Faculty Ideology and Campaign Contributions

Many posts have discussed the politics of colleges and universities in the United States.

A release from FIRE:

A new study commissioned by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression indicates that donations from faculty at top universities have become increasingly one-sided, with the range of opinion becoming concentrated on the left.

“Free speech is not just the right to speak, it is the condition that lets universities test ideas through real disagreement,” FIRE Vice President of Research Angela Erickson said. “Our findings 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.”

FIRE provided University of Rochester Professor David Primo with a list of more than 100,000 faculty members at 55 universities that was first compiled for use in the 2024 FIRE Faculty Survey Report. Primo then analyzed a dataset created by cross-referencing those names with a database of over 850 million state and federal campaign contributions compiled by a Stanford University professor. Faculty members who could be matched with donations were assigned a “CFscore,” a measure used by researchers to estimate a person’s political ideology based on who they donate to.

“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.”

By relying on contribution data rather than voter registration data, Primo was able to measure professors’ ideology instead of just their party affiliation. A Republican professor who gives exclusively to Maine Sen. Susan Collins (CFscore: 0.70) would score differently than a Republican professor giving exclusively to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (CFscore: 1.52), for example.

The average ideology score of faculty donors in the 55-school sample was -1.02. That’s only slightly less left-leaning than some of the most left-wing members of the U.S. Senate, such as Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who are tied with CFscores of -1.14. Notably, there was no equivalent critical mass of donations on the Republican side.

Problems with Scholarly Journals

Many posts have discussed the politics of colleges and universities in the United States.

Robert Maranto at AEI:

In their current state, scholarly journals are beset with mediocre research, shoddy in its execution and biased in its choice of topics. In the infamous case of the “nudge” studies that affected public policy in multiple countries, Duke University Professor Dan Ariely and Harvard University Professor Francesca Gino (at the time one of the five highest paid Harvard employees) spent nearly a decade faking data, duping both the public and dozens of coauthors.2 Such outright fraud is likely rare, but as Harvard Business School professor and former Gino collaborator Max Bazerman argues, sloppiness and questionable practices like p hacking (stopping data collection and analyses the instant desired findings are found) are common.3 Moreover, as Alvaro de Menard reports in “What’s Wrong with Social Science and How to Fix It,” scholarly studies are rarely replicated, and when they are, the original findings often turn out to be questionable or outright wrong.4

Even worse, in many fields leftist bias in scholarly publication is practically ubiquitous. For example, Richard Kahlenberg and Lief Lin detail how over a three-year period, the leading American studies scholarly journal, American Quarterly, published 77 essays and articles fundamentally critical of America, 19 neutral pieces, and zero America-positive manuscripts.5

Similarly, in a rare bit of investigative reporting, Goldwater Institute political scientist Timothy Minella finds that the American Political Science Association (APSA) governing council in 2020 selected a group calling itself “the Feminist Collective” to edit the APSA’s flagship journal, American Political Science Review (APSR).6 This group declared its intent to “actively dismantle the institutionalized racism, sexism, heterosexism, ableism, and settler colonialism that continue to characterize and structure [political science].”7 As any editor knows, most manuscripts are “desk rejected” by editors rather than sent out for anonymous peer review by scholars in the field. To fight alleged bias favoring heteronormative white males, the Feminist Collective promised in its application to edit APSR that only submissions by the privileged (i.e., heteronormative white males) would face desk rejections. Articles by others enjoyed automatic peer review, an obvious display of discrimination.

