Professor Bainbridge has the latest entry regarding academic discrimination against people on the Right, this time at Harvard. He particularly takes the LATimes Jonathan Chait to task for repeating canards that were old in Dixie in the 60's.
My take on the "Conservatives don't want to be professors" line is that the science and engineering college I attended in the 1970's had an entering class of 4 women out of 130. When I went back for my 25th reunion, the entering class was 48% women, and no, it's not affirmative action (wouldn't work at Mudd). It is affirmative recruiting, however. But the line back then was that "women don't want to be engineers."
Sure, if all the doors are closed, few will try to break them down, and fewer will succeed. As Harvard shows by attempting to block eminent right-of-center law scholars from the faculty -- and creating a very hostile workplace once they are hired -- with respect to politics academia today is roughly where Selma was in 1962.
A possible soution: What if Senate confirmations for appointees from academia treated membership on the faculty of a university hostile to conservatives as akin to being a member of a country club with no black members? A bit brutal at first, perhaps, but I bet you there would be changes made in a bloody hurry.