Interesting for two reasons:<p>First, the Times reporter wrote "intentional discrimination, one of the most frequent and volatile charges made by conservatives, turned out not to play a significant role." While the actual paper mentioned this as a potential cause, and cited conservative commentators like D'Souza and Horowitz, it wasn't one of the six hypotheses actually tested by the sociologists - I assume because it's hard to test this in a quantitative manner. In other words, the Times reporter is editorializing.<p>Second, the ending quote from Neil Gross: "The irony is that the more conservatives complain about academia’s liberalism, the more likely it’s going to remain a bastion of liberalism." If political typecasting is an issue for academia, then gender-based typecasting is almost certainly an issue for certain male-dominated professions. Yet a sociologist who said "The irony is that the more women complain about [profession's] preponderance of males, the more likely it's going to remain a bastion of males" would be widely criticized. There's a double-standard at work here.
Conservative self-selection out of academia is a second-order effect, like women self-selecting themselves off of oil rigs. The first-order effect is that progressives make better academics. This may be due in part to the rather smug assumption that progressives are smarter, but there is also obvious adaptive value to being a progressive in an occupation that both advises and is largely funded by the government.<p>Academia is a parasite on the State, but it's not just any parasite; it's a <i>brain</i> parasite. Academics tell policy-makers what to think, and policy-makers send academics a river of cash. Conservative and libertarian academics, whose political principles oppose the government cash-river, are swimming upstream.