Other critical theorists took over the prestigious Review of Educational Research (RER), a journal sponsored by the 110-year-old American Educational Research Association (AERA). The new editors of this hitherto rigorous quantitative journal, devoted to testing hypotheses and presenting research through systematic meta-analyses, announced in their inaugural essay that they would deign to allow quantitative articles, but only from scholars who “apply critical race theory to quantitative data” or “draw their scholarly genealogy from the conflict theory tradition of sociology that centers class conflict.”8 AERA’s critical theory fetish ignores the concerns of classroom teachers, who surveys show focus on student behavior, mental health, and technology use rather than leftist political activism.9

2.Frederick M. Hess, “What If Social Science Is a Scam?,” Education Next, September 30, 2025, https://www.educationnext.org/what-if-social-science-is-a-scam/.
3 Max H. Bazerman, Inside an Academic Scandal: A Story of Fraud and Betrayal (MIT Press, 2025).
4.Alvaro de Menard, “What’s Wrong with Social Science and How to Fix It: Reflections After Reading 2578 Papers,” Fantastic Anachronism, September 11, 2020, https://www.fantasticanachronism.com/p/whats-wrong-with-social-science-and-how-to-fix-it. Perhaps due to its relative ideological diversity, which enables researchers to ask a range of questions, economics does somewhat better than other fields with respect to work quality and bias. Interestingly, colleges and universities led by economists are overrepresented among high performers on the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression campus free speech rankings. Robert Maranto and Martha Bradley-Dorsey, “Yelling FIRE on Campus: Higher Education Free Speech Leaders and Laggards,” Academic Questions 36, no. 1 (2023): 23–33, https://academicquestions.org/yelling-fire-on-campus-free-speech-leaders-and-laggards/.
5 Richard D. Kahlenberg and Lief Lin, The Distortion of American Studies: How the Field’s Leading Journal Has Embraced a Worldview as Slanted as Donald Trump’s, Progressive Policy Institute, January 22, 2026, https://www.progressivepolicy.org/the-distortion-of-american-studies/.
6Timothy K. Minella, Peer Review Gone Wild: Flagship Political Science Journal Shows How Academic Gatekeepers Promote Ideology over Scholarship, Goldwater Institute, December 2, 2025, https://www.goldwaterinstitute.org/peer-review-gone-wild/.
7 Minella, Peer Review Gone Wild.
8 Mildred Boveda et al., “Editorial Vision 2022–2025,” Review of Educational Research 93, no. 5 (2023): 638–40, https://doi.org/10.3102/00346543231170179.
9 David T. Marshall et al., “Teacher and Research Priorities: To What Extent Do They Align?” (working paper, SocArXiv, December 20, 2025), https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/h82rk_v1.

 

GOP v. Trends in Higher Ed

Many posts have discussed the politics of colleges and universities in the United States.

Schickler E, Rodriguez EM. The College Campus and the Culture War: The Development of Party Polarization on Higher Education, 1980–2025. Studies in American Political Development. Published online 2026:1-21. doi:10.1017/S0898588X26100327

Abstract

We draw on a dataset of 1,044 state and national party platforms from 1980 to 2025 to track the evolution of Democratic and Republican positions with respect to higher education. The sector enjoyed considerable bipartisan support in the 1980s and early 1990s, with both parties generally expressing the view that 4-year colleges and universities contribute to economic vitality and student advancement. Starting in the mid-1990s, Republicans’ position gradually became more critical—even so, there is considerable diversity in views across states as late as 2010. In recent years, the party’s platforms have become almost uniformly negative toward higher education. The first line of GOP criticism focused on concerns about speech and alleged liberal bias. In the past decade, the party increasingly focused its criticism on higher education’s approach to racial and gender/sexuality issues—just as the intensity of opposition ramped up. Democratic platforms show much more stability but have expressed increased concern about college costs since the 2010s. Democrats also became more likely to express a liberal position on race and gender/sexuality policies just as the GOP became more vocal in criticizing these policies from the right. Our evidence suggests that the shift in the GOP’s positioning began at the national level and was instigated by nationally oriented ideological activists rather than mass-level demands. In a highly polarized and nationalized two-party system, the case of higher education illuminates the dangers that exist for any civil society institution when one party becomes hostile to its purposes and orientation.

