I think he was being deliberately disingenuous. He cleverly eliminated the real culprit: faculty hiring committees, then posited that there really was no problem because there was no bias in hiring. Well, why should we just take his word for it? He says that conservatives who want to solve the problem should “Study hard, do well in school, go on to get a Ph.D. and get yourself a job teaching at a university.” But of course this is exactly what conservatives have been trying to do for years, with little effect. The fact is, so many conservatives wind up at think tanks because they cannot get hired on campus. Why not? Because in the humanities it is nearly impossible to keep one’s general philosophical views a secret. No, they don’t ask your party affiliation. But it’s pretty easy to divine one’s political leanings if one is a devotee of Stanley Fish or John Rawls as opposed to Harold Bloom or Robert Nozick. It is simply unbelievable that an applicant’s philosophical bent would not be understood and considered by members of the committee, all of whom are always radical leftwingers, or at least leftwingers. Maybe they don’t mean to discriminate. Maybe they believe, as most people do, that people who think as they do are smarter than people who don’t think as they do. Either way, the result is the same: conservatives and libertarians are weeded out during the hiring process precisely because they are not politically liberal.