"Yet while the lack of conservative minds on college campuses is increasingly indisputable, the question remains: Why?"
An older person very familiar with Academia told me a few years ago that in the pre-60s era, colleges and universities were populated largely with conservative professors and in an attempt to live up to the goal of exposing all kinds of ideas in the educational arena, the decision was made to correct that imbalance. So, they began to fill openings with liberals. No one envisioned that the left was of an ilk to get the foot in the door, then to aggressively let their friends know immediately of any teacher openings as they came up and to push aggressively for those people to get the positions. Before long, they were a majority in academia and once a majority was reached they used their well known energy and aggression to root out the conservatives, once again creating a one-tract midset which would censor out ideas other than their own. Sheer reasoning would tell anyone with honest thinking that ideas which cannot stand exposure to debate should not prevail. This is what I was told. Knowing what we know about the left, it makes all kinds of sense.
There's also a draft-dodger factor.
Take a look at any given faculty in America. You'll find that many of them got their PhDs in the late '60s. They stayed in school not for intellectual pursuit, but to stay out of the war.
Many of them ended up on faculties, and choked the hiring system by their numbers. Closed the door on new hires for about 20 years at some places.
I agree. My college years were from 9/59 to 6/63. I got a B.S. in chemistry, but it was a liberal arts college with heavy requirements in arts/humanities/social sciences. Almost all my non-science professors made it known in one way or another that they saw it as their job to "educate" us as to how our conservative parents were wrong and parochial. As you say, the "conservative imbalence" was well on its way to correction even then.