I should expand upon something in my post below: the bigger problem for conservatives and libertarians in higher education today is not political bias but methodology. In economics, for example, while there are Keynesians who seek to impose their views upon everyone else, even many non-Keynesians would object to teaching Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard, not for partisan reasons but because they consider the Austrian approach to economics to be unscientific. If economics is a science, what kind of a science is it? The Austrians say that it is a logical science proceeding from a priori concepts — it’s akin to mathematics. The dominant schools of non-Austrian economists construe their field as an empirical science.

Likewise, in the field of politics there is a sharp division between political scientists and political theorists, and among political theorists even there are great methodological differences. (Straussians, for example, are not In politics, philosophy, and economics, the battle is less between the Left and the Right than between positivists and non-positivists (or, more generally, between older, more humanistic or theoretical approaches and later scientific or pseudoscientific ones). These methodological disputes are much less sexy — the worse for fundraising and media campaigns — than partisan conflicts.