Who would have predicted the results of this study?

The Daily Caller cites a new study which suggests liberal bias on America’s college campuses is not just a figment of conservative imagination.

Any student who’s ever tried to attend a campus speech by Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin or any other conservative figure already knows this is true but scientific confirmation is always a good thing.

It’s no secret that academia is overwhelmingly liberal; so much so that many conservative professors may feel like they are in enemy territory. But a new study suggests that conservatives may have good reason to feel uneasy. Between a quarter and a third of liberal social psychologists indicated in survey responses that they would discriminate against conservatives in hiring decisions and grant proposals.

“They [conservatives]  may be accurately worried that they’re going to suffer adverse consequences if people know their truth beliefs,” said Yoel Inbar, an assistant professor of social psychology and co-author of the study, in an interview with The Daily Caller News Foundation.

Inbar and co-author Joris Lammers — also an assistant professor of social psychology at Tilburg University — surveyed social psychologists and asked them ho w likely they would be to hire a liberal professor over an equally-qualified conservative, or evaluate a grant proposal positively if they knew its recipient was right-leaning.

The findings confirmed what many conservative faculty members already suspect: A steady minority of respondents — between a quarter and a third on average–thought they or their colleagues would discriminate against conservatives. The more liberal the respondents, the more likely they were to admit to bias.

Inbar worries that this hostile climate discourages conservatives from joining traditional academic environments.

“People who hold more conservative views may actually be feeling pushed out of our field,” he said.

The result? Universities that are self-segregated by ideology.

“If conservative people don’t feel comfortable in the mainstream academic environment, they are probably more likely to go to schools that focus on a socially conservative or libertarian perspective,” he said. “We end up with very polarized institutions where all the conservatives are in one place and all the liberals are in another, and we just don’t have any opportunity to interact with each other and talk to each other.”

For Jason Richwine, a senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, the study reflects the fact that people tend to associate with their ideological allies.

“This isn’t a conspiracy, but it is problematic from the standpoint of producing good science,” he wrote in an email to The Daily Caller News Foundation. “We want academics to question conventional wisdom and consider new ideas and perspectives. That’s going to happen less when they are ideologically homogenous.”