Trust in HIgher Education

Elite academia leans heavily to the left.

Report of the Yale Committee  on Trust in Higher Education

 It should come as no surprise that trust in higher education has fallen most among those Americans who identify as Republican or conservative. According to Gallup, the percentage of self-identified Republicans who expressed “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education declined from 56 percent in 2015 to 26 percent in 2025, while confidence among Democrats fell more modestly, from 68 to 61 percent.42 In one national survey, only 19 percent of Republicans expressed “quite a lot” of confidence that the nation’s leading research universities “teach students neutrally and without political bias.”43 

The complaint that colleges and universities lean left is hardly new. William F. Buckley, Jr., made much the same case about Yale in 1951.44 Yet something distinctive has happened in recent decades. In 1989 approximately 40 percent of the nation’s faculty identified as liberal, 40 percent as moderate, and 20 percent as conservative. By 2014, those numbers had shifted to 60 percent liberal, 30 percent moderate, and 10 percent conservative.45 Of course it is not just the faculty that has changed. The political system has changed too. Fifty years ago, the Democratic and Republican parties were less ideologically divided than they are today. As the parties resorted, so did the partisan preferences of many professions, including within higher education. 

42 Jeffrey M. Jones, “U.S. Confidence in Higher Education Now Closely Divided,” Gallup, July 8, 2024; Jones, “U.S. Public Trust in Higher Ed Rises From Recent Low.” 43 Ken Goldstein, “Yale public opinion studies: September 2025 national, state, and local studies,” presentation, November 19, 2025. 44 William F. Buckley, Jr., God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of Academic Freedom (Regnery, 1951). 45 Samuel J. Abrams, “Mind the Professors,” The American Interest, March 10, 2017. 

Leftward Trend in Social Science Research?

Many posts have discussed the politics of colleges and universities in the United States.

Manzi, J. The ideological orientation of academic social science research 1960–2024. Theor Soc 55, 25 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-026-09690-2

This study analyzes approximately 600,000 English-language social science abstracts published between 1960 and 2024 to estimate the long-run ideological orientation of disciplinary research output. Large language models (LLMs) were applied to each abstract using a fixed 2025 U.S. ideological spectrum, enabling consistent coding across six decades. Five key findings emerged. First, roughly 90 percent of politically relevant social science articles leaned left 1960–2024, and the mean political stance of every social science discipline was left-of-center every year during the period. Second, all disciplines showed leftward movement between 1990 and 2024. Third, policy-proximal disciplines generally showed limited rightward moderation between roughly 1970 and 1990, though policy-distal disciplines did not. Fourth, disciplines with greater leftward orientation generally displayed greater ideological homogeneity Fifth, sociocultural content was more consistently left-leaning than economic content, and that gap widened over time. Robustness checks using a wide assortment of alternative datasets and analytical methodologies indicated that these findings were unlikely to be artifacts of idiosyncratic assumptions. Methodologically, the study demonstrates the capacity of LLM-based text classification to deliver reliable, large-scale ideological measurement over time, a task previously impractical with human coding alone. Taken together, the analysis provides the first systematic, cross-disciplinary evidence of the long-run political orientation of anglophone social science scholarship, revealing both the persistence and the intensification of its leftward tendencies, particularly in sociocultural domains.

Huge caveat, from the article:In this study, ideology was operationalized as the relative positioning of a given text along a left–right spectrum of U.S. political thought. This includes economic and sociocultural dimensions, each characterized by their association with recognizable ideological actors and institutions. To ensure interpretive consistency over a 65-year period (1960 to 2024), political stance was evaluated against a fixed 2025 reference frame, derived from contemporary U.S. political categories.

This approach involved trade-offs. Using a static ideological scale, anchored to notions such as the 2025 political positions of Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, or the Heritage Foundation, ensured that the LLM’s judgments were grounded in stable, well-defined anchor points. It avoided the problem of ideological drift, in which the meaning of ‘left’ or ‘right’ might evolve over time due to shifting partisan alignments or cultural contexts. However, this came at the cost of temporal anachronism. Texts written in earlier decades may have been judged by standards they would not have recognized.

