Ron Lipsman wrote an excellent piece for the American Thinker, which describes the hostility of liberal/progressive academia to non-conforming ideas. I recommend that you read the entire article, but I was especially interested in Professor Lipsman’s “final observation”: 

    . . . The liberal hegemony exists in many quarters of the country beside academia — e.g., the mainstream media, major foundations, law schools and the trail lawyers they produce, public school teachers, the Democratic Party, even big corporations. But none of these can maintain the atmosphere as effortlessly as campus profs and administrators. Politicians encounter opposition from their constituents; the media from its readers, listeners and viewers; trail lawyers from their clients; and corporations from their stockholders and consumers. But the educational establishment-both higher and lower-encounters little resistance. The students are ignorant, the parents are cowed, and Boards of Regents are cowardly. The ivory tower is alive and well in America and the intellectual product it presents is completely one-sided. What a tragedy for our nation and especially for its youth.

Having worked in city government, I’ve observed that the local citizenry keeps its local officials and bureaucrats on a relatively short leash. Many of the decisions made at a municipal, or especially neighborhood, level hit people directly and right where they live. If/when a local government is perceived as over-reaching (or under-reaching) by some segment of the population, the protest will typically be swift and emotional. For example, if residents of a cozy little suburban neighborhood find out that a new Walmart development is going to be built 1/8 mile away from their subdivision, they don’t have to stretch their imaginations very far to envision what will be the imacts on their most precious investments. They run down to city hall clutching the bad news in their hands and they won’t stop fighting and appealing to higher authorities until they run out of options. 

Yet many of these very same folks will send their 18 year old sons and daughters into the world of higher education - spending as much as $200,000 in tuition, room & board, food, and other expenses - with only a passing interest in what kind of return they are getting for their investment. Sure, these parents will make every effort to ensure that their kids’ bodies are well taken care of when they leave home for the first time, but they largely cede their sons’ and daughters’ intellectual developments to liberal academia.

The kids will come home during academic breaks and talk about their coursework in post-colonial studies, Javanese puppetry, and neo-Marxism (repackaged as something else).  The parents will smile bemusedly. “Well, if that’s what they’re teaching these days, it must be important.” Of course, the dismal state of liberal academia is a bigger threat than having a Walmart built down the street, but the impacts from “progressive” academic conformity is abstract and hard to trace. This is partly how the ivory tower of  higher and lower-education is able to “encounter little resistance,” as Lipsman points out.