Here’s a summary statement on the ideological bias issue in higher education by Cathy Young at Reason Magazine, the libertarian monthly. Some of Young’s opinions downplay the problem because, she says, the “brainwashing” doesn’t really work. Undergraduates sniff out bias and pretty much ignore it. But Young also recognizes that the existence of bias falls into “the realm of the obvious,” and her conclusion raises another, more general problem:

If a student doesn’t subscribe to the campus orthodoxy, the likely effect is not to convert her but to alienate her from intellectual life. Others learn only about a narrow range of ideas. One woman, a Ph.D. student in the social sciences at a Midwestern university, told me recently that when she started reading conservative, libertarian, or otherwise heretical blogs, “it was a whole perspective I had never been exposed to before in anything other than caricature.”
When that’s the norm, the harm is less to dissenters than to the life of the mind. It’s not good for any group of people to spend a lot of time listening only to like-minded others. It is especially bad for a profession whose lifeblood is the exchange of ideas.