By Daniel J. Flynn.

John Kerry v. George W. Bush:  Giving to 2004 Presidential Campaigns from Employees at U.S. News & World Report’s Top-Ranked National Universities.

American colleges and universities are very different from the nation that surrounds them.  

The differences are especially profound when it comes to politics.  The United States is closely divided between the two major parties, but no such division exists on any major college campus.  Federal Election Commission records from 2004 show a wide disparity in donations to the two major presidential candidates from college and university employees.

Employees at Harvard University gave John Kerry $31 for every $1 they gave George W. Bush.  At Duke University, the ratio stood at $14 to $1.  At Princeton University, a $114 to $1 ratio prevails.

The Kerry/Bush split in the number of donations is even more extreme.  John Kerry received 257 donations of $200 or more from Stanford, while his opponent got just 28.  At Northwestern, Kerry received 100 such contributions and Bush six.  Georgetown University donations swung 132 to six in Kerry’s favor.

Deep Blue Campuses examines the political donations of employees at the top twenty-five national universities listed in U.S. News and World Report’s 2004 college issue.  Specifically, this booklet compares donations in the 2004 election cycle to the two major presidential candidates, George W. Bush and John Kerry.

Although George Bush claimed a bare majority of votes in the actual election, John Kerry trounced him in donations received from colleges and universities.  In fact, John Kerry received the lion’s share of donations from workers at all twenty-five schools featured in U.S. News and World Report’s annual survey.  At one school (Dartmouth), Kerry posted an infinite advantage: FEC records show 39 donations to Kerry but not a single Dartmouth employee donating to George W. Bush’s campaign.

According to Federal Election Commission records, five of the top twenty institutions of all types from which donors made contributions to John Kerry’s campaign – the University of California, Harvard, Stanford, the University of Michigan, and Columbia – were universities.[1] The UC system and Harvard actually gave more than Viacom, JP Morgan, CitiGroup, and other corporate behemoths.  In contrast, no university ranked in George W. Bush’s top twenty contributors.

The buzzword on campus is diversity.  The reality on campus is conformity.  

Ward Churchill: Case Study

In the spring of 2005, Ward Churchill, a heretofore obscure professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado, became the subject of op-eds, cable news debates, blog posts, and angry talk-radio calls.  Several schools, including Hamilton College, ignited controversy by inviting Churchill to speak.  Churchill had penned a response to 9/11 entitled “Some People Push Back,” which characterized Osama bin Laden’s followers as acting with “patience and restraint” and compared the victims of 9/11 to Nazis.[2]

America considers Ward Churchill a mental case.  Academia considers Ward Churchill a scholar.

Churchill holds a masters degree in communications from Sangamon State University yet somehow managed to get tenure at one of the nation’s more prestigious state universities.  A committee of his peers even made him the chairman of an academic department.  Outside the University of Colorado, universities officially invite him to address their students.  Standing ovations interrupted Churchill’s post-controversy speeches at the Universities of Hawaii and Colorado, for instance, and overflow audiences packed the rooms.[3]  The Martin Luther King Jr. Collegium of Scholars at Morehouse College even inducted Churchill into its group.

The Churchill scandal illustrates the perils of campus conformity.  The University of Colorado hires extremists such as Ward Churchill, but excludes mainstream conservatives.  When the Rocky Mountain News surveyed thirteen departments on the Boulder campus in 1997, they found a 31-1 Democrat/Republican party-registration imbalance among the faculty.[4]

If a conservative relied on as underwhelming a resume as Ward Churchill and similarly exposed himself as a sloppy thinker in the way Churchill has, would he have received tenure, a department chair, and the support of the University of Colorado faculty?  No.

Churchill’s radicalism, rather than his resume, landed him the job.  Just as his politics were his qualifications, the politics of conservatives often disqualify them from academic positions.   

Consequences of Groupthink

American college campuses are tiny blue islands engulfed in a giant red sea.  The political alienation of the professoriate results in a tendency among academics to lash out at the surrounding society, to react immaturely to views contrary to their own, and to cultivate extremism among students.  A more politically diverse faculty would alleviate these problems.

The controversy over Ward Churchill’s words coincided with a controversy over the words of a more famous academic.[5]  Harvard President Larry Summers’s speech exploring possible genetic differences in the cognitive abilities of the sexes sparked controversy on campus, whereas Churchill’s words sparked controversy off campus.  

In response to the uproar over Churchill, hundreds of CU faculty purchased an ad in a Boulder newspaper expressing their support for their embattled colleague.[6]  In Summers’s case, the Harvard faculty of arts and sciences voted to call on Summers to resign.[7]  

Campus conformity makes freedom of speech a relative concept, subject to the political outlook of the speaker.  If your words offend liberals, like Summers’s words did, it is deemed a firing offense.  If your words offend everybody else, like Churchill’s words did, academics will defend you and label criticism “censorship.”  On campus, what unfortunately matters is whose ox is being gored.  This overwhelming political bias characterizes the faculties of all top colleges.

