Conservatives are increasingly hostile to higher education. Who can blame them?

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.