A new study examining campaign donations from faculty members at top American universities found that politically active professors overwhelmingly support left-wing causes and candidates.
The report, released Thursday and commissioned by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), analyzed campaign contributions from faculty members at 55 universities across the country.
Researchers matched approximately 100,000 faculty names against a database containing more than 850 million federal and state political donations in an effort to measure political ideology more precisely than traditional studies that rely only on party registration or self-identification.
The findings suggest that politically active faculty are concentrated within what researchers described as a “narrow” and heavily left-leaning ideological range.
FIRE Vice President of Research Angela Erickson said the results raise broader questions about intellectual diversity on college campuses.
“The results also suggest politically active faculty are clustered within a narrow ideological band, which raises serious concerns about whether students and scholars are getting the full benefit of the open inquiry universities promise,” Erickson said.
The study was conducted by University of Rochester professor David Primo, who compiled the faculty list and cross-referenced it with campaign finance records. Faculty members linked to donations were assigned ideology scores based on their contribution patterns.
“Studying faculty campaign contributors provides a unique window into the views of politically active professors,” Primo said. “These data allow us to systematically measure viewpoint diversity at top universities and lay a foundation for strengthening discourse, teaching, and research on college campuses.”
According to FIRE, the average ideology score among faculty donors in the study was only slightly less left-wing than some of the Senate’s most progressive lawmakers, including Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.
Researchers also found no comparable concentration of donations supporting Republican candidates or conservative causes.
FIRE Campus Advocacy Chief of Staff Connor Murnane warned that the lack of ideological balance in academia has become a major problem for universities that claim to value open debate and inquiry.
“The lack of viewpoint diversity in academia is a crisis,” Murnane said.
