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Money talks
It's well known that America's faculties tilt to one side. Studies of voter registration and voting patterns have consistently documented a lack of diversity among professors when it comes to political issues. And while many professors argue that their outside electoral habits have no impact on their teaching and research, there are convincing arguments to the contrary. As University of Montana professor Paul Trout and UC Santa Cruz emeritus professor John Ellis have argued, political one-sidedness creates groupthink where there should be robust debate, skews research, and even encourages scholarly organizations to behave like advocacy groups. The result is an impoverished scholarly atmosphere that undermines the quality of undergraduate education. As ACTA revealed in a 2004 survey, 49 percent of college students believe their professors "frequently injected political comments into their courses, even if they had nothing to do with the subject" and 29 percent feel they must agree with their professors' political views to get a good grade
A new study from the Center for Responsive Politics comes at the issue from another angle, and reports some striking results. Tracking campaign contributions during the '08 cycle, the Center found that higher ed is a bigger donor than the oil and gas industry, the computer and Internet industry, general contractors, and the drug companies. Currently, people employed by colleges and universities have contributed over $7 million to prospective presidential candidates, parties and committees, with 76% of the total going to Democrats and 60% going to individual candidates. Barack Obama is the frontrunner at $1.5 million, while Hillary Clinton follows at nearly $940,000.
Within higher ed, Harvard is the biggest contributor, with $266,000 in donations, 81% of which has gone to Democrats. 90% of the University of California's $248,488 has gone to Democrats, 92% of the University of Chicago’s $102,880 has gone to Democrats, and a whopping 99% of William and Mary's $136,200 has gone to Democrats.
Campaign contributions from higher ed have skyrocketed during the last two election cycles. During the 1990s, academics tended to give about $7 million per cycle. But in 2000, they gave $17 million, and in 2004 they gave $38 million. The effect on individual candidates' campaigns has been dramatic--in 2004, John Kerry received more money from University of California employees than from any other employer, and these gave more than twice what employees of Time Warner, the Kerry campaign's largest corporate donor, gave.
Intellectual diversity is not, of course, reducible to party affiliation, and the professoriate's campaign contributions do not themselves tell us what happens inside college classrooms. Still, the numbers are suggestive, and they do indicate cause for concern. "This...might not be a crisis if it were not for the fact that some of the ideals that encourage intellectual openness command less allegiance in academe than they once did," ACTA noted in its 2005 report, Intellectual Diversity: Time for Action. "Today, the notion of truth and objectivity is regarded by many professors as antiquated and an obstacle to social change. In this 'postmodern' view, all ideas are political, the classroom is an appropriate place for advocacy, and students should be molded into 'change agents' to promote a political agenda. ... Faculty imbalance, combined with the idea that the 'politically correct' point of view has a right to dominate classroom and campus discussions, has had fearful consequences for university life."
Posted by acta online at August 14, 2007 12:26 PM
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