By Mitchell Langbert
Two weeks ago, a demonstration of Palestinian students at the University of Virginia resulted in 25 trespassing arrests. The protest in Charlottesville was one of more than sixty around the country.
There is nothing wrong with demonstrations that vent political belief, but when speech turns into trespassing and vandalism, it stops being speech. That such spillovers have occurred at universities around the country is unremarkable because insularity, which results from the ideological homogeneity characteristic of America’s universities, leads to intolerance, and intolerance closes minds.
I have done a series of research studies on the political imbalance in America’s universities. The higher-education institutions that most Americans believe have been established to encourage learning, curiosity, and thought now encourage the reverse. Ideological litmus tests via formalized DEI statements are the rule. Conservatives, libertarians, Christians, Republicans, and retired military personnel are not tolerated in many academic departments. If sunlight is the best disinfectant, the shade in the groves of academe is dense.
A few months ago, the National Association of Scholars on behalf of the Jefferson Council asked me to review the political affiliations of the faculty and staff at the University of Virginia at Charlottesville. Research assistants at the NAS identified 2,384 usable federal-candidate-donation records from faculty and staff. The records covered six years or three Federal Elections Commission cycles, from 2017 to 2022.
We found that federal political donations from the faculty and staff at UVA go almost exclusively to one political party: the Democrats. For faculty, the ratios of Democratic to Republican donors is 24:1, while for staff it is 16:1.
I differentiated between white-collar staff such as computer programmers and blue-collar staff such as electricians. For the relatively few blue-collar staff, the ratio is 1.4:1 while for the white-collar staff the ratio is 17.5:1 Besides the blue-collar staff, the only exception to the skewed pattern is athletic coaches (1.8:1), presumably because the athletic success of UVA’s Cavaliers supersedes decreased performance, which likely results from viewpoint discrimination. Universities have become one big affirmative action plan for left-wing ideologues.
Moreover, we found that 21 of the 39 departments that have donors have zero donors to Republican candidates. The proportion roughly follows a study I coauthored a few years ago that looked at donations in the four leading colleges in 30 states. We found that across a wide swath of leading academic institutions, the faculty contributes $21 to Democrats for every $1 to Republicans. The more elite institutions have more extreme imbalances, so the imbalance at UVA, which is ranked within the top two percent, can be viewed as having a moderate imbalance in line with expectations. Moderate in this context means extreme, of course.
In prior studies (also here), I looked at faculty but not staff. What our UVA results suggest is that viewpoint discrimination at UVA and in colleges in general extends to the nonacademic staff. The issue is one of organizational culture.
There has been a claim among academics who defend the ideological imbalance in American academic institutions that the reason for the imbalance is that left ideology is associated with personality traits that draw people into academic careers. But no one has claimed that a wide swath of nonacademic personnel have such personalities. Yet, the imbalance is almost the same for the white-collar staff.
The real reason for the political imbalance in universities is that they have intolerant cultures that are ideologically infused, and as America has become ideologically polarized, colleges have increasingly excluded those who disagree with the dominant viewpoints.
Before the 1920s, most colleges were conservative, but that changed as the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching encouraged secularization. Funding from the New Deal intensified the ideological role academics played in the federal government, beginning with FDR’S Brains Trust and programs associated with the Agricultural Adjustment Act.
Grotesque imbalances have resulted not only in intolerance but also in complacency about the intolerance. University presidents congratulate themselves about the academic freedom they encourage while dissident professors and students are afraid to speak. The silencing of dissenters through ad hominem attacks has become normalized. Virtually every conservative and libertarian professor has by now either hidden their views, suffered an attack on his career, or been fired for ideological reasons.
To change an organizational culture is difficult if not impossible. Americans need to begin to consider whether reorganization and reform of established academic institutions, including one founded by Thomas Jefferson, may be necessary. As Jefferson wrote to William Stephens Smith, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure.”
Mitchell Langbert is associate professor of business at Brooklyn College.