So far, we don’t seem to have much that’s new in the way of actual evidence, as opposed to unsupported assertions and anecdotal reports, on the issue of whether colleges are actively discriminating against conservative candidates. The one possible exception is december’s cited study of respondents reacting differently to the same c.v. depending on whether or not the applicant self-identified as a conservative Christian.
I call that a “possible” exception because I think y’all (Izzy excepted) have not yet really confronted the question of whether certain beliefs generally identified as “liberal” may in fact constitute a BFOQ—bona fide occupational qualification—based on the ideals that the college officially upholds. A couple of respondents objected—and I think with some reason—to my use of white-supremacism as an example of a belief that might be called “conservative”, but I notice nobody mentioned my other example, i.e., disapproval of homosexuality.
If I’m on a search committee at a college that is explicitly committed to equal rights regardless of sexual orientation, and I don’t want to hire a candidate who openly opposes homosexuality and supports legal discrimination against homosexuals, am I just being bigoted and unfair to conservatives? Or do I have a justifiable reason for thinking that this candidate is going to be handicapped in his/her ability to serve my college’s mission?
Similarly, if I’m on a search committee at a college that is explicitly committed to religious tolerance, and I don’t want to hire a candidate who openly adheres to a doctrine that everybody else has to convert to his/her faith or else they’ll burn in hell for all eternity, am I just discriminating against conservatives, or have I identified a genuine problem with the candidate’s qualifications?
Now, if you want to argue about whether colleges should have goals and mission statements that openly espouse so-called “liberal” goals like gay rights and religious tolerance, go right ahead for all I care. Or if you have actual evidence that the reason college humanities departments are primarily liberal (a fact which I don’t think anyone here is even trying to dispute, T-bone) is that the colleges are unfairly discriminating against conservatives without a BFOQ justification, let’s see it.
But so far, most of the arguments seem to boil down to mere assertions that the mean old liberal establishment of academia is just refusing to hire conservatives because they don’t like conservatives. Prove it, sez I. These whinefests about how liberals are ruthlessly indoctrinating college students are especially irritating to me—particularly now in the midst of a very stormy electoral campaign season in my area—because I personally bend over so far backwards to avoid any conflict of interest between my responsibilities to my students and my right to express my own liberal political beliefs. I won’t canvass on campus, I won’t put up posters in the dorms or mention political events in my classes, I won’t do anything that might even look as though I’m taking unfair advantage of my faculty-member status to influence students’ politics. And this is the thanks I get. Hmmmph.
SS: As a conservative who went to a liberal college, I can tell you that it was not much fun. Most of campus life was shut off to me because much of it revolved around liberal causes.
This complaint, like the suggestions for “ideological affirmative action” coming from conservatives, sounds rather strange coming from a libertarian. I thought you folks didn’t care how many other people chose to adopt different “causes” from yours as long as you had the individual freedom to support your own.
In a country that is dominated by a great dialogue between two large political parties, essentially excluding one of them from academic life is destructive and just plain wrong.
“Excluding”? More hyperbole. If your complaint is just that the prevailing ethos on many college campuses tends to be liberal, well, sorry you felt left out, and I wholeheartedly urge you and your fellow conservatives to go into academia yourself and provide a countervailing conservative ethos. If you’re asserting that this imbalance is a result of colleges unfairly discriminating against conservatives, well, as pld says, we need cites.
(And the fact that the first chance I get to come back to this thread is around midnight on a Saturday should give a clue about what “liberal” campus life is really like for professors. 
Yeah, like I have the time to indoctrinate my students with liberal beliefs even if I wanted to! Have fun, and see y’all again probably after classes end in December!)
