Here’s how anti-conservative academic discrimination works

To this study, I can add my own anecdotal experience. In case after case, I’ve seen conservative professors fired or punished in spite of possessing superior academic credentials. In one case, an untenured conservative professor was fired after publishing more (and more consequential) scholarship than even some of the tenured professors who evaluated him. In another, the department rejected a conservative professor’s promotion in part for poor scholarship even though he’d published more than most of his peers and in spite of the fact that key members of the department didn’t even bother to read his work.

In fact, you’ll often find an odd kind of political affirmative action. Because so many departments view themselves as cultural revolutionaries, they’ll tolerate and encourage enormous amounts of shoddy research and scholarship so long as that scholarship is sufficiently radical. It’s as if some faculties take pride in housing leftist fools and cranks.

The cumulative effect of all these factors renders conservatives rightly suspicious when they see any university summarily fire or otherwise punish the few conservative scholars who’ve made it through the hiring gauntlet. Students know full well that they’ll spend part of their academic careers sitting in classrooms taught by hectoring leftist ideologues. Students know full well that teaching quality is wildly inconsistent. They also know full well that far-left scholars often attack their own universities with unrestrained ferocity. Yet they not only soldier on, they gain tenure and lead academic departments.