I came across this article in the online edition of today's New York Times Sunday Magazine. It's written by Michael Berube, who is a professor of English at Penn State and writes one of the blogs that Professor Fitzpatrick has included in our blogroll. I noted that Berube's blog was not mentioned in the author's biography at the bottom of the article.

In this piece, Berube argues that although there are indeed many more liberal than conservative college professors (the ratio is something like 3 to 1), this is not because liberal academics are trying to keep conservative academics out of their departments, as conservatives like David Horowitz maintain. Berube tries to explain this ratio by suggesting that the applicant pool for arts and humanities professorships probably has the same 3 to 1 liberal to conservative ratio (and thereby insinuating that there's something about conservative beliefs that makes one less likely to want to be an academic in the arts or humanities. But Berube never actually says this, so he doesn't have to defend it. Clever.)