The campus is the place where speech should be the most free.  The campus is the place where speech is the most restricted.  

• Offended by a politically incorrect campus newspaper, students in a women’s studies class at Rutgers fulfilled a required assignment to “construct a feminist action project” by collecting signatures demanding the university ban the publication.  When the censorship campaign went nowhere, students took action into their own hands by confiscating and destroying an entire press-run of the paper in the fall of 2004.[8]  

• Ball State University student Amanda Carpenter penned exposés on BSU faculty and its summer reading program in her campus publication, www.bsyou.net.  In response, a BSU teaching assistant doctored images of her – superimposing her face over pornographic pictures – and posted them on a local message board.[9]  

• Left-wing activists assaulted Ann Coulter, David Horowitz, Richard Perle, William Kristol, and Pat Buchanan as they spoke on campuses during the 2004-2005 school year.  

• Over 2004’s Thanksgiving weekend, Yale University thieves confiscated an entire press run of the Yale Free Press, a conservative student publication.  The school’s Dean of Student Affairs refused to look into the matter, brushing off the student journalists.  To have their complaint investigated, they had to individually contact each of the school’s eleven residential colleges, the Dean told them.[10]  

Why does a healthy exchange of ideas matter in an academic setting?  The search for truth is the longstanding mission of higher education.  When one side of the debate is silenced, finding the truth becomes more difficult.  If institutions embraced intellectual diversity in the way they have embraced racial diversity they would be much more likely to foster debate and thus aid the search for truth.

Consequences of Groupthink, Part II

Ward Churchill merely defends terrorists.  Other professors once were terrorists.

Bill Ayers bombed the Pentagon in 1972.  Now he’s the Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois-Chicago.

Bernadine Dohrn, a terrorist who romanticized the Manson Family, reacted to the 1969 Helter Skelter slayings by remarking: “Dig it.  First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, they even shoved a fork into a victim’s stomach!  Wild!”[11]  Dohrn is now a professor at Northwestern University and gave the 2004 commencement address at Pitzer College.

Like Ayers and Dohrn, Mark Rudd helped lead the Weather Underground, which bombed banks, police stations, and university buildings in the 1970s.  Today he teaches at a college in New Mexico.

However, what is taught is more important than who is teaching.

While their lecture halls host scores of politicized courses such as “Women, Race, Gender, Sexuality” (Yale) and “Feminist Biblical Interpretation” (Harvard), Yale and Harvard prohibit the Reserve Officers Training Corps from using their classroom space.

A sample of ideologically-loaded courses elsewhere include the University of Michigan’s “How to Be Gay: Male Homosexuality and Initiation,” Amherst College’s “Taking Marx Seriously,” and the University of North Carolina’s “Environmental Advocacy.”  Grading on an ideological curve, assigning activism for credit, and transforming lecterns into soap-boxes are among the pitfalls of a hyper-politicized faculty.  

Campus Bias

For years, the left dismissed such anecdotes as cherry-picked examples that distort the reality of the campuses as repositories of debate, intellectual diversity, and free speech.  In response, conservatives began to undertake empirical surveys demonstrating the political imbalance on college campuses.

Numerous studies have demonstrated just how politically slanted the campuses are.  The findings of Deep Blue Campuses are consistent with the existing body of data that shows that those entrusted with imparting knowledge to the rising generation are outside of the mainstream.  

• Individual students combed through voter registration rolls in the 1990s, finding a Democrat/Republican ratio among professors of 25-1 at Cornell, 10-1 at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, and 9-1 at Stanford.[12]  

• The Center for the Study of Popular Culture surveyed Ivy League professors after the 2000 election, and found that 84 percent had voted for Al Gore to just nine percent for George W. Bush.  When CSPC asked the academics to rank the presidents since John F. Kennedy, they placed Bill Clinton on top followed by Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Jimmy Carter.  Republicans constituted the list’s entire bottom half.  For every professor who ranked a Republican president highest, nine named a Democrat.[13]  

• Accuracy in Academia researched Cabinet-level officials from 1977-2001 who landed jobs in academia after their time in office.  Republicans and Democrats equally split time in the executive branch during that twenty-four-year period.  But Democrat cabinet officials were more than three times as likely to land jobs in academia as Republicans.[14]  

• A study by scholars Robert Lichter, Neil Nevitte, and Stanley Rothman found that 72 percent of faculty describe themselves as liberal while 15 percent describe themselves as conservative.  The survey of 1,643 faculty teaching at 183 colleges and universities reports that more than eight in ten respondents favor abortion rights, about nine in ten support increased environmental regulations even at the cost of jobs, and more than six in ten believe that the government should provide full employment.[15]  

Longstanding denials of a slanted academia have morphed into a collective “So what?” among academicians.

