Professors are Lefties Because Republicans are Stupid.

At least that's what the Northern Valley Beacon thinks.  They swallow hook, line, and sinker, the recent poison pen letter from former Exon adviser Paul Krugman. 

Scientific American may think that evolution is supported by mountains of evidence, but President Bush declares that "the jury is still out." Senator James Inhofe dismisses the vast body of research supporting the scientific consensus on climate change as a "gigantic hoax." And conservative pundits like George Will write approvingly about Michael Crichton's anti-environmentalist fantasies.

Think of the message this sends: today's Republican Party - increasingly dominated by people who believe truth should be determined by revelation, not research - doesn't respect science, or scholarship in general. It shouldn't be surprising that scholars have returned the favor by losing respect for the Republican Party.

Krugman characteristically confuses scientific questions with political ones.  And this gives the game away: whats really wrong with Republicans is their politics, not their attitude to science. 

Here is a reply that is more thoughtful than Krugman's writing deserves, from James Miller at Tech Central Station.  Miller notes how fast leftists drop their principles when they have a political enemy in their sites.

Larry Summers hinted that women on average might not be as qualified as men to be science professors. Paul Krugman wrote that Republicans en masse are categorically not as qualified as everyone else to be professors. Larry Summers was almost universally condemned by academia for his comments, not because they were necessarily wrong, but because it was considered wrong for him to make negative generalizations about an under-represented group. In academia, Republicans are far more under-represented than women are. So if Paul Krugman is not widely condemned by academics it will constitute pretty strong evidence that academia is biased against Republicans.

And he notes that much of the left is much more explicitly anti-science than anyone on the right.  Religious conservatives are often opposed to Darwinian explanations (for all the wrong reasons, I would argue), but they do not reject the idea of science as such.  Much of the humanities is quite different.

New York University professor of physics Alan Sokal, himself an "unabashed Old Leftist," was bothered by the anti-scientific viewpoints of many left-wing humanities professors. These professors often used their French literary theories to attack science. To prove that these humanities professors actually knew nothing about real science he wrote an article titled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" agreeing with the leftists' view of science. But as the author himself wrote, his article contained a "mélange of truths, half-truths, quarter-truths, falsehoods, non sequiturs, and syntactically correct sentences that have no meaning whatsoever." The article was, however, published in 1996 by the academic journal Social Text as a serious piece criticizing the scientific method. Only after it appeared did Professor Sokal reveal that his article was a parody. That such an article could get published would surprise few Republican college professors as we well understand how many leftist humanities professors both hate science and are ignorant of its workings.

If African Americans or Hispanics or women are under-represented in a field, the left automatically assumes discrimination on the part of the institutions in question.  So what is responsible for Republican under-representation?  Not, for the most part, discrimination.  The answer is much simpler: conservatism arose as a campus counter culture only a few decades ago.  It has grown significantly since then, but it is still a counter culture. 

But that doesn't mean that conservatives are not subject to significant hostility in many campus communities.  Says Miller:

Bias against Republicans in academia is an intenselfy personal issue for me.  Smith College recently tried to fire me by denying me tenure. I believe that I was denied tenure for being a conservative. Fortunately, Smith's five person faculty Grievance Committee found that my academic freedom had been violated during my tenure review. As a result I came up for tenure again and this time succeeded. (My story is well told here.) Based on my experience and knowledge of academia, however, I have advised other Republicans to be wary of academic careers.