The insinuation is that academic institutions need to have their staffs ideologically equalized. What does that imply?

The reason there are not more conservatives in academic circles is that there are fewer conservatives who choose that career path.

If there were more qualified conservatives who had chosen that path in the first place, in spite of the fact that it doesn't pay very well, there would be more conservative professors, because society and its subsections can't avoid that kind of demographic pressure forever.

Now, having abdicated the field to liberals, conservatives are shocked, shocked to discover that academia is full of liberals! They are equally shocked to discover that, in a professional environment that encourages and even requires argument, the few conservatives who do choose academia are argued with by almost everybody. It must seem like a hostile environment when you're in the minority. So, unused to being fought, many of them apparently quit, poor things. The inequity is worth huffing and puffing about, but not worth fighting for.

You would think there would be more sympathy for embattled minorities from conservative refugees from academia in view of their persecution. Alas, no.

You say I'm suggesting that close-mindedness should be the order of the day in institutions of higher learning. What I'm actually suggesting is that conservatives need to suck it up and fight for what they want in the academic world, in other words, they need to live by the same sword with which they stick it to those who encounter the tyranny of the majority in other parts of society. I am, in fact, rather enjoying the spectacle of the poor poor conservatives who moan and complain over the one area that they haven't yet been able to co-opt. I hear a lot about liberal whining here. Yet to me, true whining comes not from those who are losing their voices and trying to shore up what they still have, but from those who have nine-tenths of the property on the Monopoly board yet complain bitterly because one opponent stubbornly clings to Park Place.

If conservative ideas are superior, then according to conservative ideology they should triumph without any intervention by authority figures, just the same way any truly qualified woman can make it through the glass ceiling if she really tries. The latter is becoming true, even though it's liberal social initiatives that have helped to make it possible. Are you suggesting that the only way that a conservative can get a job in the academic world is through some kind of ideological affirmative action? What happened to the old Bootstrap Theory of social advancement? Does struggling through adversity only apply to those who want equal pay or equal protection under the law, but not to those struggling for equal ideological dignity?

Don't worry. If conservatives work hard enough, they too can become professors. The question is, how many conservatives really want to do that?