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Monday, Nov 23, 2009
Conservatives like David Brooks love to blame academics for making lopsided donations to Democrats. A closer look reveals otherwise.
Sep 20, 2004 | George Wallace used to score points attacking "pointy-headed intellectuals." The first President Bush mocked Michael Dukakis for getting too many ideas in Cambridge, Mass. As Richard Hofstadter explained in "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life," American politicians have long trumpeted their "common man" ideals to contrast themselves to the educated elite.
The 2004 election is no different. This year's canard is that all professors are liberals, making colleges and universities distorted, irrelevant and closed to conservative ideas. The straw professor makes an easy election-year target. After all, many professors are liberal. Many academic ideas are hard to understand.
Recent attacks on academe, however, are more than election-year tactics. The image of higher education as having a single party line helps conservative academic groups raise money. Which in turn leads lawmakers to propose legislation to require colleges to achieve "balance" in their faculties -- a requirement many academics view as forcing faculty members to justify and perhaps soften their opinions. Congress is currently reviewing the Higher Education Act, a mammoth federal law that governs most student-aid programs, and a perfect vehicle for lawmakers to tack on amendments to make points about the academy. So this debate comes at a very sensitive time.
Much of the conservative commentary about academics this year springs from news reports that Sen. John Kerry is trouncing the president in places like Cambridge, Berkeley and Madison. When the Boston Globe conducted an analysis of professors' campaign contributions in May and found that Kerry had received more than twice as much as the president, a Bush campaign spokesman derided professors as "those who are more inclined to view this time in history as just another gray area in need of a group discussion."
In the New York Times, David Brooks had this to say: "Academics have had such an impact on the Democratic donor base because there is less intellectual diversity in academia than in any other profession. All but 1 percent of the campaign donations made by employees of William & Mary College went to Democrats. In the Harvard crowd, Democrats got 96 percent of the dollars. At M.I.T., it was 94 percent. Yale is a beacon of freethinking by comparison; 8 percent of its employee donations went to Republicans."
Those numbers sound pretty dramatic. But the same Federal Elections Commission database that was used to produce them contains numbers that suggest that there are plenty of colleges that don't fit the mold of an all-liberal campus.
To begin with, most of the institutions cited by conservatives are in blue states that already support Kerry, and not just on campuses. But venture into Red State U. and it's a different picture. Since Jan. 1, 2003, nine employees at Texas Tech made contributions to either a Democratic presidential candidate or the Democratic Party. But Bush or the Republican Party received help from seven employees, including one of the most influential men in Lubbock these days, Bob Knight, the university's basketball coach. Over at Baylor, six employees backed Bush and the Republican Party, while just two supported Kerry and the Democratic Party.
At Mercer University in Georgia, seven employees made contributions to Bush or the Republican Party, while five backed Democrats. Notably, Republicans on campus include the university president and two senior administrators.
Some of the institutions where Bush and conservative politicians like to appear don't donate much to any presidential candidate. No employees of Bob Jones University, site of a controversial appearance by Bush in the 2000 campaign, donated to anyone -- perhaps faculty members were too busy discouraging interracial dating. Hillsdale College, a Michigan institution beloved by the right, had three donors: all to Republican congressional candidates. