“I think philosophy does better than most humanities and social sciences but not as well as the natural sciences with [when] it comes to accepting deviate social groups.”
What’s the evidence for this? (I’m not necessarily doubting either claim, I’m just wondering what the evidence looks like for these two claims – presumably in his book?).

Also, I found it interesting that there is one category for “Muslim” but for Christianity there is Catholic, Protestant, Evangelical, etc.” I guess that is because of the demographics he’s interested in?

The figure concerning fundamentalists doesn’t surprise. Philosophy ought to be about following the reasons, evidence, and argument. Fundamentalists are, it seems clear, quite often opposed to doing that (even if they hide their inclinations under a fig leaf by invoking Plantinga’s views regarding “properly basic” beliefs).

It’s great to actually get some data about how dramatically conservatives are disfavored in academia. Of course, we all knew this anyway, but the documentation is useful.

I wonder whether there’s any traction to be had by broadening the du jour emphasis on diversity to include intellectual diversity as well: the academy is so starved for conservative voices that I’d reckon prioritizing hiring them would make a lot of sense.

In the following paragraphs I quote from a relevant passage from Richard Rorty on the duty of liberal teachers to combat religious fundamentalism, from his “Universality and Truth”. Agreement with Rorty on the following is clearly sufficient to rule out hiring religious fundamentalists:

“It seems to me that the regulative idea that we—we…liberals, we heirs of the Enlightenment, we Socratists—most frequently use to criticize the conduct of various conversational partners is that of ‘needing education in order to outgrow their primitive fear, hatreds, and superstitions.’ This is the concept the victorious Allied armies used when they set about re-educating the citizens of occupied Germany and Japan. It is also the one which was used by American schoolteachers who had read Dewey and were concerned to get students to think ‘scientifically’ and ‘rationally’ about such matters as the origin of the species and sexual behavior (that is, to get them to read Darwin and Freud without disgust and incredulity). It is a concept which I, like most Americans who teach humanities or social science in colleges and universities, invoke when we try to arrange things so that students who enter as bigoted, homophobic, religious fundamentalists will leave college with views more like our own.

“What is the relation of this idea to the regulative idea of ‘reason’ which Putnam believes to be transcendent and which Habermas believes to be discoverable within the grammar of concepts ineliminable from our description of the making of assertions? The answer to that question depends upon how much the re-education of Nazis and fundamentalists has to do with merging interpretive horizons and how much with replacing such horizons. The fundamentalist parents of our fundamentalist students think that the entire “American liberal establishment” is engaged in a conspiracy. Had they read Habermas, these people would say that the typical communication situation in American college classrooms is no more herrschaftsfrei [domination free] than that in the Hitler Youth camps.

“These parents have a point. Their point is that we liberal teachers no more feel in a symmetrical communication situation when we talk with bigots than do kindergarten teachers talking with their students….When we American college teachers encounter religious fundamentalists, we do not consider the possibility of reformulating our own practices of justification so as to give more weight to the authority of the Christian scriptures. Instead, we do our best to convince these students of the benefits of secularization. We assign first-person accounts of growing up homosexual to our homophobic students for the same reasons that German schoolteachers in the postwar period assigned The Diary of Anne Frank.

“Putnam and Habermas can rejoin that we teachers do our best to be Socratic, to get our job of re-education, secularization, and liberalization done by conversational exchange. That is true up to a point, but what about assigning books like Black Boy, The Diary of Anne Frank, and Becoming a Man? The racist or fundamentalist parents of our students say that in a truly democratic society the students should not be forced to read books by such people—black people, Jewish people, homosexual people. They will protest that these books are being jammed down their children’s throats. I cannot see how to reply to this charge without saying something like ‘There are credentials for admission to our democratic society, credentials which we liberals have been making more stringent by doing our best to excommunicate racists, male chauvinists, homophobes, and the like. You have to be educated in order to be a citizen of our society, a participant in our conversation, someone with whom we can envisage merging our horizons. So we are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable. We are not so inclusivist as to tolerate intolerance such as yours.'”

The data is about academic philosophers in the US and not about academic philosophers more generally. One cannot generalize beyond the US with such data because the culture of academia can differ significantly from country to country and there are certainly significant differences between the US, UK, Western Continental Europe, Eastern Europe, Australia & New Zealand, and Asia. Furthermore, at least half the categories that participants were asked to consider are US-centric and not very applicable to other countries. Therefore, could commentators please use the term “US-based academic philosophers” rather than “academic philosophers” when discussing these survey result as the latter grossly overgeneralizes. It may feel to some that US academia is the center of the world and that academia elsewhere always follows in its footsteps, however, that is not true. Academia is in a much healthier condition in many other parts of the world and as the US continues to decline in the coming decades, relinquishing its position as a global superpower and dominant cultural force, academia elsewhere will become more influential and more important.

Isn’t it relatively rare to know of a candidate which of these categories they fall into, at least for most of the categories?

I remember a discussion a few years back over at Leiter about how certain (probably) Christian colleges felt it well within their rights not to hire homosexuals, Christians of other denominations, Muslims, atheists, etc. I remember when I was on the market many years ago many positions that said: must sign declaration to be x or y. Without reading the book (forgive me), it seems Yancy is measuring the personal biases of people at (I’m guessing) state or large non-denominational (or not seriously denominational) schools. There exist, after all, many schools (how many I don’t know)–some of them fundamentalist–that have explicit institutional rules against hiring people who fit many of the categories above. These same schools have (or have had) explicit prohibitions against teaching certain subjects (like evolution) I wonder how that figures in the data.

Within limits, I care more about someone’s reasons for their views than I do about the content of those views. I’d be more interested in working with someone with good arguments for unlimited gun rights or trickle down economics or the incarnation or young earth creationism than I would be working with someone with merely dogmatic adherence to the “right” views.

In case people are assuming that philosophers would not be less willing to hire philosophers of their own group, I mention the following experiences.

Multiple Christian philosophers (some would have called themselves evangelicals at some point) have told me that they look down on Christian philosophers’ work when it seems to be motivated by the philosopher’s evangelical commitments. For instance, one said that doing philosophy in a way that allows their Christian beliefs/priors to play a role in their philosophy is just bad philosophy.

I am not endorsing this view. I mention it only to point out that it is not only non-X philosophers who would every be less willing to hire X philosophers — e.g., that only atheist philosophers would be less willing to hire an evangelical philosopher. My experience suggests that philosophers from a particular group will openly admit that they are less willing to hire philosophers of their own group, depending on the nature of such philosophers’ work.