We offer the following theory in our forthcoming book, "A Patriot's History of the United States" (Penguin Sentinel, Dec. 29):
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1595230017/qid=1092168718/sr=1-5/ref=sr_1_5/103-2896973-9763812?v=glance&s=books
1) Part of it was backlash: the universities (many, willingly) excluded any leftists in the late 1940s and early 1950s out of fears of being tainted with communism. After the mid-1950s, the universities began to reverse their policies and to encourage leftists to apply.
2) Another factor was the massive expansion of colleges and universities as a result of the baby boom providing new customers and the $$$ provided by Uncle Sam in reaction to the Space Program.
3) Some of it was self-selection---those who can, do, those who can't . . . . which meant many conservatives went into the "real world." Conservatives on campus tended to go into business and engineering where there was more money.
Some of you laugh and say, "So what?" Well, that's very shortsighted. We are now reaping the harvest of allowing fruitloops to run our institutions of higher learning, in part, precisely because good conservatives would not take a pay cut to teach.
The quickly eroding position of existing conservatives was exacerbated by the fact that conservatives truly were "open minded" and could tolerate a liberal who happened to be a good scholar, but not vice versa. When liberals built up enough power to staff search committees, they would bring in no one but libs.
4) We lost the argument over what constituted "scholarship." Sometime in the 1960s, it no longer was sufficient to write a biography of a famous American or to research the military or business. Instead, "class, race, gender" became the mantra, and ANY "scholarship" not tied to that in some way was viewed as not worthy of attention. Professional organizations like the AHA and OAH started to feature increasingly leftist panels, and, as the author points out, conservatives started to feel not only left out, but under attack. I quit the AHA (which I had only stayed in to get the jobs listings) some 20 years ago, and I haven't been to an actual conference in 15---and then only because I had to go as a part of a search committee.
I have always been confident that in the marketplace, conservative ideas would win. I always knew in my heart that the leftist media would be, if not defeated, easily surpassed.
I have no such illusions about higher education. We can still control k-12 through private schools and home schooling, and even parental participation in public school boards; but trustees of universities are easily cowed and made to feel inferior by a bunch of puffed-up pansies, and I see NOTHING on the horizon that offers and hope for recapturing academia in the next 30 years.
I also agree on the battle over what what acceptable scholarship and the 'tipping point' theory that conservatives accept liberal colleagues but radicals do not accept colleagues more conservative than themselves. Was it Benda in The Treason of the Intellectuals who first talked about the pas d'enemie au gauche (no enemy to the left) approach? An interesting study of the liberal worldview written in the '60s is James Burnham's The Suicide of the West, which I commend to you if you don't have it. It is only fully being borne out now, but it really does nail the mentality.
Agreed, he never really gets around to it.