Below is an excerpt from an interview on James Miller's fight for tenure at Smith College and an excerpt from the paper discussed. Note that Dr. Miller is an economist and as such is much closer to the mainstream of his discipline than a hypothetical conservative social psychologist.

If you want another unambiguous case of politically motivated violation of academic freedom look at this case study of Linda S. Gottfredson's experience at the University of Delaware. She had to fight for six years. She's a psychologist in a field that's less homogeneous than social psychology.

Lessons in academic freedom as lived experience
Linda S. Gottfredson *
School of Education, University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716, USA
http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/2009academicfr...

Conservative Professor Fights Smith's Tenure Decision · 31 May 2003

O'REILLY: In the "Personal Story" segment tonight, James Miller, who teaches economics at Smith College in Massachusetts, was up for tenure this year, but he didn't get it.

Miller says the reason is he's a conservative Republican. And the college grievance committee agrees he wasn't treated fairly, saying "the rationale for their votes included consideration of matters that infringed on the candidate's right to academic freedom."

Joining us now from Boston is Professor Miller, who is the author of the book, "Game Theory at Work." All right, so you succeeded in convincing the hierarchy at Smith College that you were, indeed, denied tenure because of your political beliefs, which is supposed to be against every academic tenet in this country. But I find it hard to believe that a college as prestigious as Smith, they would punish you because you were a conservative. Am I naive?

JAMES MILLER, SMITH COLLEGE ASST. PROF.: Well, I think the problem is that there are so few conservatives and Republicans at most American colleges, including Smith, that when, you know, they read something written by a conservative, it just seems crazy to them. So I don't think the people who are punishing me for being a conservative thought they were violating my academic freedom. They thought they were keeping out someone who has this utterly crazy beliefs from teaching and corrupting their students.

In the social sciences and humanities, however, there is a stronger imbalance. For
instance, recent surveys find that 58 - 66 percent of social science professors in the United States
identify as liberals, while only 5 - 8 percent identify as conservatives, and that self-identified
Democrats outnumber Republicans by ratios of at least 8 to 1 (Gross & Simmons, 2007; Klein &
Stern, 2009; Rothman & Lichter, 2008). A similar situation is found in the humanities where
surveys find that 52 - 77 percent of humanities professors identify as liberals, while only 4 - 8
percent identify as conservatives, and that self-identified Democrats outnumber Republicans by
ratios of at least 5:1 (Gross & Simmons, 2007; Rothman & Lichter, 2008). In psychology the
imbalance is slightly stronger: 84 percent identify as liberal while only 8 percent identify as
conservative (Gross & Simmons, 2007; Rothman & Lichter, 2008). That is a ratio of 10.5 to 1. In
the United States as a whole, the ratio of liberals to conservatives is roughly 1 to 2 (Gallup,
2010).