This is a messy and poorly constructed argument. In the abstract, sure the author's not wrong that the academy lacks conservative voices, but what concretely are we missing? In economics, the contributions of conservative thinkers is clear. What's the equivalent for conservative voices in sociology? That in fact, blacks are poor because of their culture and not ongoing structural racism? I honestly feel that any worthwhile conservative arguments are being made by center-left thinkers.<p>This particularly is incredibly disingenuous:<p>> I suspect many liberals disdain evangelicals in part because they don’t have any evangelical friends.<p>The comparison to Muslims is an awful false equivalence. First of all, discriminating against someone because they hold intolerant beliefs is categorically different from discriminating against someone based on their religion (and let's be honest, given that Sikhs and other South Asians get targeted, it's really a racial issue). Second, he's postulating this without any evidence. Lots of academics grew up in the South or the Midwest, and a lot of great universities are in those areas as well. Thirdly, even if someone doesn't know an evangelical personally, they are exposed to Jerry Falwell, the Bush administration, Fox News, Kim Davis, etc.<p>If Kristoff wants to make the claim that individual conservatives shouldn't be judged based on the plethora of conservative thought leaders that represent them in the media, he needs to provide an actual argument for that distinction. If he doesn't want racists, homophobes, misogynists, etc. in the academy, he needs to provide examples of the useful discourse we are missing out on.<p>Frankly, the center-left vs hard-left feel like the debates we should be having as a society, e.g. how do we reconcile the racist history of our most esteemed institutions with our modern values, or how do we deal with the consequences of tech rapidly eliminating the livelihoods of millions of working class citizens.