The oxymoron of conservative academics?

I’ve had a couple of e-mail request to comment on the David Brooks piece from Saturday on how few conservatives there are in academia. I really don’t want to write anything new on this, but click here, here, and here and you’ll have my general take on this problem. Oh, and Bruce Bartlett provides an excellent summary of the data on academic bias. Well…. let me also agree completely with two of Jacob Levy’s main points in his follow-up post on this topic. Point #1:

What we do is also: research. It’s always been pretty clear to me that there are people who have the reputation of subordinating their research to an ideological mission, and doing bad research as a result. This is among the worst reputations one can have in academia; it’s fatal. It is almost certainly easier for someone to the right of center to acquire that reputation than it is for someone to the left of center. In other words, one has to be more careful not to acquire it if one’s ideology is out of the academic mainstream. But it’s pretty easy not to acquire the reputation by not committing the act. If people want to write lobbying briefs, they should write lobbying briefs, not scholarly articles and books. Those who do write scholarly articles and books, I maintain, get them judged more-or-less fairly by their peers.

Point #2:

Academia is tough. Most applicants don’t get into grad schools; many grad students don’t finish; most PhDs don’t get tenure-track jobs; most papers don’t become articles; etc. It’s easy to be on the disappointed end of one of those decisions and to chalk it up to a bias against some category to which one belongs, instead of to bad luck. But it’s also self-destructive.

Good God, yes. Also be sure to check out Virginia Postrel, David Adesnik, Henry Farrell — and his commenters, particularly Timothy Burke. UPDATE: I’m afraid you’ll also need to check out Chris Lawrence, Invisible Adjunct, and Erin O’Connor. Erin makes a point about the humanities that’s particularly sad:

The student who enters grad school intent on becoming a traditional humanist is the student who will be labelled as hopelessly unsophisticated by her peers and her professors. She will also be labelled a conservative by default: she may vote democratic; may be pro-choice, pro-affirmative action, and anti-gun; may possess a palpably bleeding heart; but if she refuses to “politicize” her academic work, if she refuses to embrace the belief that ultimately everything she reads and writes is a political act before it is anything else, if she resists the pressure to throw an earnest belief in an aesthetic tradition and a desire to address the transhistorical “human questions” out the window in favor of partisan theorizing and thesis-driven advocacy work, then she is by default a political undesirable, and will be described by fellow students and faculty as a conservative.