How Did the Academy Become Liberal

 IIRC in my young the American Medical Association and the American Bar Association were generally quite conservative, perhaps with an exception for the ABA on civil rights (though ChatGpt says it was criticized for being too conservative).

At my college the most liberal professor was Douglas Dowd, an economist.  

My question: the right today claims that colleges are dominated by liberals/the left.  The right says that today liberals essentially veto the hiring of almost all conservatives in almost all fields, perhaps less so in engineering. Assuming that's right, how did we get to this point?  Certainly liberals didn't dominate the academy in in the 1950s and 60s, so what happened?

My guess is that it's the result of the civil rights movement in the 1960s.Some protests split the professors, certainly they did at my alma mater--my advisor moved to Yale,  But I think after the protests died down the academy found itself pretty much united in supporting civil rights for blacks, rights for women, and open to the other cultural movments--notably Hispanics and gays.