BUZZ
Four of the ten least intellectually diverse campuses are on the West Coast, with another four in the Ivy League
A recent study from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression shows that the average college faculty member who contributes to a political candidate is “only slightly less left” than Vermont U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders.
The FIRE study also found that “politically active faculty are largely confined to a narrow band of liberal politics, with virtually no conservative counterbalance.”
According to a FIRE press release, University of Rochester Professor David Primo utilized a list of “100,000 faculty members at 55 universities” that FIRE first used two years ago.
Primo cross-referenced the names with a Stanford University professor’s database of more than “850 million state and federal campaign contributions” to see to whom faculty had donated, and then made an “estimate” about their political ideology via a “CFscore.”
Analysis of political contributions instead of voter registrations provided a measure of academics’ ideology “instead of just their party affiliation.”
For example, a professor who gave “exclusively” to moderate Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine would get a lower CFscore (0.70) than a professor who donated only to conservative GOP Senator Ted Cruz of Texas (1.52).
Overall, Primo found that the average CFscore for the 55-university list was -1.02, or “only slightly less left-leaning than some of the most left-wing members of the U.S. Senate” such as Sanders and Massachusetts’ Elizabeth Warren.
By comparing the standard deviation of the CFscore of donations, it’s also possible to approximate which schools and disciplines might have greater intellectual diversity than others. The humanities and fine arts show the least political diversity, while business and agriculture show the highest — but even business and agriculture professors still lean heavily to the left in their donations.
Eight of the ten most politically diverse faculty bodies were at universities located in the U.S. South, a region where conservatives are more plentiful (the other two were Kansas State University and Brigham Young University). Meanwhile, four of the ten least intellectually diverse campuses were located on the West Coast, and four were Ivy League schools in the Northeast.
Although a “high level of ideological conformity within the academy doesn’t necessarily mean dissenting voices are being silenced or frozen out,” another recent FIRE analysis shows this does appear to be the case.
Among other things, its December 2024 survey found that “only 20% of university faculty say a conservative would fit in well in their department.”
MORE: U. Chicago poll: 27% say colleges give conservatives ‘respectful environment’
