Anatomy of an Intellectual Monoculture

University of Virginia employees who donated to Democratic Party candidates between 2017 and 2022 outnumbered Republican donors by an eighteen-to-one ratio, reports a National Association of Scholars case study.

Professors favor Democratic candidates over GOP by a twenty-four-to-one ratio, and staff by a sixteen-to-one ratio. The only sub-categories that came close to parity were "blue-collar staff (1.4-to-one) and sports team coaches (seven-to-four). Twenty-one of thirty-nine academic disciplines included not a single Republican donor.

Compared to other elite higher-ed institutions, the ideological imbalance at UVA is "moderate," writes author Mitchell Langbert, an associate professor at Brooklyn College. At some institutions, it's almost impossible to find any Republicans. However, the imbalance is getting worse, not better.

"In the past decade, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) politics, including expensive DEI officers, DEI compliance requirements, and litmus tests for professors have further skewed university cultures," Langbert writes. "Identity studies departments, such as gender studies, have also influenced universities' organizational cultures and personnel policies."

UVA has seen especially rapid growth in its DEI bureaucracy, the size estimates for which range from 55 employees (UVA's estimate) to 235 employees including student interns (OpenTheBooks' estimate). Under President Jim Ryan, UVA also has aggressively recruited "under-represented" minority faculty in fields that have skewed hard left politically.

One limitation of the study, which Langbert acknowledges, is that it doesn't capture the political views of all employees, only donors. Unlike other states, Virginia does not require registered voters to identify a party affiliation. His UVA database encompasses 2,255 Democratic donors and 125 Republican donors in a university with 17,500 employees. 

Still, the NAS findings are entirely consistent with The Jefferson Council's own research, which has documented a steady leftward drift in donors since the 1960s. As the heterodox Boomer generation of faculty retires, it is being replaced by professors who are almost uniformly left of center in their political orientation. Efforts at UVA by philanthropists like John Nau and Drew McKnight to rectify the imbalance by endowing professorships with the goal of promoting viewpoint diversity have been far outweighed by foundation funding sought by the Ryan administration to ramp up social-justice disciplines. The handful of conservative post-docs recruited by the handful of conservative professors as short-term instructors don't get offered tenure-track positions. They wind up seeking employment at less prestigious but less ideologically monolithic universities.

Democrats outnumber Republicans by whopping majorities in every discipline, even fields traditionally thought of as "conservative," such as business, engineering, medicine, and the classics. Seventy-one donors in education donated to Democrats versus one to Republicans. In the fields of English (sixty-two donors), history (thirty-three donors), religion (twenty donors), and languages (forty-one donors), not a single faculty member contributed to a Republican candidate.

The power imbalance within hierarchical higher-ed structures is even more pronounced. Policies and practices restrict advancement opportunities for individuals who do not share the dominant ethos, Langbert says.

Summarizing work he has done in the fields of economics and industrial relations, he finds:

As one moves up the hierarchy in economics and the academic field of industrial relations the higher-ranked academics skew further left than do the lower-ranked academics. Thus, editors of journals are more consistently to the left than are published authors, and published authors are more consistently to the left than mere members of the American Economic Association or Labor and Employment Relations Association. That is consistent with organizational culture in which left-political affiliation is an important norm or standard, a litmus test for acceptability.

In the estimation of The Jefferson Council, the ideological filtering process is at work at UVA. The more each department becomes ideologically homogenous, inclined to groupthink, and disparaging of anyone with different views, the less likely it is to hire anyone who thinks differently. A vicious cycle sets in. Ideologically left professors take on similarly inclined graduate students. Seeing the writing on the wall, conservatives students are less likely to enter and persist through graduate programs. Ideologically left individuals become more likely to earn advanced degrees and enter the tenure track. Over time, the pipeline of conservative scholars dries up.

The process is likely irreversible in many elite institutions. Whether UVA is too far gone to salvage is an open question.