The reason there are fewer conservatives in universities than in the country at large is because they have a history of attacking education institutions. It was only ten years ago that many Republicans were seriously talking about getting rid of the department of education. They cut spending on education all the time and don't like the teachers' unions.
Now, democrats often do exactly the same thing but the difference is in the rhetoric and justification. Democrats usually present those kinds of actions as a "necessary evil" brought on by conservative circumstances while Republicans make it out to be a matter of principle, of cutting "big government." This was more true a decade ago then it is today (the republicans have mellowed due to holding power for long enough) but the effects of it on acadamia are still there. It's about self-interest, not intelligence or discrimination or a liberal conspiracy. While most institutions in society have become much more conservative and come under republican domination over the last couple of decades, universities are less conservative because it is not in their interests to do so. You can't go around trying to terminate people's jobs & cut their pay and expect them to like you.
Conservative whining about liberal dominance of universities is entirely hypocritical. Capitalists (including liberals) overwhelmingly dominate univerisites and the rest of society. Conservatives dominate every other major institution in America, they don't need to dominate this one too. People outside the liberal-conservative spectrum are routinely marginalized and excluded from major institutions, including universities & the media. There are no anarchist, socialist or communist columnists in major newspapers, nor do any communists have any talk shows, etc. The spectrum of views major institutions allow is limited, ideas outside of it are generally ignored or disparaged. It's not unusual for k-12 schools to teach children that capitalism is the best possible system, that anarchy is choas, etc. That's pretty blatant political teaching, yet "Students for Academic Freedom" and the like have no problem with it. They only whine when liberals give them a taste of their own medicine. If Horowitz & co. really wanted "ideological diversity" then they'd want more Churchills, Chomskys, etc. hired because that would increase ideological diversity. What they're really trying to do is turn universities into Fox news clones.
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