FIRE’s Flawed Study on Political Donations, Viewpoint Diversity

Last week, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression released a study of political donations by college faculty, purporting to show the “narrowing range of political views among faculty donors.” This is yet another study telling us the obvious—that college faculty are more liberal than the public—but with much less precision or value than many other studies.

Unfortunately, all studies of faculty campaign donations are essentially worthless at accurately measuring faculty viewpoints. Faculty who donate to political candidates are not typical of all faculty—they tend to be more politically active and more extreme ideologically than the average professor. As a result, this is a study of an unrepresentative sample of faculty at an unrepresentative sample of colleges based on an estimate of the ideology of politicians resting on the assumption that donors always agree with candidates. All the fancy charts and extensive analysis can’t change this fundamental and fatal flaw in this study.

All the data tell you nothing except to confirm the obvious hunch that faculty are more liberal than the average American. It definitely doesn’t give you any accurate information about how liberal the typical professor is or what this means.

In the early days of the campus culture wars, conservatives loved to use political donations as a measure of faculty ideology: It was easier than doing a real survey, and it showed faculty to be more liberal than they really were. The purpose of using campaign donations as a proxy for faculty ideology is to obscure the large number of moderate and politically indifferent faculty who rarely donate to political candidates, and in doing so make faculty seem more left-wing.

Supporting a particular political candidate doesn’t reveal that much about what faculty think about politics. More importantly, it doesn’t tell you anything about how they teach, research or engage with opposing ideas.

For example, the FIRE study finds that the “least diverse” university in its study was not an elite coastal college, but DePauw University in Indiana—which is one of the least prestigious colleges in FIRE’s study and one of the few located in a red state. DePauw is also ranked 18th out of 257 universities in FIRE’s free speech rankings. If donations reveal faculty ideology, and if the alleged lack of diversity creates a repressive environment, then why is the least diverse university in faculty donations ranked by FIRE as one of the best universities in the country for free speech?

All this indicates that donations are a poor measure of faculty ideology, and faculty ideology is a poor measure of campus repression.

Although this particular study is worthless, the issue of viewpoint diversity is important, and FIRE has some decent recommendations. The best advice FIRE gives is to reject calls for imposing viewpoint diversity, according to FIRE campus advocacy chief of staff Connor Murnane: “The lack of viewpoint diversity in academia is a crisis, but the cure can’t be worse than the disease. Heavy-handed measures like ideological tests or hiring quotas for conservatives would just replace one form of forced conformity with another.”

But the message “we have a terrible crisis” often overwhelms the caveat that it can’t be cured with censorship.

And some of FIRE’s recommendations come alarmingly close to advocating censorship, such as “Stop compelled ideological tests,” including “trainings.” But would FIRE apply that same logic to trainings in viewpoint diversity and free speech? Or is it just trainings by people with views FIRE doesn’t like that need to be banned? The only thing I hate more than attempts to impose trainings are attempts to ban trainings.

And many of FIRE’s recommendations remain extremely vague: “Teach disagreement as a skill” and “protect the conditions for inquiry.”

Yes, that’s all good, but what are the specific ways colleges can encourage more viewpoint diversity without falling into the trap of repression?

I think there are a couple of good options. As I noted in my review of the new book Viewpoint Diversity, the best way to improve campus culture is to focus on extracurricular activities, where there is no danger of imposing ideological discrimination on hiring and promotion practices. Colleges can encourage debates and bring more ideas to campus without pushing out those evil leftists who dare to donate money to Democrats.

Unfortunately, some people think viewpoint diversity isn’t real unless you hit the classroom, which gets into the danger zone. However, there is a noncoercive alternative: team teaching. Colleges can encourage professors to volunteer to open up their classes to a second teacher who disagrees with them, who is funded separately and therefore doesn’t hurt their department’s budget. This can also open up courses to a wide range of views from people who don’t work at the university and don’t have fancy degrees. It’s important to make this voluntary and viewpoint-neutral—conservative professors are encouraged to invite liberals into their classes as well. But team teaching offers the opportunity to expand the viewpoints heard in the classroom and models for debating ideas to help students learn.

These are the practical solutions for viewpoint diversity, and they have a universal application without first needing to conduct a survey of faculty donations to determine whether we should be concerned about campus culture.