The study, commissioned by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), found that elite and flagship universities' faculty members who make political donations overwhelmingly give to left-leaning candidates and causes.
FIRE provided University of Rochester Professor David Primo with a list of more than 110,000 faculty members at 55 universities, including Harvard, Stanford, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Michigan, that was first compiled for use in the 2024 FIRE Faculty Survey Report.
Primo analyzed a dataset created by cross-referencing those names with a database of over 850 million itemized state and federal campaign contributions compiled by a Stanford University professor and matched those faculty members with campaign contribution records from Stanford's database on ideology, money, politics, and elections.
The study does not identify individual faculty members' notable contributions in a named or case-by-case way, but aggregates donation behavior.
"To get a bit more in the weeds," Connor Murnane, campus advocacy chief of staff at FIRE, says the study does not just show that politically active faculty tend to give to Democrats; it shows that they are clustered in a narrow subset of liberal politics with very little counterbalance.
Once Primo was able to parse out the individual faculty donors, Murnane says the professor used a measure called a "CFscore," which is a campaign finance-based measure to place donors and candidates on a particular ideological scale.
A Republican professor who gives exclusively to Maine Sen. Susan Collins (CFscore: 0.70), for example, would score differently than a Republican professor giving exclusively to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (CFscore: 1.52).
By relying on contribution data rather than voter registration data, Primo was able to measure professors' ideology instead of just their party affiliation.
"That matters because party labels alone are kind of crude when you're talking about this," Murnane explains. "The CFscore … helps show not just which party someone supports, but specifically who they support with their money and where they fall on a specific ideological scale."
Murnane calls it "unique" in that it separates individuals from political parties and provides as narrow a look into their worldview as possible.
He adds that the lack of viewpoint diversity in academia is a "crisis" and encourages universities interested in taking meaningful action to consult FIRE's recommendations on how to foster viewpoint diversity in their faculty ranks.
