Washington ? The conservative publicist David Horowitz has just released the findings of a survey he conducted in conjunction with the American Enterprise Institute. Its conclusion: The faculties of American universities are overwhelmingly populated by people on the left. And, as Horowitz notes, in those disciplines where political opinions count for something the humanities, generally speaking the disparity between left and right is especially striking.

More than 90 percent of the professors who teach in the arts and sciences at such institutions as Stanford, Penn State, Harvard, Cornell, Maryland and Brown were found to be either registered Democrats or members of the Green or Working Families parties. Few were Republicans; even fewer were Libertarians. At Brown, for example, of those whose party affiliation could be determined, 54 were Democrats and three were Republicans. Out of six professors of economics, one was Republican; and of nine engineering professors, two were Republican. In the English, history, sociology and political-science departments, there was not a single Republican.

As might be expected, David Horowitz thinks this is an outrage. “You can’t get a good education if you only get half the story,” he declares. “You could understand this taking place in the Soviet Union, but you can’t understand why this takes place in the United States. This is McCarthyism in the extreme.” Worrisome, yes; McCarthyism, no. But the study does yield two obvious questions: What else is new? And, as Lenin once famously asked, what is to be done?

It might surprise David Horowitz to learn that he is not the first person to notice that the professoriate is out of step. At Harvard, at the turn of the 20th century, the Spanish-born philosopher George Santayana was amused to observe the anger of his colleagues as the United States took the world stage in the Spanish-American War. Intellectuals like William James, he believed, should have understood that American growth and expansion were a natural development in the country’s “psychological history,” and by clinging to an outmoded vision of the republic, they were shielding themselves from reality. In a satirical poem about the self-satisfied atmosphere in Harvard Yard, Santayana warned that “the smoke of trade and battle/Cannot quite be banished hence,/And the air-line to Seattle/Whizzes just behind the fence.”

Nor should it be forgotten that the conservative hero William F. Buckley Jr. gained notoriety with his first book, “God and Man at Yale,” which, as long ago as 1950 complained about the left-wing, anti-Christian bias at his alma mater. I should insert here my own theory that most people believe American education began to deteriorate shortly after they graduated from school or college. And yet, in Buckley’s case, it is worth noting that two decades after he escaped (presumably unscathed) from New Haven he sent his own son into the den of iniquity.

The truth is that a distressing number of undergraduates pass through universities relatively untouched by the life of the mind, or, to be more charitable, unaffected by the prevailing ideology. Students are seldom indoctrinated by their professors I took a course in Asian history taught by an admirer of North Korea and, being adolescents, are just as likely to resist as absorb propaganda. For that matter, there are plenty of good teachers, even registered Democrats, who keep their personal views to themselves.

Which is not to say the Horowitz/AEI statistics are cause for complacency. College faculties tend to believe in diversity about everything except ideas the atmosphere on campuses can be remarkably intolerant of dissent and departments hire their friends and exclude their adversaries. In principle, it is better for students to be exposed to a variety of viewpoints, rather than uniform opinions and fearsome presumptions. Even the race-gender-class set in academia would benefit from defending their opinions against skeptical challengers.

And yet an obvious solution does not present itself. The only thing worse than widespread left-wing bias is the suggestion that universities adopt an ideological quota system. This would require aspiring teachers to disclose their political opinions in effect, an affirmative-action program for conservatives and politicize higher education to the point of absurdity. The fact is that higher education, like journalism, tends to attract people on the left. The only way the right can aspire to parity with the left on campus is to interest young conservatives in academic careers, then wait a few decades. And if anyone can figure out a way to accomplish this, they might consider diversifying America’s newsrooms, as well.

Philip Terzian is the associate editor of the Providence Journal.