Bias in Postdoc Hiring

[Jonathan Whatley]

That's not a question that's in front of us or that anyone raised. Researchers all the time make well-intentioned surveys of population x that don't represent population x+y.

 
Umm ... you raised that point:

I certainly don't assert that the researchers "were deliberately (or inadvertently) excluding Republicans in an effort to skew the results."

It's a survey of five departments in a small group of elite universities. Nothing less, nothing more. It's not representative of American colleges and universities overall.

The authors themselves don't appear to claim it is. If we represent their study as saying something it doesn't, the mistake is on us. I'm saying, let's not make that mistake.

Again ... you're way too quick to try and make a point. You raised that issue to try and invalidate the study.

Not what I'm saying. It appears to be a valid study of the small group it looks at. It's not representative of American professors overall.

They literally started at the top and worked their way down the list [of the 60 highest ranking institutions in the USNews National Universities list].

The sampling method you're describing clearly won't produce a representative sample of colleges and universities overall.