They Have No Idea What We Think

In the past week or so, there have been some popular threads and insightful discussions on social media about the presence of conservatives and conservatism — or more accurately, lack thereof — in universities. (See here, here, here, and here for a few examples.) Below I have paraphrased responses contributed by (presumably left-wing) individuals defending the state of academia, in no particular order. (A few of these lack hyperlinks as citations, either because the account went private or the post was deleted as I was drafting.)

So, to summarize: There are too many conservatives in academia, but also conservatives are barely represented on campus so academia leans left, and conservatives need to stop complaining about a perceived ideological bias on campus, but we should maintain the existing left-leaning bias because conservatives are dumb and evil, yet most professors are apolitical and therefore there isn’t a detectable partisanship on campus. Conservatives are discriminated against because their views are immoral or unintellectual, but also there isn’t ideological discrimination because they actually just fail to meet scholarly standards, and conservatives are unwelcome in certain fields because they reject the left-leaning premises of specific disciplines, yet conservatives are the ones who resist intellectual challenges. The ideological imbalance is a figment of the conservative imagination, but also it is real and good.