Having sensed that they reached the point of diminishing returns with the "liberal media" meme, conservative activists have recently turned their attention to the one institution in American society that is still mostly dominated by the liberal ethos: higher education.

Led by erstwhile communist David Horowitz and a bevy of unproven allegations by conservative students whose main beef seems to be that their claims were not given the same credence as their professors', the American Right has quietly begun submitting bills to state legislatures that would mandate "balance" in public university classrooms, and keep educators from expressing "irrelevant" political opinions. Some have spoken unironically of instituting a kind of "affirmative action" in hiring conservative academics.

Please.

These bills are gross, but I don't believe they will have any lasting impact on the academy, and certainly not the kind that the Right effected on the mass media. Why? First, higher education is not essentially market-driven the way media content is. My institution has a student body of roughly 40,000 and a reputation as "the Berkeley of the midwest," even though it's in the middle of a tight swing state. If conservatives were going to use the market to create an alternative, they would've, but they can't, and trying to put in place mealy-mouthed guidelines at the legislative level is simply not going to be enforceable (or especially popular).

More important, though, is the fact that education and research are inherently unconservative, in the literal sense. The functions of academic institutions are to expand knowledge, to change ways of thinking, to progress. The heart of conservatism is tradition, and that literal conservatism still contributes a lot to the make-up of modern American political conservatism. And if you can't stomach the idea that agreed-upon scientific findings might contradict your superstitions, well, maybe the academy is not the place for you.