Wow! And from that radical leftist Nicholas Kristof, of all people.

Here is the New York Times:

We progressives believe in diversity, and we want women, blacks, Latinos, gays and Muslims at the table — er, so long as they aren’t conservatives.

Universities are the bedrock of progressive values, but the one kind of diversity that universities disregard is ideological and religious. We’re fine with people who don’t look like us, as long as they think like us.

[…]Four studies found that the proportion of professors in the humanities who are Republicans ranges between 6 and 11 percent, and in the social sciences between 7 and 9 percent.

Conservatives can be spotted in the sciences and in economics, but they are virtually an endangered species in fields like anthropology, sociology, history and literature. One study found that only 2 percent of English professors are Republicans (although a large share are independents).

In contrast, some 18 percent of social scientists say they are Marxist. So it’s easier to find a Marxist in some disciplines than a Republican.

[…]The scarcity of conservatives seems driven in part by discrimination. One peer-reviewed study found that one-third of social psychologists admitted that if choosing between two equally qualified job candidates, they would be inclined to discriminate against the more conservative candidate.

Yancey, the black sociologist, who now teaches at the University of North Texas,conducted a survey in which up to 30 percent of academics said that they would be less likely to support a job seeker if they knew that the person was a Republican.

The discrimination becomes worse if the applicant is an evangelical Christian. According to Yancey’s study, 59 percent of anthropologists and 53 percent of English professors would be less likely to hire someone they found out was an evangelical.

“Of course there are biases against evangelicals on campuses,” notes Jonathan L. Walton, the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals at Harvard. Walton, a black evangelical, adds that the condescension toward evangelicals echoes the patronizing attitude toward racial minorities: “The same arguments I hear people make about evangelicals sound so familiar to the ways people often describe folk of color, i.e. politically unsophisticated, lacking education, angry, bitter, emotional, poor.”

A study published in The American Journal of Political Science underscored how powerful political bias can be. In an experiment, Democrats and Republicans were asked to choose a scholarship winner from among (fictitious) finalists, with the experiment tweaked so that applicants sometimes included the president of the Democratic or Republican club, while varying the credentials and race of each. Four-fifths of Democrats and Republicans alike chose a student of their own party to win a scholarship, and discrimination against people of the other party was much greater than discrimination based on race.

“I am the equivalent of someone who was gay in Mississippi in 1950,” a conservative professor is quoted as saying in “Passing on the Right,” a new book about right-wing faculty members by Jon A. Shields and Joshua M. Dunn Sr. That’s a metaphor that conservative scholars often use, with talk of remaining in the closet early in one’s career and then “coming out” after receiving tenure.

I often get asked by people why I push your Christians and conservatives so hard towards STEM fields, especially math and engineering and technology. The answer is simple. For Christians, this is the safest way to get a degree that will pay for itself. The risk you take when you borrow money to go into a non-STEM field is that you will face discrimination, be graded down, and be denied your degree. Every other minority gets affirmative action on the university campus except for evangelical Christians and Constitutional conservatives. And the worst thing that you can be is what I am, a black conservative male evangelical.

I was talking to one of my mentorees who is an graduate program in computer science the other day. I said to her that I find it more difficult to get motivated to keep up with the latest programming technologies than to keep up with apologetics and politics. She asked me why I chose computer science, then. And I said “because I was good at it, and I needed a way to be able to support a wife and four children”. I was interested in English and criminal law when I was younger, but I saw that those departments were among the most liberal by taking night classes at the local universities while I was still in high school. I actually got into trouble with the law professors because I always wanted the stiffest sentences for criminals.

So this is why I push young people to STEM, or more accurately, TEM. It’s because to come out of university as a Ted Cruz, you have to be the best by far. You have to be ten times as smart as the typical pot-smoking, drunken, promiscuous leftist college student. They get As just for parroting what the professors indoctrinate them with. It really is much safer to stick with quantitative fields, especially engineering.