1. Conservatives do not value knowledge for its own
sake.

2. Conservatives do not care about the social good.

3. Conservatives are too greedy to work for
professors’ wages.

4. Conservatives are too dumb to get tenure.

I’m studied these theories as best I could (for a
conservative), but somehow I can’t shake the notion
that there just might be some bias on campus.

I can imagine reasons why liberals would be
intrinsically more inclined than conservatives to
pursue academic careers. But even if that’s true, it
doesn’t explain why there are so many more liberal
professors now than there used to be.

Surveys last year showed that Democratic professors
outnumber Republican professors by at least seven to
one, more than twice the ratio of three decades
earlier. The trend seems likely to continue, because
younger professors are far more likely than older
professors to be Democrats.

You could argue that fewer conservatives today want to
become professors, but that seems odd given the
country’s move to the right in recent decades.
Conservative student groups and publications are
flourishing. Plenty of smart conservatives have passed
up Wall Street to work for right-wing think tanks that
often don’t pay more than universities do, and don’t
offer lifetime tenure and summers off.

At think tanks and other research institutions outside
academia, there’s a much higher percentage of
Republicans than there is on university faculties.
Apparently, despite their greed and other failings,
many conservatives do want to become scholars, but
they can’t find work on campus.

One reason is the structure of academia, where
decisions about hiring are made by small independent
groups of scholars. They’re subject to the law of
group polarization, derived from studies of juries and
other groups.

”If people are engaged in deliberation with
like-minded others, they end up more confident, more
homogenous and more extreme in their beliefs,” said
Cass Sunstein, a law professor at the University of
Chicago. ”If you have an English or history
department that leans left, their interactions will
push them further left.”

Once liberals dominate a department, they can increase
their majority by voting to award tenure to
like-minded scholars. As liberals dominate a field,
conservatives’ work comes to be seen as fringe
scholarship.

”The filtering out of conservatives in the job
pipeline rarely works by outright blackballing,” said
Mark Bauerlein, a conservative who is an English
professor at Emory. ”It doesn’t have to. The
intellectual focus of the disciplines does that by
itself.”

Suppose, he said, you were a conservative who wanted
to do a sociology dissertation on the debilitating
effects of the European welfare state, or an English
dissertation arguing that anticommunist literature
from the mid-20th century was as valuable as the
procommunist literature.

”You’d have a hard time finding a dissertation
adviser, an interested publisher and a receptive
hiring committee,” Bauerlein said. ”Your work just
wouldn’t look like relevant scholarship, and would be
quietly set aside.”

Social scientists call it the false consensus effect:
a group’s conviction that its opinions are the norm.
Liberals on campus have become so used to hearing
their opinions reinforced that they have a hard time
imagining there are intelligent people with different
views, either on campus or in politics. Last year
professors at Harvard and the University of California
system gave $19 to Democrats for every $1 they gave to
Republicans.

Conservatives complain about this imbalance in
academia, but in some ways they’ve benefited from
being outcasts. They’ve been toughened by confronting
skeptics on campus and working at think tanks in
Washington involved in the political fray. They’ve
come up with ideas — welfare reform, school vouchers,
all kinds of privatization schemes — that have been
adopted around the country and the world.