Bias? What Bias?

Harry recently posted about liberal academia. The London-based Economist magazine (a moderate-left paper, in my opinion) has an article about the phenomenon in its latest issue. The Economist calls liberals’ reluctance to release their grip on academia is a “tragedy not just for America’s universities but also for liberal thought.”
Here is some more:
“Academia is simultaneously both the part of America that is most obsessed with diversity, and the least diverse part of the country. On the one hand, colleges bend over backwards to hire minority professors and recruit minority students, aided by an ever-burgeoning bureaucracy of “diversity officers”. Yet, when it comes to politics, they are not just indifferent to diversity, but downright allergic to it.
Evidence of the atypical uniformity of American universities grows by the week. The Centre for Responsive Politics notes that this year two universities—the University of California and Harvard—occupied first and second place in the list of donations to the Kerry campaign by employee groups, ahead of Time Warner, Goldman Sachs, Microsoft et al. Employees at both universities gave 19 times as much to John Kerry as to George Bush. Meanwhile, a new national survey of more than 1,000 academics by Daniel Klein, of Santa Clara University, shows that Democrats outnumber Republicans by at least seven to one in the humanities and social sciences. And things are likely to get less balanced, because younger professors are more liberal. For instance, at Berkeley and Stanford, where Democrats overall outnumber Republicans by a mere nine to one, the ratio rises above 30 to one among assistant and associate professors.”
And my favorite:
“It is notable that the surveys show far more conservatives in the more rigorous disciplines such as economics than in the vaguer 1960s ‘ologies’.”
If you would like to read the whole article, it can be found here with no subscription required (though I’m not sure how long that will last).