Month: November 2004

The branch of the homebuilding company, Mercedes Homes, operating in Brevard County Florida, writes into the fine print of their contracts that customers cannot complain about inferior construction to their neighbors. They actually filed a lawsuit against one woman for doing so:

Jay Ann Contardi couldn’t imagine a problem any worse than the deluge of rainwater pouring into her leaking home. That is, until she ran afoul of the aggressive lawyers representing her builder, Mercedes Homes.

"It has changed my life. I’m afraid to talk to my neighbors. I’m afraid to walk my daughter to the bus stop. I’m afraid to talk to you right now," she told NewsChannel 2 reporter Dan Billow.

She’s not the only one. Other Mercedes homeowners asked us to protect their identities.

"I feel like I’m in a police state. I can’t do anything. I have no avenues. I have nowhere to turn," one homeowner said. That’s what it feels like when you’re sued for talking to your neighbor.

In the company’s plush corporate offices, executives hatched a plan to make buyers sign away their First Amendment rights.

"It’s there in black and white. The customer should read his or her contract thoroughly before they enter into it," said Patrick Roche, Mercedes Attorney.

When you buy a Mercedes home, the fine print says you can’t complain to your neighbors, call the news media or even carry a picket sign, even if your new quarter-million dollar home leaks through the roof, walls and windows.

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Academics are, on the whole, more liberal than the population at large. I would be interested to know why this is so, and what effects, if any, it has. I don’t usually find conservative reporting on this subject illuminating, since it generally doesn’t go beyond reporting anecdotes which, while bad, are not obviously more than occasional episodes of the sort that one would expect, human nature being what it is. (Nor is it obvious to me that a disproportionate number of cases of professorial bad behavior involve politics: I knew a professor once who spent the better part of a class making fun of a student for not drinking beer at parties. Really.) It is amusing to see conservatives responding with the sort of horrified cries of victimhood that they disapprove of in other contexts, e.g. those involving racism and sexism; but it’s not particularly enlightening.

An article by John Fund looked as though it might be an exception: it actually cites studies and not just anecdotes, for instance. But on closer examination it’s not. To start with, the studies themselves don’t seem to prove much. Of the three Fund cites, two just claim that a disproportionate number of professors are Democrats, which says little about why this is so or what effects it has. But a third claims to do more. Here’s how Fund describes it:

“A forthcoming study by Stanley Rothman of Smith College looked at a random sample of more than 1,600 undergraduate faculty members from 183 institutions of higher learning. He found that across all faculty departments, including business and engineering, academics were over five times as likely to be liberals as conservatives.

Mr. Rothman used statistical analysis to determine what factors explained how academics ended up working at elite universities. Marital status, sexual orientation and race didn’t play a statistically significant role. Academic excellence, as measured by papers published and awards conferred, did. But the next best predictor was whether the professor was a liberal. To critics that argue his methodology is flawed, Mr. Rothman points out that he used the same research tools long used in courts by liberal faculty members to prove race and sex bias at universities. Liberals criticizing his methods may find themselves hoist by their own petard.”

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