What Does It Mean To “Hire More Conservatives”?

As Donald Trump’s second term rages on, conservatives are quickly returning to their old enemy, academia. This is far from surprising — colleges have always been under attack by the right, going back to William Buckley’s 1951 work God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of “Academic Freedom” — but a specific article from Jacob Shell published in Compact on 2/21/2025 caught my attention, that being “To Save Academia, Hire Conservatives.”

Shell begins the article by discussing a study which recently found professors in certain fields are far more likely to be supporters of the Democratic Party than the Republican Party — with anthropology being highlighted due to its disparity being forty-two to one.

Mind you, although I am unable to think of a reason why anthropology would not lend itself to Republicans, other fields can be explained with very little thought. The paper notes a disparity in biology, for example, but that could easily be explained through Republicans being more likely to believe in creationism than Democrats. Similarly, the Republican Party’s recent embrace of protectionist likely turned off those who teach economics, given economists are in constant near universal agreement that free trade is beneficial.

The article presents a situation where would-be conservative academics are forced to push the…