Noah Rothman for USA Today:
The Missouri story is indicative of the broader crisis on at many American colleges. Increasingly, the evidence shows, they are places of strictly enforced intellectual, cultural and political homogeneity. That rigid conformity may be enforced from below by energetic activists, but it finds succor and rationalizations for its conduct from above.
A study of “Faculty Voter Registration in Economics, History, Journalism, Law, and Psychology” published in Econ Journal Watch in late 2016 found that at 40 leading universities, registered Republicans were outnumbered by their Democratic counterparts by an average ratio of 11.5-to-1. This disparity isn’t new, but it’s been exacerbated as identity politics has polarized the academy.
The Heritage Foundation’s Kim Holmes, author of The Closing of the Liberal Mind, blames the rise of multicultural studies departments. “If you’re going to have a Gender Studies Department, or something like that, the progressive assumptions are built into the very idea of the department, so you’re not going to hire any conservative professors,” said Holmes. If conservatives self-select out of programs like these, it follows that those who emerge from these programs will consider conservative ideas alien and threatening.
The irony of course is that it’s a mainstay of progressivism that only conservatives are held hostage by such primitive thinking.