The typical politically active professor teaching at Harvard, Yale, Georgetown, and America’s other leading universities sits in the same ideological neighborhood as Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the three most progressive members of Congress. The bigger issue, however, is that many campuses lack the intellectual range for anyone to seriously challenge those professors’ views.
That is the central finding of a new study commissionedby the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and conducted by University of Rochester political scientist David Primo.
For decades, any evidence of faculty ideology came from two kinds of data, each with limits that let defenders of the academy dismiss the importance of the findings. Surveys produced left-to-right ratios of about 6-to-1, but they were vulnerable to issues like non-response bias and the known tendency for conservative professors to self-censor on polls (both documented by FIRE’s own 2024 faculty survey). Voter-registration data yielded an 8.5-to-1 Democrat-to-Republican ratio, but that information exists in only 30 states and reveals nothing about how Democrats break down internally. The problem is “Democrat” stretches from the culturally conservative Joe Manchin to the democratic socialist Bernie Sanders, and ratios cannot say where on that spectrum the typical professor sits.
Primo’s study adds that new dimension to our understanding of faculty ideological diversity. It draws on a database built by Stanford political scientist Adam Bonica that tracks more than 850 million political contributions since 1979 and places every donor (and every politician they fund) on a single continuous left-right scale. Donors to Susan Collins occupy a different ideological position than donors to Ted Cruz, even though both give only to Republicans. The same logic separates Manchin from Warren donors. The result is a number on the same scale used for every member of Congress, placing faculty directly alongside the people who write America’s laws.
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An important new study commissioned by FIRE has two major findings – AOC and Bernie are ideologically aligned with the median faculty member at a group of 55 leading colleges and universities, and (more importantly) there has been a near-total collapse in ideological diversity among this group.