I misunderstood. Federal and state funding do make up a significant portion of public university budgets, but post-recession, federal funding makes up a greater share than state funding (https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/issue-bri...). Regardless, I don't feel universities enact the biases of governments, either at the state or federal level. I think there is a general bias in the academic community that crosses those lines.

I think that bias (perceived or real) is more of a factor of US higher-education tradition of than anything else. If you get a liberal arts degree, you'll take courses focused in nuanced discussions of arts, humanities, sociology, etc... and those courses are going to be taught by people who inherently thought those topics were important enough to dedicate their lives to.

Of course, it's completely reasonable for a sociology professor to think that social issues are important, just as much as we might expect a business or economics professor to believe that business or economics is important. And the things that people think are important influences a person's politics.

If you look at the academic disciplines that are interest groups that conservative politics align with, you'll find conservatives there: petroleum engineering, business, marketing, religious studies, etc. The thing is, there's just not that many academic focus areas that contemporary conservative politics prioritizes in their messaging.

In the end, I don't think the bias of individual professors at a university is a concern as much as institutional bias is. You can never really hire a professor who doesn't have an inherent interest in their own work. The important part is that we continue the western tradition of well-rounded study so that people are exposed to as many differing viewpoints as possible.

Your point about biases aligning with the field is interesting. I think it depends on how "generalized" a field is. "Economics" for example, allows exploration of both pro-capitalist and anti-capitalist perspectives. However, social science has been subdivided into many narrow fields like "gender studies", which include presupposed assumptions. If instead these same subjects fell under a single broader field called "social science", then there is room for academic exploration both in favor of and against such assumptions.

We probably both agree that individual bias cannot realistically be eliminated. However, I feel that despite biases, individuals shouldn't practice disingenuous academic behavior. As a quick example of this, I'll offer that sociologists regularly claim there is a significant gender pay gap without performing a multivariate study that controls for various confounding factors. If they exercised more rigor and held a sincere mentality of truth seeking, they would explore those obvious contradictions to their assumptions more readily, and also welcome the same explorations from their students and peers.

I think intolerance for different opinions is broader than just professors though. It's also campus administrators (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/16/opinion/liberal-college-a...) and the students themselves (https://www.thecollegefix.com/shock-poll-most-students-oppos...). If this intolerance persists or worsens, the outcome will be that anyone who disagrees must self-censor and express blind faith to avoid negative consequences. That's not academic freedom, but rather religious coercion.