Race and Respect

I've just been reading through the ABA's recent report:  "After Tenure:  Post-Tenure Law Professors in the United States" (Mertz, Tung, Barnes, Njogu, Heiler and Martin).  This is the first in a series of planned publications reporting on an after tenure study.  Thus, its findings are not yet too detailed or analytical but rather report the key statistically significant differences between groups picked up on a variety of criteria.  One thing that jumped out at me was that with respect to job satisfaction, the survey found a disparity between minority professors' feelings about respect and comfort within their institutions as compared with their position within their chosen field.  The authors suggest that perhaps the immediate law school environment is less supportive for minority professors than the wider legal academy broken up into its distinct fields.  I wonder what might explain such a phenomenon.  Does anyone have any thoughts?

I also noted that the survey included a study of the impact of race and gender on the various criteria investigated - job satisfaction, interaction with students, committee work, income etc.  However, it did not study people identified in any GLBT groups.  I wondered if this was because there is too little reported data to work with as compared with race and gender, or if there was some other reason this was not included.

Comments

[anon]

What I found interesting was the class bias. Professors come from parents/families who were college educated at a greater rate than the rest of the American population. I am only speculating, but I imagine this may be attributable to the fact that professors mostly come from elite schools.

I wonder what Jeff Harrison will have to say about the report: http://classbias.blogspot.com/

[Joe]

I think that it is, perhaps, simply difficult to be one of the few of your particular ethnicity or gender in a given group. It's more comforting to see your ethnicity or gender reflected in your surroundings.

[Jacqui Lipton]

Joe: Doesn't that assume that minorities gravitate towards particular fields of specialization, which would account for them not being in the "minority" of the specialty group, but still in the minority at their own institution? That is certainly a plausible explanation. I wonder if the ABA survey investigated for this possibility ie by matching race, gender etc with field of specialization?

[Orin Kerr]

The report appears to be here, with the materials on race starting at page 36:
http://www.americanbarfoundation.org/uploads/cms/documents/after_tenure_report-_final-_abf_4.1.pdf