You can&#x27;t choose your skin color or where you were born, but you can choose your political beliefs. For that reason alone, I think statements like<p>&quot;My Facebook followers have incredible compassion for war victims in South Sudan, for kids who have been trafficked, even for abused chickens, but no obvious empathy for conservative scholars facing discrimination.&quot;<p>miss the mark. Excluding people based on their beliefs is completely a judgement call about whether you think their beliefs are so far from your own that nothing productive can come from sharing a department with them. The feelings of the author (and me, and a lot of others besides) is that staunch liberals in academia might be flawed in excluding conservatives. But not because it&#x27;s akin to racism, it&#x27;s a different (and less objectionable) type of discrimination.