“It is entirely rational for conservatives to flock to jobs that reward competition, aggression and victory at the expense of others,” opines Northwestern professor Steven Lubet.  “So it should not be surprising that liberals gravitate to professions – such as academics, journalism, social work and the arts – that emphasize inquiry, objectivity and the free exchange of ideas.”[16]

Lawrence Evans, a professor emeritus at Duke University, acknowledged “Republicans are a small minority of the professoriate.  True, and rightly so.  In seeking faculty, universities look for people who can analyze and discuss matters of some complexity, who are unafraid to challenge the wisdom of simple solutions, and who have a sense of social responsibility toward those who cannot buy influence…. People like that usually vote for the Democrats.”[17]

Wouldn’t the Left respond differently if conservatives rather than liberals dominated the nation’s faculties?  

Methodology

The Internet makes campaign finance more transparent than ever.  With Federal Election Commission data online, anyone with an Internet connection can access donor information through sites such as www.tray.com.  One can confine a search to individual donors, candidates, or, as was done in this survey, employers of donors.  Since this information is online, every reader of this survey has the ability to check the validity of the data presented.  

Reports from the Federal Election Commission display information for donors contributing $200 or more to federal campaigns.  My methodology in researching donations from employees at U.S. News and World Report’s top twenty-five national universities consisted of counting only contributions to the two major campaigns and their auxiliaries containing the candidate’s last name in the title.

I’ll use Carnegie Mellon as an example of how I arrived at my findings.  I listed the dollar amounts of each donation given to George W. Bush.  The total came to $1,000 from three donations.  I did the same for Carnegie Mellon donations by employees of that university to John Kerry.  The total came to $29,325 from 55 donations (Since some donors gave multiple contributions, it is important not to use donors and donations interchangeably.).

From this, I found that the split in the raw number of donations is 55 for Kerry and 3 for Bush and that the giving ratio is 18 to 1 in favor of Kerry.  For simplicity’s sake, the giving ratios have been rounded to conform to a ratio of some variable to one.

This is an inexact science. FEC reports don’t list donations under $200.  Not everyone fills out the reports honestly or completely.  Searches based on key words “Bush” or “Kerry” omit some contributions that in effect go to the campaign.  Searches based on name variations of top universities – e.g., “Penn,” “UPenn,” “U. of Pennsylvania,” “University of Pennsylvania” – may leave out some more obscure name variants for schools, and thus, leave out some information.

At one of U.S. News and World Report’s top-ranked schools, the University of California-Berkeley, an FEC search proved ineffective in determining ratios for employee giving.  The number of schools within the University of California system made it impossible to know exactly which school employed individual donors in certain cases.  Thus, the data included here focuses on the entire University of California system, rather than just its Berkeley campus.

This is a survey of the giving patterns of employees at major universities.  University employees include not only professors and administrators, but also librarians, janitors, coaches, and anyone else employed by the school.  

Although students who donate to campaigns often provide the FEC with the names of the educational institutions they’re affiliated with, we’ve excluded donors identified as students unless they provided information demonstrating that their college or university also employed them, e.g., as a teaching assistant.

In addition to students, hospitals associated with universities pose problems.  Does one omit or include, for instance, the data from employees of Cornell University’s hospital in New York City—approximately 200 miles from Cornell’s campus in Ithaca, New York?  I omitted it, and did so in similar cases when institutions – such as hospitals and clinics – bearing a university’s name were not housed on-site, or had only a tangential relationship with the school.  While employees of major hospitals and health plans bearing a university’s name were excluded from the survey, the faculty of medical, law, and business schools affiliated with the main university were included. 

The differences in methodology, and the limits posed by computer searches, ensures that researchers inspecting the same data will compute slightly different dollar amounts coming from each school to each candidate.  It is, however, unlikely that anyone looking at the same reports would come up with ratios that differ in any substantial way from the ratios that I’ve computed.

Conclusion

The lopsided ratio of Democrats to Republicans among college faculty and administrators rivals and in some cases exceeds the ballot disparity between the winning and losing candidates in phony elections held in Castro’s Cuba and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.  

Just as political conformity is unhealthy in a nation, it is unhealthy in an educational setting too.  Students pay tens of thousands of dollars for an education yet are denied exposure to points of view covering roughly half of the political spectrum.   

Changing this requires that more fair-minded people, rather than political hacks, enter the teaching profession at the college level. Alas, that project is too ambitious for this pamphlet.

Awareness rather than action is the purpose here.  And when taxpayers, parents, students, and alumni become aware, they can make educated choices – choices about, for example, which schools to avoid in the application process and which schools to withhold donations from.

