Kim Davis refusing to sign marriage certificates for gay couples, because that makes the gay couple feel bad. But, if an entire city wants to break federal law, and that makes someone like Kate Steinle DEAD, that’s OK with them. That doesn’t seem fair to me. Laws exist to protect the public, and that’s why they need to be enforced. We can have an expanded guest worker program for people who can get with an employer to come here and work. But there’s no excuse for allowing illegal immigrants with criminal convictions to live in sanctuary cities, where they can commit more crimes.