These days, the news is full of sensational stories of violent campus mobs shutting down conservative speakers and freaked-out college administrators treating rioters with kid gloves. Such stories offer excellent fodder for critics who are eager to condemn university culture. But I believe they distract from a deeper, subtler intellectual problem on the modern campus: the profound alienation of professors who don't hold the mainstream political views and are treated as outsiders as a result.
This is the argument of an important book titled “Passing on the Right: Conservative Professors in the Progressive University.” Written by the political scientists Jon A. Shields and Joshua M. Dunn Sr., it gives a glimpse into the lonely lives of ideological strangers on the modern campus. While conservatives represent America's largest ideological group, at 36 percent of the population, they constitute less than 10 percent of faculty in the social sciences and humanities — and a small fraction of that at elite private schools. Many report feeling like oddballs who never quite fit in.
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