The Yale Daily News reviewed more than 7,000 Federal Election Commission filings from 2025 listing Yale as the employer: “Of 1,099 filings that included ‘professor’ in their occupation, 97.6 percent of the donations went to Democrats, while the remaining 2.4 percent went to independent candidates or groups,” the student newspaper reported Jan. 14.”
The study reinforces the recent Buckley Institute report, which found that, of the 43 departments surveyed, 27 entire departments contained zero Republican professors.
Even if the study missed a couple of donations, the radical imbalance is a reflection of the lack of diversity at the school. It is not a perfect point of comparison. There can be a conservative or libertarian faculty member who does not make donations and does not register with any party.
Moreover, those of us who have criticized the lack of diversity have not argued for partisan criteria in faculty appointments. Rather, these are metrics that help show the lack of diversity. Many scholars prefer to dismiss these criticisms as speculative or unproven. However, the problem has long been obvious and these studies reinforce what critics have said for years.
One professor is quoted as acknowledging the apparent problem. Carlos Eire, a history and religious studies professor, said, “It’s true, there is very, very, very little intellectual diversity at Yale and at most institutions of higher learning when it comes to politics.” Professor Eire added,“Academics in the US, Canada and Europe have been leaning left for the past three or four generations. And this is something that shows no signs of being corrected or correcting itself anytime soon.”
He is correct.
I was asked by the president of a top-ranked university how he could reverse this problem. He was convinced that the lack of intellectual diversity was causing lasting harm to higher education. I told him that one thing is clear: you cannot rely on faculty members to restore diversity.
I was at a dinner not long ago with a Harvard Law Professor who told me and others that he could not be expected to vote for a faculty candidate with whom he disagreed. Two of us objected that we do that all the time to reinforce intellectual diversity. He was entirely unapologetic and unyielding that he would not vote for faculty candidates who embrace conservative views of the Constitution that he considers wrong.
Faculty members have privately acknowledged for years that they have largely eliminated conservatives and libertarians, but rationalize their records on not finding “intellectually promising” conservative candidates. If the imbalance involved race or gender, a court would crush arguments that the lack of diversity is some unintended consequence of the applicant pool.
University presidents must create enclaves of diversity outside these departments, through institutes and centers that faculty members do not control.
Some faculty are more honest than others.
As I discuss in my book “The Indispensable Right,” Harvard is not just an academic echo chamber. It is a virtual academic sensory deprivation tank.
In a country with a majority of conservative and libertarian voters, fewer than 9 percent of the Harvard student body and less than 3 percent of the faculty members identify as conservative.
For years, Harvard faculty have brushed away complaints over its liberal orthodoxy, including purging conservative faculty. It has created one of the most hostile schools for free speech in the nation, ranking dead last among universities in annual studies by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).
Only a third of students at Harvard feel comfortable speaking on campus despite being overwhelmingly liberal at an overwhelmingly liberal institution. (The percentage is much higher for the small number of conservative students).
Not long ago, I debated Professor Randall Kennedy at Harvard Law School about the lack of ideological diversity at the school. I respect Kennedy and I do not view him as anti-free speech or intolerant. Yet when I noted the statistics on the vanishing number of conservative students and faculty in comparison to the nation, Kennedy responded that Harvard “is an elite university” and does not have to “look like America.”
Of course, the problem is that Harvard does not even look like Massachusetts, which is nearly 30 percent Republican.
Yale, however, is now a perfect echo chamber where moderate, libertarian, and conservative students (if they can make it into the school) are left to self-censor and avoid backlash for their views.