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Conservative speakers more likely at red state universities
University commencement speakers have become increasingly liberal over the past three decades, according to a new academic study.
The Georgia State University study looked at 1,875 commencement speakers from 52 schools within a 35-year period. Professor David Johnson’s study found that the number of liberal speakers increased since 1989 while conservative speakers declined, with the most pronounced change coming in the past 15 years.
He wrote the paper with New York University Professor Liang Zhang. Johnson provided a copy of the American Education Research Journal study to The College Fix.
“[T]he proportion of liberal speakers increased at the same time that campus speech became more politically contested and higher education became a more visible part of national partisan debate,” Johnson wrote in an email to The Fix.
The researchers classified political orientation via federal campaign contribution records and official party affiliation. Those who gave more than half of their political contributions to Democratic or liberal candidates were classified as liberal, and likewise for conservatives. They were able to classify some speakers by looking directly at their known political affiliations.
Of the 1,875 speakers in the sample, the researchers were able to classify 1,353 of them: 1,043 speakers were liberal, while only 310 were conservative, at a ratio of 77:23.
When all 1,875 were observed, liberal speakers accounted for 55.6 percent and conservatives for 16.5 percent. The remaining speakers either did not have identifiable political affiliations, were foreign nationals, or could not be confidently matched to political donation records.
The proportion of liberal speakers was relatively stable until 2011, when it started to increase by approximately 1.2 percentage points annually, as opposed to no statistically significant trend before then.
“In the mid-90s and early 2000s, the proportion of conservative speakers peaked at close to a third; across the full 1989-2024 period the figure was closer to 20%,” Johnson told The Fix.
He pointed to the University of Georgia and Ole Miss as examples of red-state universities where commencement speakers have largely been Republican/conservative. Speakers included several Republican congressmen, state governors, and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
However, Johnson noted that the finding about “state political control is a probabilistic pattern across more than 1,300 speaker observations, not a rule that predicts any single university’s choice in any single year… Individual institutions make individual decisions in particular contexts; the pattern only emerges in aggregate.”
The study also found differences according to the type of university and its political environment. Public universities were more likely than private ones to choose conservative commencement speakers. Schools with a larger share of students enrolled in occupational or professional programs were also less likely to choose liberal speakers.
Johnson said the most plausible explanation for the difference in the selections of speakers in public versus private universities is there is more interaction within the institutional government of public schools than in private schools.
“[I]f you are a university in a state where political leaders and the public tend to lean right, there may be an institutional awareness, formal or informal, of the need to maintain legitimacy with a broad range of constituencies,” he wrote.
The study also found larger universities and those with higher proportions of black, Asian, and Hispanic students were more likely to choose liberal speakers, as well as those located in more liberal states. Its state’s politics and disinvitation habits also influence its choice of commencement speaker.
However, Johnson was careful to note that this doesn’t mean schools are deliberately choosing speakers based on political affiliation or in response to politicians or citizens.
“What we can say is that speaker selection appears to be related to the political environment in which universities operate, and this is consistent with the kind of legitimacy management that organizations of all types engage in more broadly, not necessarily a partisan calculation specific to speaker choice,” Johnson said.
“We saw a similar pattern separately: institutions in states with more Democratic leaning-governments and more liberal citizen populations were more likely to select liberal speakers, independent of whether the institution was public or private.”
Social scientist offers independent analysis of study
A quantitative social scientist who often comments on polling methods said the use of campaign contributions is a reasonable method for the study despite having limitations.
“[Some] people make political donations to gain access to an elected official. Some people make donations as a favor or as a professional courtesy,” Professor Michael New wrote in an email to The Fix. “However, most of the time people… do so for partisan or ideological reasons.”
The Catholic University professor said since the study only considers commencement speakers at 52 universities of the over 2,500 four-year schools there are in the U.S., the researchers need a larger sample size to be able to “say with any degree of statistical confidence that a higher fraction of commencement speakers [since 2011] are politically liberal.”
Professor New agreed that universities strategically respond to their political environments in their selection of commencement speakers.
“Public universities in conservative parts of the country, universities with a strong religious affiliation, and universities with active and prominent conservative alumni are more likely to select a conservative commencement speaker,” he said. “Interestingly, universities with a relatively high percentage of students in an occupational or professional major are also more likely to.”
Chance Layton from the National Association of Scholars likewise said the study provides quantitative evidence of a longstanding pattern.
Layton said he found the decline in conservative speakers since 2011 to be more notable than the larger, more apparent finding that liberal speakers outnumbered conservative speakers.
“The paper gives objective data to what we knew subjectively: universities actively screened conservatives from the academy and, worse, from even receiving the opportunity to speak directly to students,” Layton wrote in an email to The Fix.
Although the choice of commencement speakers is only one measure of campus ideology, “when added to others, they help us build a fuller picture of the ideological makeup of our universities.”
MORE: Democrats outnumber Republicans 5 to 1 as graduation speakers
