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> Believing that these agendas exist simply because they are evil people is reductionist. For example, my parents wholly support private schools because they believe that public education will strip students of their cultural identity and religious beliefs.

I think the issue is that do we want to inject profit into every aspect of human life. We do this with prisons and schools to some extent already. How about a privatized police force anyone?

That's the thin end of the wedge fallacy.

Would you prefer the thick end?

Here is an argument about why academia is relatively more left leaning. Would love to hear rebuttals but that's how I think about it for now. https://youtu.be/LwI25UhTtGo

They aren't doing it because they are evil - that's totally silly. They're doing it because they hold what I consider to be bad ideas around supporting the public good and it's simply in their best interest to pay less taxes and have a less educated and more compliant workforce in the process.

Betsy Devos is a billionaire private school activist that Trump appointed. The less they need to worry about public opinion the better, it's the same reason they've succeeded so wildly in controlling the Supreme Court. Their strategy with the Federalist Society has been to work around what is popular, no majority would vote to overturn Roe. Public education is definitely on their minds now.

> How many professors are conservative or openly religious?

Separation of church and state happened a long time ago, so the age of finding out your teacher's religion is generally in the past. It's not because they aren't religious, it's because they'll get punished for discussing it with their students.

There is hostility in some education sectors though, which has driven out a lot of conservative and religious teachers.

Not every college is "state".

> How many professors are conservative or openly religious?

At German universities the answer is actually "quite a number of professors", and being conservative or religious is just as normal and accepted as being on the progressive side.

The major difference, however, is that Conservatism there (fortunately) is still very pro-science and you won't find many climate change deniers, creationists, anti-vaxxers, etc. among conservatives, especially not among educated conservatives. Overall, society is also much less scarred by years and years of relentless culture wars, and the majority of the population clusters in the middle of the political spectrum (i.e., in the range "moderate conservative" to "moderate progressive").

In the US, there seems to have been a vicious circle going on for a long time now with conservatives becoming more and more anti-science, because they perceive universities and most scientists as leftists; and scientists becoming more and more hostile to conservatives, because they perceive them to be waging a war on science. I don't know what started this arms race (i.e., whether universities in the US first became hostile to conservatives, or whether conservatives first turned anti-science), but I find this development incredibly depressing and heartbreaking.