The Boring Truth

I was reading James D. Miller's response to Paul Krugman's take on the dearth of conservative academics (basically all Republicans are anti-science know-nothings in Krugman's view) when I came upon the following paragraph by Miller:

Krugman correctly points out that self-selection is part of the reason there are so few Republicans in academia. But much of this self-selection is because of leftist bias. For example, consider the academic field of Women's Studies. True, few Republicans will self-select to become Women Studies professors, but only because this field is totally defined in left-wing terms. Similarly, the fields of African-American Studies, History, English and Sociology are increasingly devoted to left-wing topics. A smart undergraduate who tells her academic advisor that she wants to get a Ph.D. focusing on military history will likely be told to go to law school instead because few colleges will consider hiring a military historian. In contrast, if this same undergraduate announced her desire to study how capitalism has promoted environmental racism she would be told of the rich academic job market that will await her after she completes her Ph.D.

I'm not sure I can think of anyone I know who has even the slightest connection with academia that would dispute the veracity of any part of the above. In some ways it is so ordinary an obervation at best it might produce a yawn. I've made the argument before that in academia like begets like. Left leaning profs in Ph.D. granting institutions have a tendency to attract left leaning students, who finish their left leaning Ph.D.'s and become the new batch of left leaning Profs. And the cycle of academic life continues. I stopped short of calling it out and out discrimination, at least as a system wide phenomenon. But I may have to reconsider.

Here is the question: Does the systematic removal of areas of study from university curriculum that may be more amenable to people of more conservative viewpoints (such as military history), and their replacement by areas that could only be represented by people with more liberal viewpoints (such as the great swath of gender, ethnicity, and sexual preference studies,) constitute in itself an act of discrimination? Go to the Chronicle of Higher Education add read through the academic job ads in History and Political Science, and see how many could clearly only be filled by a liberal minded individual. Then count the ads that could only be filled by a conservative. Should this discrepancy matter to us? If not, why not?