The College Fix

Boston College is a school with a liberal reputation in a blue city in a blue state. But for the 2010 election cycle, the faculty’s donated more money to Republican candidates than Democrats.

According to the Huffington Post Fundrace, 62 percent of campaign donations made by Boston College faculty members have been made to Republican campaigns in the 2010 election cycle, a total of $4,150,.

In general, higher education leans left. A recent analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics showed Democrats as the primary beneficiaries of educators’ federal political donations. Employees at nine educational institutions or systems have collectively donated $100,000 or more to Democrats.

BC has followed the trend historically. Huffington Post data for the 2008 election cycle revealed 94 percent of faculty donations, a total of $53,753, went to Democratic campaigns, compared to the only 6 percent of donations made to Republican campaigns. 2010 is a different story.

“This could very well reflect the shifting political environment even among former Obama supporters,” said Tomas Castella, president of the BC Republicans.

According to Castella, the campus dynamic has changed this school year.

“The dissatisfaction with the Obama administration is reflected in the number of new and excited members to the BC Republicans,” Castella said. “We signed more students up on Student Activities Day than I had ever seen at Boston College.”

But the data may not signify sweeping changes to the faculty.

“It is always important, when looking at statistics, to know what the sample was, including how large it was: in a small sample a single outlier can create a big (and possibly misleading) difference,” said Dennis Hale, an associate professor of political science at BC.

A donation of $500 made by a graduate student this year, for instance, has skewed the data. While that leaves 59 percent of the donation total for the year, there were actually only a total of four donations made to the Republican campaigns by Boston College faculty, including a single large donation made by law professor Scott Fitzgibbon to the Frank Guinta campaign.

BC professors made 23 donations to liberal campaigns for a total of $2,586, nowhere near the $53,753 BC employees donated to Democratic candidates in 2008.

“Most faculty members are liberal, a fact which can probably be explained by their having formed their political ideas in the 1960s and 1970s,” Hale said.

Hale doesn’t see that liberal dominance as something that stifles campus debate, however.

“My impression of the campus is that the dominance of a single party does not stifle debate the way it does on many other campuses, in part because there are enough Republican, independent, and conservative students to keep the debate lively,” Hale said. Moreover, he said, though most faculty members are Democrats, they are nevertheless “open to the expression of competing views.”

“The contributions support the generalization that professors are, overall, more likely to be liberal than other groups,” said Kristoffer Munden, president of the College Democrats.

But Munden does not believe that the abundance of faculty members with liberal viewpoints affects the political on-campus experience of the BC student. He sees the abundance of contributions as an indication of “a politically engaged professorship” rather than “a partisan professorship.”

“Most professors do not discuss their personal political beliefs in class,” he said.

Morgan Chalfant is a staff writer for the BC Observer and a student at Boston College. She is a contributor to the Student Free Press Association.

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