This booklet examines about one percent of institutions of higher learning in America.  Are you curious about a school not listed?  I encourage you to undertake research on any school that interests you.  Doing so is easy.

Many sites, such as www.tray.com, feature FEC data.  Determining the political imbalance of the faculty requires four steps.  First, confine your search to the “employer/occupation” category.  Second, search by typing in the variations of a school’s name, ensuring that one variation doesn’t overlap another resulting in double-counting donors.  Third, do a “find” search for Kerry and then for Bush.  Finally, tabulate the numeric results from your “find” searches.

If you are a student reading this, I encourage you to conduct research on your school and publicize the data.

 If you are a parent, I encourage you to review the colleges and universities that your child is interested in attending.  If you are an alumnus, I encourage you to inspect the political diversity of your alma mater.  If you are a skeptic, I encourage you to check the data in this booklet for accuracy.

Campuses preach diversity but practice conformity.  Whatever the benefit of hiring professors whose skin shades differ, it is more than offset when those professors vote the same.  Real diversity is more than skin deep. 

[1] “John Kerry: Top Contributors,” www.opensecrets.org/presidential/contrib.asp?id=N00000245&cycle=2004, accessed on April 13, 2005.

[2] Ward Churchill, “Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens,” http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/WC091201.html, accessed on April 13, 2005. 

[3] Craig Gima, “Churchill Attacks Essay’s Critics,” http://starbulletin.com/2005/02/23/news/story2.html, accessed on April 13, 2005. “Colo. Scholar Not Backing Down,” www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/02/03/national/main671638.shtml, accessed on April 13, 2005.

[4] Bill Scanlon, “One-Party Rules Among CU Profs,” Rocky Mountain News, April 27, 1997, p. 1.

[5] Speech: Lawrence Summers, “Remarks at NBER Conference on Diversifying the Science & Engineering Workforce,” Cambridge, Massachusetts, January 14, 2005, www.president.harvard.edu/speeches/2005/nber.html, accessed on April 13, 2005.

[6] “CU Faculty Buys Ad to Support Churchill, Byout Possible,” http://news4colorado.com/topstories/local_story_059075239.html, accessed on March 21, 2005.

[7] “Harvard Faculty Lacks Confidence in President,”   www.cnn.com/2005/EDUCATION/03/16/harvard.summers.ap/, accessed on April 13, 2005.

[8] “Rutgers’ Student Newspaper Angers Some,” www.showmenews.com/2004/Nov/20041129News006.asp, accessed on December 1, 2004. Paul Mulshine, “Rutgers Forces Students to Protest Against the First Amendment,” www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=16061, accessed on April 13, 2005.

[9] Seth Slabaugh, “Students Complain of Liberal Bias on Campus,” www.thestarpress.com/articles/4/026869-2784-001.html, accessed on September 27, 2004. 

[10] Sarah Mishkin, Yale Daily News, http://www.yaledailynews.com/article.asp?AID=27532, accessed on March 18, 2005.

[11] Quoted in David Horowitz, “Allies in War,” www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=1021, accessed on April 18, 2005. Horowitz notes that although Dohrn conveniently claims her remarks were meant as a joke, no one thought so at the time. “In 1980, I taped interviews with thirty members of the Weather Underground who were present at the Flint War Council, including most of its leadership,” writes Horowitz. “Not one of them thought Dohrn was anything but deadly serious.”

[12] Kenneth Lee, “Where’s the Diversity?” Cornell Review, September 28, 1995, p. 1. Tony Mecia, “UNC Professors Lean Toward Political Left,” Daily Tar Heel, October 28, 1996, p. 1. David Sacks and Peter Theil, The Diversity Myth: ‘Multiculturalism’ and the Politics of Intolerance at Stanford (Oakland, CA: The Independent Institute, 1995), p. 38.

[13] Sara Russo, “Bias Revealed Among Ivy League Faculty,” http://www.academia.org/campus_reports/2002/february_2002_2.html, accessed on March 18, 2005.  Robert Stacey McCain, “Poll Confirms Ivy League Liberal Tilt,” January 17, 2002.

[14] Mal Kline, “College Democrats,” http://www.campusreportonline.net/main/articles.php?id=162, accessed on March 18, 2005.

[15] Howard Kurtz, “College Faculties a Most Liberal Lot, Study Finds,” Washington Post, March 29, 2005, p. C1.

[16] Steven Lubet, “Nothing Sinister About Liberal Campuses,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, December 1, 2004, p. 21.

[17] Evans quoted in David Horowitz, “Idiot Professor,” www.frontpagemag.com/blog/BlogList.asp?D=&ID=&CP=66, accessed on October 3, 2002.