Selected quotes from the article posted by David8814wguy:

PS: Political Science & Politics (2008), 41: 773-783 Cambridge University Press

Indoctrination U.? Faculty Ideology and Changes
in Student Political Orientation
Mack D. Mariani, Xavier University
Gordon J. Hewitt, Hamilton College

We find little evidence, however, that
faculty ideology is associated with
changes in students’ ideological orientation.
The students at colleges with more
liberal faculties were not statistically
more likely to move to the left than students
at other institutions.(773)



The study, which
included 3,890 students, found that conservative
students received grades equal
to or higher than more liberal students;
in fact, conservatives actually scored
higher grades than liberals in the fields
of business and economics and there
was no difference between the grades
received by liberals and conservatives
in sociology, African American studies,
and other more liberal fields of study (775)

The study is limited, however, in that it examines
the impact of faculty ideology on
students taking a single course. Additional
research is needed to take into account
the effect of faculty ideology on
student ideology across multiple classes
or over the duration of a college career.
The indoctrination argument is fundamentally
an argument about change, the
main point being that liberal professors
indoctrinate students to become more
liberal over the course of their college
careers. Thus, in order to assess whether
there is evidence of indoctrination, additional
empirical research is needed that
takes into account both faculty ideology
and changes in student political orientation
that occurs between the time that
students start and finish college.(775)

So the article from whence your table comes did not come to a definite conclusion. One of the things the authors suggest is that conservatives are more prone to select careers in other fields than academia because they can make more money in business, technology and other fields.

Another thing the study fails to account for is the political affiliations of the parents, as there are many studies that show young people are likely to have the same affiliations at their parents. I suppose a better study would begin by comparing the beliefs of the students to their parents and then track the students through all 4 years of college to see if and how their orientation shifts.

Maybe you could submit a research proposal for such a study to some conservative watchdog foundation like the CSPC study from the first article (now called the David Horrowitz Freedom Center).

David Horrowitz is truly an awful person, who circulates "hit list" style pamphlets and books featuring liberal academics. See also: The murder of Dr. George Tiller by right-wing extremists.



Pennsylvania actually took Horrowitz to task and had a big to-do about "academic freedom," the results were inconclusive and Horrowitz and his supporters could not come up with specific evidence of conservative students being discriminated against to back up their claims.

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/11/16/tabor