{"id":5551,"date":"2026-07-28T09:07:50","date_gmt":"2026-07-28T09:07:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/metrotransitreview.com\/?p=5551"},"modified":"2026-07-28T09:07:50","modified_gmt":"2026-07-28T09:07:50","slug":"even-the-left-is-now-flagging-the-gross-bias-at-americas-universities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/metrotransitreview.com\/?p=5551","title":{"rendered":"Even the left is now flagging the gross bias at America’s universities"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Academia has a diversity problem, and people are starting to notice.<\/p>\n

Oh, it\u2019s not a race\/gender diversity problem;\u00a0academia has paid a lot <\/em>of attention to that.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Read more ATV street takeover throws Long Island into chaos, with boneheaded stunts and police chases<\/a><\/p>\n

It\u2019s a political<\/em> diversity problem.<\/p>\n

One person raising alarms is Tennessee\u2019s former governor, Phil Bredesen \u2014 a Democrat<\/em>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Bredesen recently flagged research he\u2019d done that showed virtually all (over 90%) of Tennessee faculty members\u2019 political donations have gone to Democrats.\u00a0<\/p>\n

How long, he asked, can such overwhelmingly blue higher-ed command political support, or even legitimacy, in a deep-red state like Tennessee (where more than 64% of voters went for Trump in the last election)? Good question.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not just Tennessee. In the 2022 election cycle, 93% of donations by professors nationwide went to Democrats; just 7% went to Republicans, per a study of educators\u2019 donations done by Data Orbital for the Education Freedom Institute.\u00a0<\/p>\n

By contrast, 51% of the votes in that election went to Republicans. That\u2019s quite a gap.<\/p>\n

In an ideal world, of course, it wouldn\u2019t really matter:\u00a0Faculty members\u2019 political views shouldn\u2019t have much, if anything, to do with how they teach English literature, or anthropology, or chemistry.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

But, of course, they do.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Politicizing the curriculum isn\u2019t even controversial \u2014 you\u2019re more likely, on most campuses, to see professors criticized for refusing<\/em> to do so.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And even if you believe this doesn\u2019t affect instruction, one of the arguments made on behalf of \u201cdiversity and inclusion\u201d programs in general is that students should have professors, and fellow students, who \u201clook like them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Well, Trump voters who come to the University of Tennessee won\u2019t see a faculty that went for Trump by over 64%.\u00a0Or, probably, even a tenth of that.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Other campuses aren\u2019t much better.<\/p>\n

This huge political imbalance in the professoriate affects student learning directly.\u00a0<\/p>\n

A recent study by Forest Romm and Kevin Waldman involving confidential interviews with 1,452 students at Northwestern University and the University of Michigan found that a whopping 88% of students said they had pretended to hold more \u201cprogressive\u201d views than they really did to get ahead.<\/p>\n

More than 80% said they submitted classwork that misrepresented their views in order to align with those of professors.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Anecdotal evidence suggests this is the case pretty much everywhere.<\/p>\n

The problem isn\u2019t professors\u2019 donations \u2014 every American has a right to support politicians and causes\u00a0 \u2014 but rather what it says about the uniformity of today\u2019s academic culture.<\/p>\n

Read more Nolan Wells drank heavily, chose to stay on remote island before vanishing on July 4 trip: report<\/a><\/p>\n

There are excuses:\u00a0Conservatives, we are sometimes told, are too dumb, or too greedy for big bucks to get involved in academia.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Not only does this sound troublingly like what was said about black people and women in the past, but it runs counter to the facts:\u00a0Academia used to be much less overwhelmingly leftist than it is now.<\/p>\n

In a SCOTUSblog column, law professor Brian Fitzpatrick recalls that when he wanted to teach race discrimination law, he asked his former law professor Elena Kagan (then dean at Harvard Law, now a Supreme Court Justice) for advice.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cHer response: don\u2019t do it. She explained that, in order to get a job as a race discrimination scholar at any school, I would have to win over the other scholars at that school who worked in that area.<\/p>\n

\u201cKagan said that at every school the scholars who worked in that area all supported racial preferences. The problem was that I was against racial preferences. She said for that reason alone no one in the field would support hiring me.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is true all over.\u00a0 A new study by the America First Policy Institute found that 40% of faculty would oppose hiring any Trump supporter; one in four were in favor of purging existing faculty who expressed conservative views; 43% of conservative faculty report being penalized for their views.<\/p>\n

Academia is a far-left institution in a center-right nation.\u00a0Yet professors who regard Trump voters as anathema are supported, at least in part, by taxpayers who the faculty regard as beyond the pale.<\/p>\n

How can an institution \u2014 industry? \u2014 that depends so heavily on taxpayer money expect to retain its legitimacy, and funding, under such circumstances?<\/p>\n

The rejoinder is that people wanting to cut academic budgets are \u201canti-intellectual.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

But some may find it hard to be pro-intellectual when the intellectuals are so anti-them<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\n<\/div>\n

Anyway, there is nothing intellectual about one-sided discourse.<\/p>\n

People on the right have been talking about this problem for a while.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But now, with even those on the left, like Phil Bredesen and Elena Kagan, noticing, it\u2019s becoming impossible to dismiss.<\/p>\n

Academia needs to vastly broaden its intellectual base, or face an end to business as usual.\u00a0Will it?<\/p>\n

Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and founder of the InstaPundit.com blog.<\/em><\/p>\n

Read more Yankees offense gets help from unlikely source to pick up Max Fried in win over White Sox<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Academia has a political diversity problem. And even some on the left, like Tennessee\u2019s former governor, Phil Bredesen \u2014 a Democrat \u2014 are starting to notice. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5550,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5551","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinion"],"yoast_head":"\nEven the left is now flagging the gross bias at America's universities - Metro Transit Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/metrotransitreview.com\/?p=5551\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Even the left is now flagging the gross bias at America's universities - Metro Transit Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Academia has a political diversity problem. 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