Faculty members at elite US colleges who make political campaign contributions skew heavily Left, according to a new study.

Conducted by political scientist David M. Primo of the University of Rochester, the analysis examines over 850 million campaign contribution records from the Database on Ideology, Money in Politics, and Elections (DIME), alongside a dataset of more than 112,000 faculty members at 55 elite and flagship public universities. These institutions include Ivy League schools and major research universities such as Harvard University; Stanford University; the University of California, Berkeley; and the University of Michigan.

Drawing on faculty data from the same 55 elite and flagship universities — which are also included in the 2024 FIRE Faculty Survey — the analysis examines ideological patterns among faculty campaign donors. Across the full sample, these donors cluster heavily on the Left of the ideological spectrum, with very limited representation on the Right.

On a donation-based ideology scale, the typical faculty donor sits firmly on the progressive end of US politics, comparable to some of the most Left-leaning members of Congress. By contrast, conservative-leaning donors are largely absent from the distribution in recent election cycles. This stands in sharp contrast to the broader donor population, which shows a more balanced ideological spread.

The analysis also notes that some commentators attribute shifts in political giving after 2016 to a “Donald Trump effect”, pointing to declines in Republican contributions among certain professional groups. However, the author argues that longer-run donation data — spanning back to 1979 — suggests the Leftward skew in faculty giving predates the Trump era and is visible across multiple election cycles, rather than being a short-term reaction to recent political developments.

Ideological concentration is not evenly distributed across institutions. While all 55 universities in the sample exhibit a Left-leaning pattern, the degree of ideological spread varies. Some institutions, such as Texas A&M University, show a relatively broader spread in faculty donor ideology, while others, including several elite private universities, skew far more heavily to the Left.

Across academic disciplines, the pattern is broadly consistent. Humanities and social science faculty are the most liberal on average, though even fields such as business and engineering still show a clear Leftward tilt.

The analysis also finds differences in how often groups make campaign contributions. About 27% of faculty in the dataset made at least one political donation that could be used to estimate their ideology, which is much higher than the rate among US adults generally. Faculty donors were also more likely to make larger or repeated contributions compared with average citizens, suggesting higher levels of political engagement among politically active academics.

Comparisons with the broader donor population further underscore this imbalance. While American campaign contributors as a whole span a range of political views, the beliefs of faculty donors are markedly narrower, with very little representation to the Right of center in recent election cycles.

The study concludes that consistent liberal dominance across different measures raises questions about the level of viewpoint diversity in US higher education. It adds that this pattern appears across multiple datasets and institutions, not just a handful of outliers. “Regardless of one’s political views, the lack of ideological diversity in academia should be of concern for the broader enterprise of higher education,” Primo writes. “Students are likely to receive a different sort of educational experience — especially in the humanities and social sciences — if they never encounter a conservative professor in four years of study.”

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James Billot is UnHerd’s Newsroom editor.

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