It was a familiar complaint from an unusual source. A colleague of mine at the University of Texas at Austin, where I teach a rhetoric course, was moaning about the overwhelming support for Democrats in the liberal arts.

“It just irritates me that people assume that everyone in the liberal arts is a Democrat,” the American Studies graduate student told me. “The chair of my department sends mass emails of George Bush jokes. I think it’s totally inappropriate that a university forum be used for partisan politics.”

I was shocked to hear this grumbling from an avowed leftist and member of the Green Party.

This is also the cause du jour of conservative pundits like George Will and David Brooks, who have written of the liberal hegemon that is higher education. Brooks and Will both seem to believe that the liberal arts are dominated by radical leftists calling for the overthrow of capitalism.

A quick glance around my campus here in Austin reveals a Taco Bell in the student union, Coke machines in every building, a business school endowed by a mega-rich car salesman, Dell computers in almost every classroom, and an athletics department endorsed by Nike. Hardly evidence of a socialist cabal.

Still, just when it seemed the conservative attack machine had run out of straw men, it has unearthed a new menace: leftist profs in the ivory tower. Arch-conservative activist and faux scholar David Horowitz is the ringleader of the campus jihad. For years, he has been calling attention to the “modern plague” of “radical leftism in the universities,” but now, with the decline of leftist boogeymen in the halls of power, Republicans are starting to listen.

Horowitz has written an “Academic Bill of Rights” that would protect against the “unwarranted intrusion of faculty members’ political views into the classroom.” He claims that at least 20 states will enact legislation this year in support of his manifesto.  

Horowitz has also found some obedient foot soldiers here in Austin — another supposed liberal bastion in a sea of red. The Young Conservatives of Texas made headlines last year with a  “watch list,” designed to “monitor” professors pushing an ideological agenda.

The fact is, when push comes to shove, colleges and universities are only as liberal as the people who fund and manage them; i.e. rich alumni, Boards of Regents, and endowment managers.

Universities, like it or not, are pseudo-corporations that pay more attention to their self-image than true intellectual freedom. When Michael Moore scheduled a stop at Utah Valley State on his “Slacker Tour” last year, prominent alumni threatened to withdraw all donations to the school unless Moore’s gig was cancelled. The school, not surprisingly, complied.

If you want to see how political power on campus really works, don’t read an MLA article about race, class, and gender in the works of Jane Austen. Instead, consider UT’s Board of Regents, which actively solicited funds for Republican candidates on university letterhead during the last election as a quid pro quo for tuition deregulation.

While registered Democrats probably do outnumber Republicans in humanities and social science departments, statistics on professors’ ideologies have been notoriously difficult to pin down. The most reliable survey, conducted by the Higher Education Research Institute and published in the Chronicle of Higher Education , found that 48 percent of 50,000 faculty interviewed classified themselves as “liberal” to “far left.” The rest classified themselves as either “conservative” or “moderate.” Hardly a mandate for the radical leftism that Horowitz complains about.

Even if Democrats do outnumber Republicans in the liberal arts, conservative “scholars” seem to have no problem finding public outlets for their views — even when their opinions fly in the face of accepted scholarship. There was no shortage of publicity last month, for instance, when Harvard president Larry Summers made the absurd claim that woman lack a biological predisposition for science and engineering. And Condi Rice, Richard Perle, and Paul Wolfowitz, all big-time players in the Bush Administration, previously held cozy academic positions at elite universities.

If conservative academics find themselves on the outs with their moderate to liberal colleagues, they probably have their own shrillness to blame. That’s because many of them, like Stephen Balch, president of the conservative National Association of Scholars, have an annoying tendency to openly boast of their revolutionary zeal. Balch recently told the Chronicle of Higher Education that his conservative colleagues share the belief that “America is a society in drastic need of an overhaul.”

Academia, contrary to popular belief, is a community that thrives on consensus and non-confrontation. If out-of-the-closet conservative professors intimidate hiring committees, it is not because of a specific ideology, but because anyone openly calling for a revolution — from the left or the right — will raise a few eyebrows among tenured faculty.

Russell Cobb