Today, Paul Krugmanwrites about an often overlooked explanation for the dearth of conservative academics today: in recent years, the right has positioned itself in opposition to the very mission of truth-seeking to which academics commit their lives. Krugman notes that conservatives are rare not only in the humanities and social sciences, where the potential for political bias does exist, but also in the hard sciences, where it is far more difficult to maintain that subjective leftist standards are being used to weed out legitimate scientists. Unless, of course, dedication to the scientific method that proves evolution is considered subjective and illegitimate.

The problem that Krugman points to is that old tension between science and religion. Although there's no reason that progressivism and (economic) conservativism would intuitively match up with the two sides of this debate, the post-Reagan right aligns more and more comfortably with religion. Meanwhile, oh-so-retro American research universities are still living in the Englightenment era, holding scientific rationality as the standard for scholarship. For now, let's skip over the challenges that postmodernism poses to that standard; in any case, scientists don't tend to be Derridians.

Then, to a certain extent, David Horowitz is right: campuses are inherently inhospitable to conservative students, if those conservative students are themselves hostile to the notions of hypothesis, inquiry, and conclusion that academia propounds. For the last couple of centuries, academic truth-seeking has separated itself from religious belief. If conservatives want to forge a new key, they ought to admit that they're throwing out the old Locke.