Despite decades of talk radio hosts complaining about pointy-headed liberal academics, Republicans in 2010 were still pretty fond of higher education. Fifty-eight percent of them said that colleges had a positive effect on the country, a number that ticked along in roughly that range in 2011 … 2012 … 2013 …2014 … then, whoa. It started to go off the cliff, hitting a mere 36 percent in Pew’s most recent poll.

Looking at this poll, Philip Bump of the Washington Post blames this on the focus “by conservative media on tensions at universities.”

“Conservative media,” he adds, “focused its attention on the idea of ‘safe spaces’ on college campuses, places where students would be sheltered from controversial or upsetting information or viewpoints. This idea quickly spread into a broader critique of left-wing culture, but anecdotal examples from individual universities, such as objections to scheduled speakers and warnings in classrooms, became a focal point.”

It’s the sort of theory that may sound plausible on first read, except … see the first sentence of this column. Conservatives in the media have been complaining about liberals in academia for a very long time — just about as long, in fact, as academia has been trending liberal.