FIRE survey of faculty donations: How does Princeton Compare?
Leslie Spencer
Princetonians for Free Speech
The average college professor who donates to political candidates is “only slightly less left on the ideological spectrum than Bernie Sanders.” So reveals a new report by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) . Faculty at America’s top universities overwhelmingly donate to candidates on the left, with the range increasingly concentrated on the far left. The study’s author, University of Rochester professor David Primo, concludes that the “The figures suggest that ideological diversity is essentially absent from universities today.”
The study analyses campaign contributions by faculty over time at 55 institutions of higher education in the US, including Princeton. Data from 100,000 faculty members gathered by FIRE for its 2024 faculty survey was compared with 850 million campaign contributions gathered since 1979. The method used provides a more revealing measure of ideology than looking at simple party affiliation: A Republican professor who gives exclusively to Lisa Murkowski, for instance, scores very differently from one who gives exclusively to Ted Cruz.
Are some schools better at fostering intellectual diversity than others? The study clearly reveals that the most elite universities are among those with the least ideological diversity. Princeton is ranked 13 out of the 55 in the study, with its faculty slightly more ideologically diverse than, for instance, UC Berkeley, Brown, Dartmouth and Harvard, and slightly less diverse than Stanford, Cornell, UCLA or Georgetown. But it is important to note: Princeton’s scores are very similar to all of the elite schools located on the West Coast and the Northeast, which show extreme lack of ideological diversity and which on average skew far left, a reality that has grown more pronounced over time. The schools that show more ideological diversity are in the South and Midwest: Professors at Texas A&M, Clemson and Kansas State for instance, spread out ideologically three or four times more than Princeton or any of the Ivy and other elite schools in the Northeast and West Coast. In sum, Princeton faculty as measured by political contributions are among the least ideologically diverse in the country and occupy a narrow band of left and far-left politics with virtually no conservative or moderate presence as a counterweight.
Why does this matter? Can’t leftwing professors teach without indoctrinating, and research without bias? The study concludes:
Regardless of one’s political views, the lack of ideological diversity in academia should be of concern for the broader enterprise of higher education. Scholars have raised concerns that the quality of higher education both in terms of scientific progress and the classroom experience is hindered by lack of viewpoint diversity. Scientists who view the world through the same ideological lens are, all else equal, not going to push the boundaries of knowledge in the same way that a group of diverse thinkers will. Similarly, 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.
FIRE stresses that the way to champion viewpoint diversity on campus does not mean quotas or top-down management. Instead it recommends ways to enliven a campus culture so that students and faculty “regularly encounter real disagreement on contested political, moral, cultural, and scholarly questions, and can air and respond to those disagreements on the merits without fear of professional, academic, or social punishment.”
There is little doubt that this study provides another opening for politicians and critics to attack higher education, perhaps in unfair ways. Princeton could help neutralize this by joining those reform-minded university leaders in the now burgeoning effort to regain the public’s trust in higher education. Princeton’s leadership could, for instance, commit to strict institutional neutrality policies, end ideological litmus tests in hiring and admissions, and redouble its efforts to train students and administrators about free speech protections. For a more detailed list of reforms, see PFS’s Top Ten recommendations to Princeton’s leadership. FIRE’s findings need not cause conflict and defensiveness. It can instead become a foundation for reforming discourse, research and teaching on college campuses. Princeton should look hard at FIRE’s faculty ideology study and lead the effort to course correct.
Leslie Spencer '79 is Vice Chair of Princetonians for Free Speech.