Even the left is now flagging the gross bias at Americas universities

Academia has a diversity problem, and people are starting to notice.Oh, it’s not a race/gender diversity problem; academia has paid a lot of attention to that. It’s a political diversity problem.One person raising alarms is Tennessee’s former governor, Phil Bredesen — a Democrat. Bredesen recently flagged research he’d done that showed virtually all (over 90%) of Tennessee faculty members’ political donations have gone to Democrats. How long, he asked, can such overwhelmingly blue higher-ed command political support, or even legitimacy, in a deep-red state like Tennessee (where more than 64% of voters went for Trump in the last election)? Good question.It’s not just Tennessee.In the 2022 election cycle, 93% of donations by professors nationwide went to Democrats; just 7% went to Republicans, per a study of educators’ donations done by Data Orbital for the Education Freedom Institute. By contrast, 51% of the votes in that election went to Republicans.

That’s quite a gap.In an ideal world, of course, it wouldn’t really matter: Faculty members’ political views shouldn’t have much, if anything, to do with how they teach English literature, or anthropology, or chemistry.  But, of course, they do. Politicizing the curriculum isn’t even controversial — you’re more likely, on most campuses, to see professors criticized for refusing to do so. And even if you believe this doesn’t affect instruction, one of the arguments made on behalf of “diversity and inclusion” programs in general is that students should have professors, and fellow students, who “look like them.”Well, Trump voters who come to the University of Tennessee won’t see a faculty that went for Trump by over 64%. Or, probably, even a tenth of that. Other campuses aren’t much better.This huge political imbalance in the professoriate affects student learning directly. A recent study by Forest Romm and Kevin Waldman involving confidential interviews with 1,452 ...