Funny, back in the day, when conservatives were worried about liberals being in too much control over something, they infiltrated that something. Nowadays, they just throw pity parties. Take this piece by Erika Andersen at Culture 11, a generally good conservative site. I already left a comment there, but it strikes me that one of the problems why conservatives don't have as much success in academia is because, well, a lot of modern conservatism just doesn't care much about facts. You can't become a biologist while denying evolution, as the past 150 years of biological science draws on evolution. Conservatives tend to dominate business and econ departments at universities, and in the sciences and engineering the faculty (in my experience) tends to fall along liberal lines, though with a strong libertarian presence.
I will admit that there tend to be little other than liberals in liberal arts departments, in my experience, and universities ought to try to remedy that. But let's face facts: most conservatives don't have a college education. Many conservatives are anti-intellectual, a la Sarah Palin. Liberals, meanwhile, tend to value facts and reason. Admittedly, some tend to be excessively ideological, but that's going to be true of any political group. If the Republicans were to value facts and reason as well, and appeal to professionals and academics, that would be one thing, but a large part of conservative thought is that mainstream academic views--on economics and science, among others--are wrong. Another way of saying this is that conservatives disagree with conclusions on these subjects that are based on what we know and have been able to prove. What's more, they don't really offer compelling alternatives (like supply-siderism and intelligent design) that jive with what we know. Now, if conservatism were to be about balanced budgets, laissez faire, and reasonable skepticism of certain scientific theories, it would certainly merit a place in the discussion, as these are entirely debatable theories. But the reason why there aren't too many conservative public intellectuals these days is because so much of modern-day conservatism simply cannot be defended intellectually. In order to defend, say, supply-side tax cuts, you have to be willing to disregard virtually every teaching of modern economics and quite a few common sense arguments. In other words, you have to push aside inconvenient facts. And this is why there aren't as many conservatives in academe, and the ones that are tend to be heterodox--in economics, you tend to find faculty who are classical economists, which is not where Republicans are these days.
