There’s certainly a lack of conservative professors at American colleges. Would this help?

The Los Angeles Times reports.

Do universities need affirmative action for conservative professors?

Even though we are conservative professors, we’ve argued publicly that conservative attacks on universities are too often overheated and counterproductive. Nonetheless, liberals shouldn’t pretend that academia is untouched by political prejudices. Conservatives do face some bias and are wildly underrepresented in the social sciences; enough, perhaps, to warrant new affirmative efforts to increase political pluralism in academia.

According to a recent study, only 6.6% of professors in the social sciences self-identify as Republicans (compared with 24.2% in business, 23.3% in engineering, and 22.9% in the health sciences). In sociology, Marxists outnumber Republicans by 4 to 1. Conservative professors are, then, less well represented in the social sciences than women and people of color.

This imbalance is partly attributable to the fact that conservative students steer clear of the social sciences well before they consider graduate programs. One study found that students’ politics is among the very best predictors of their undergraduate major choice, with conservatives tending to select the natural sciences.

It’s possible that these conservative undergraduates simply prefer the natural sciences — some evidence, for example, suggests that they are slightly more focused on financial success than are liberals. But it’s also germane that conservatives feel uncomfortable in classes that touch on politics.