Anti-con discrimination in academia is real. Part of it is a self-selection problem in the pipeline (ie "I have better things to do with my time than deal with a hostile grad program,") but part is also surely active discrimination in hiring, grad admissions, publication. 1/

We have good reason to think this is happening. Surveys of academic philosophers, psychologists, and sociologists all show an explicit willingness to discriminate. Cons and libs do it at equal rates, but since academia has far more libs than cons, they tend to do more damage. 2/

I'll say that again, just so there's no misunderstanding. A significant minority of academics explicitly state that they would be less likely to hire a candidate or support publication of a paper due to political identity. It's happening. 3/

Most academics have a hard time acknowledging this. That's admirable, after a fashion. It means that they, personally, consider the idea of discrimination so repellant that they can't imagine it ever taking place. But it happens, though more in some disciplines than others. 4/

The challenge is figuring out (a) how much it happens; and (b) whether it is responsible for academia's leftwing tilt. And here, the first thing to note is that this tilt is not unique to academia. It's happening across the white-collar board. 5/

Yes, academics started becoming much more leftwing (at least according to this measure) around 2004. But so did engineers, school teachers, tech workers, and folks in the entertainment industry. Doctors lagged a bit but now have made that shift too. 6/

The obvious explanation is that all these shifts are downstream of the academic shift. Higher ed moved left first and then dragged all other college-grad professions leftward with them. The problem here is the timing. It doesn't fit. The shifts were broadly simultaneous. 7/

You cannot overemphasize the importance of this fact. In virtually every white-collar industry in virtually every advanced democracy, this shift is happening at roughly the same rate and the same time. In Canada, France, the Netherlands, Japan, Germany, and the UK. 8/

That makes it hard to attribute the shift to anti-con discrimination in any great part. The reality is that most lib academics who are ready to discriminate against con academics will never get the chance. They'll never encounter one in the wild. 9/

If you're like me and you think that academia has all kinds of good reasons to get more intellectual diversity, this is a depressing conclusion. The Rouses of higher ed are a big problem that more cons academia might help address. 10/

But how do you make that happen when the trend is so broad and pervasive? 11/

A few basic thoughts: First, people who think, say, or tweet things like this need to be marginalized within the academia. They are simply not intellectually serious views and people should feel embarrassed for saying them. 12/

Second, the so-called Civic Thought centers have promise, but must be carefully designed to ensure maximal academic freedom. UT Knoxville and ASU seem to have a good approach. UNC-Chapel Hill much, much less so. 13/

Third, the professoriate needs to drop the idea that it can in any way control the conversation about academia. Some people seem to have the crazy notion that by criticizing academia, folks like @Tyler Austin Harper is helping Trump dismantle it. As if Trump needs Harper's help. 14/

Academia has totally and utterly lost control over how it is seen, if it ever had that control in the first place. We do ourselves zero favors by pretending everything is fine or declining to air our dirty laundry in public. It's already public! We've seen to that already. 15/

We are not powerless. We can affect things at the margins, mainly by not making such easy targets of ourselves. So no more electing people like Rouse who are unable to mount a coherent defense of your discipline. But the idea that we can shut down critique is laughable. 16/

Like it or not, we are a great story. The media *loves* talking about us. That's not fair and there are lots more important topics out there they should be talking about instead, but boo hoo. We have to work with the world as it is. 17/

So we need to all get somewhat into the pubic relations game. We stop electing people like Rouse who can't properly defend their academic discipline to the larger public. That's not to slag Rouse, who may be an excellent academic, but that's no qualification for AAA Prez. 18/

We call out and marginalize bad behavior by our colleagues. An ugly but necessary task. 19/

And we also do all the other things. We organize, we unionize, we get better at lobbying state officials. I've seen these things work (even earlier this year in Texas!) and am writing about them now for PEN America. More please. 20/

But we are deluding ourselves if we think that we don't have problems. The very willingness of so many academics to engage in rank political discrimination is proof enough of that. 21/21