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Notes -
This has a lot in it. As someone in (higher) education, my way to make the profession more conservative would be (a) more job security at the earlier stages, (b) more competition/rules based criteria for hiring, and (c) higher salaries that are more linked to performance.
(That I've done extremely well on quantitative criteria like students' ratings of my teaching and my number of publications, but suffered from not being part of certain cliques, is obviously incidental to my opinions...)
Right now, academia is a matter of being an itinerant global citizen (so less disincentive for people with more openness to experience and lower orderliness) with the ultimate goal of a secure job where the key skill is people liking you (so motivates people with higher agreeableness and neuroticism). Why would anyone who knows about political psychology be surprised that this tends to select for liberals over conservatives?
You could try "defund academia," but this isn't going to result in more conservative academics, just fewer academics. You could try "defund the humanities," but the sciences also have plenty of liberals and potential liberals, and they'll feel threatened by conservatives, to the point of turning potential conservative scientists into liberals.
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