My thinking about this? Uh. That it's probably true?
But look, I'm not really interested in score keeping. I'm sure informed liberals and conservatives could go on endlessly citing incidents where their side was unfairly censured on campus. Despite all of the recent high profile incidents of conservatives being de-platformed and protested and whatever else, of course people on the left face censorship in universities. I'm old enough to remember the
Steven Salaita affair back in 2014, for instance. Scandals happen at universities all the time, and people try to take individual incidents, and use them as an occasion to make larger arguments about civility, or censorship, or free speech, the role of money outside the university on debate inside it, due process, or whatever else. I think the article is spot on, in its most general point. Those debates often involve caricaturing/stereotyping students so that the pundit on whatever side of the aisle can make his/her point. And the debates around campus activism are often a proxy for larger social issues that have nothing to do with students or universities at all (e.g., about to what extent hate speech should be tolerated in a liberal society, etc etc).
Even so, it doesn't change the fact that it's not an exaggeration to say that universities are, by and large, liberal institutions. See, for example,
this Washington Post article, which features this chart:
And, from that article:
I think the WashPo article does a pretty good job capturing arguments on the left and the right.
TL;DR: professors have increasingly identified as liberal over the course of the past few decades, but the same trend is not exhibited amongst student bodies. Students don't necessarily become indoctrinated by attending four year institutions, but at the same time, negative consequences may follow from conservatives being underrepresented in our institutions of higher learning.
That basically seems right to me. In addition to teaching, universities are also responsible for producing research, and, in the case of the social sciences especially, that research can have an effect on government policy. Are we as a society disadvantaged because liberal scholars in the social sciences don't regularly have to interact with voices that force them to question some of their most fundamental assumptions and beliefs? Are we disadvantaged because because conservatives in departments throughout the humanities/social sciences are often token faculty appointments who are despised and ridiculed by their colleagues? Yeah, I suspect we are.