ACADEMIC LEFTYISM….Via Pandagon, here’s an interesting statistic from the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics: political donations from the education industry in the current election cycle have favored the Democrats by a margin of 65% to 34%. Since this segment doesn’t include teachers’ unions and is “dominated by contributions from college and university professors,” it’s probably a fairly decent proxy for the political leanings of university professors and administrators.
This suggests that about one-third of university academics lean Republican, which hardly gibes with the conservative notion that universities are hotbeds of lefty radicalism, a conclusion they usually come to by examining the affiliations of women’s studies and social ecology departments at a few selected universities and mysteriously ignoring the law schools and engineering departments.
So, yes, universities lean liberal, and some of them lean very liberal. But many of them don’t, and overall they are far from monolithic. For that, you need to look at the oil and gas industry, which so far has given 83% of its money to Republicans. I wonder why?