There is no doubt that the academy leans left, and has done so for a long time.  But the core problem with Manzi's analysis is that the entire US political spectrum has moved to the left, especially on cultural issues.  On abortion, civil rights, marriage, gender equality and a range of other issues, positions that were once radical left (e.g., support for same-sex marriage) are now mainstream.  Judge Glock at National Affairs:

The interaction of politics, policy, and public opinion should change how we look at polarization. In one sense, some conservative Republicans have indeed moved away from what we now consider the center. But the center itself has also changed, and veered emphatically to the left. Both parties, to varying degrees, have followed this shift over time. The changing context helps explain why each party can see the other as "radical" relative to what it considers the center, and why the argument that the right has moved rightward more than the left has moved leftward is unpersuasive.

 

Policy Schools Are Short on Conservative Voices

Many posts have discussed the politics of colleges and universities in the United States.

Frederick Hess at AEI:

It’d be good for everyone if there were a deeper bench of Republican policy professionals who really knew how government works. That’s why it’s such a big problem that the nation’s public policy schools serve as owned-and-operated subsidiaries of the Democratic Party.

Faculty at leading programs lean lopsidedly to the left; unsurprisingly, they emphasize predictable priorities, such as prison reform, homelessness, or healthcare. The technocratic progressives are joined by colleagues who go further still, recasting policy debates in identity-driven and baldly ideological terms to “expose” systemic racism and the evils of U.S. capitalism.

Right-leaning priorities are routinely marginalized or dismissed as backward-looking, as is the case with immigration enforcement, entitlement reform, educational choice, or tax-cutting. As a result of this bias, a broad swath of aspiring conservative policy professionals has sensibly opted to avoid these programs altogether. The result: Republicans are short on skilled policy professionals, while left-leaning students and scholars operate in a blue bubble in which they too rarely engage with those who think differently.

What Is News?

  Kirsten Eddy at al. wrote a Pew study of the meaning of news:

Key findings:

• Defining news has become a personal, and personalized, experience. People decide what news means to them and which sources they turn to based on a variety of factors, including their own identities and interests.
• Most people agree that information must be factual, up to date and important to society to be considered news. Personal importance or relevance also came up often, both in participants’ own words and in their actual behaviors.
• “Hard news” stories about politics and war continue to be what people most clearly think of as news. U.S. adults are most likely to say election updates (66%) and information about the war in Gaza (62%) are “definitely news.”
• There are also consistent views on what news is not. People make clear distinctions between news versus entertainment and news versus opinion.
• At the same time, views of news as not being “biased” or “opinionated” can conflict with people’s actual behaviors and preferences. For instance, 55% of Americans believe it’s at least somewhat important that their news sources share their political views.
• People don’t always like news, but they say they need it: While many express negative emotions surrounding news (such as anger or sadness), they also say it helps them feel informed or feel that they “need” to keep up with it.
• People’s emotions about news are at times tied to broader feelings of media distrust, or specific events going on at that time – perhaps in combination with individuals’ political identities. For instance, partisans often react positively to news about their own political parties or candidates and negatively to news covering their opposition, which means feelings can shift with political changes.

The answers to the question “What is news?” are not always straightforward. As this study confirms, the definitions people hold for news may not be consistent with their actual behaviors. There are sometimes clashes between what people believe others think of as news and what “feels” like news to them. And people often categorize information as “news” along a continuum rather than as a simple yes-or-no question. Those perceptions vary depending on the platform, source and individual.

Enhancing Viewpoint Diversity on Campus

 Many posts have discussed the politics of colleges and universities in the United States.

