The New York Sun reports on a conference sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute which will allegedly show that American universities are growing more liberal.

"Universities are tilting to the left, and it starts at the student level and goes all the way through to the hiring level and even to the promotion level," the vice president and director of the National Research Initiative at AEI, Henry Olsen, said. "This is a real problem, not anecdote masquerading as fact."

(I like that, "it starts at the student level." And how exactly would universities be to blame for the politics of their incoming students more than, say, George W. Bush?)

This liberal bias is apparently wounding to conservatives who wish to become scholars.

"If my students show conservative bias, I steer them away from the academy," a professor of English at the University of Virginia, Paul Cantor, said. "They have no future — they will not get jobs. If they want to teach traditional works in a traditional matter, they have no future in an English department today."

(Professor Cantor is a visiting professor at Harvard, incidentally.)

I'm not quite sure I buy all this agita. Can anyone find a case of a conservative scholar being rejected for tenure because of his or her politics? How many conservatives even choose to go into academia? And if in the free market of ideas, most intellectuals are liberals, then how can a good-conscience conservative complain about that?