 At AEI, Jenna Silber Storey and Benjamin Storey discuss ways of improving viewpoint diversity on college campuses:

Short-term: Involve PhDs and other professionals currently working outside academia in research and teaching. Many right-of-center PhDs find more congenial professional homes in think-tanks than on campus, as Johns Hopkins president Ronald J. Daniels points out. There are also plenty of highly-educated conservative professionals working in law, business, and politics. Universities should draw on these experts, as Rick Hess argues, to round out their course offerings.

Example: The newly launched Johns Hopkins-AEI Fellowship Exchange program, which offers grants to groups of Hopkins faculty and AEI scholars who are interested in teaching or researching together. Scholars have discussed collaborative work on subjects ranging from public health to the future of liberal education.

Medium-term: Give academics who chafe against the ideological skew of the current university a home in which to grow. Such professors are often isolated, and have little influence on the direction of their departments or disciplines. Some are interested in changes to academic structures that would allow them to do more consequential teaching, scholarship, and program-building. To enhance the influence of these professors, trustees and administrators should work with them to form new academic units with authority to hire faculty and create curricula.

Example: The new schools of Civic Thought, initially launched in red-and-purple state public universities. These schools have the opportunity to pioneer an approach to university-level civic education that could give rise to a new field of study. Giving definition and life to that field will require working with national networks of civics professors, hosting conferences and ultimately establishing an association.

Long-term: Expand the academic pipeline to support talented young people who do not perceive the current academy as a vocational home. Many disciplines today suffer from “field compression:” a narrowed range of questions considered valid to ask, and hypotheses considered reasonable to entertain. Universities that seek to remedy this problem by hiring right-of-center professors often find that there are few available to employ. Treating this problem means making a concerted effort to welcome young people who are inhabit a wider range of political and intellectual perspectives into the academic profession.

Example: The “Graduate Student Intellectual Diversity Initiative,” designed with Johns Hopkins professor Steven Teles. This mentorship program connects talented young people enrolled in study opportunities such as the AEI Summer Honors Program, the Hertog Political Studies Program, and the Hudson Political Studies Fellowship with faculty from top graduate schools who want to help broaden the academic pipeline for the sake of the future health of their discipline.

LA Times Edits an Op-Ed

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Conversation

Eric Reinhart

@_Eric_Reinhart

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1h

I am the author of this OpEd, which was given a misleading title and from which key lines were cut—lines that made very clear that RFK Jr is dangerously ignorant, has absolutely no business near HHS, and is effectively a mass murderer in waiting.

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Dr. Pat Soon-Shiong

@DrPatSoonShiong

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11h

Trump’s healthcare disruption could pay off — if he pushes real reform ⁦@latimes⁩ ⁦@RobertKennedyJr⁩.He is our best chance of doing so https://latimes.com/opinion/story/2025-01-29/rfk-jr-trump-health-reform…

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Eric Reinhart

@_Eric_Reinhart

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1h

My first time working with the Los Angeles Times, and I expect also my last.

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Eric Reinhart

@_Eric_Reinhart

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1h

My suggested title, which reflects the content I expected to go to press, was “RFK Jr’s Wrecking Ball Won’t Fix Public Health.” A vote for RFK Jr is a vote for nothing but chaos, the opposite of the essential public-systems building I argue for in the OpEd, and mass death.

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Eric Reinhart

@_Eric_Reinhart

My opening and closing lines do not leave my stance on RFK Jr remotely ambiguous.

7:52 AM · Jan 31, 2025

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Eric Reinhart

@_Eric_Reinhart

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1h

Editors edit and control final copy and hed; I get that. But editing out a very central and timely point in the minutes before sending to press while then also assigning a title and image that suggest an argument entirely opposite to the author’s clear intent is bad.

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Eric Reinhart

@_Eric_Reinhart

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45m

Here’s the original OpEd that reflects my actual intended arguments.

drive.google.com

Reinhart_Populist Public Health OpEd_1.29.24.pdf

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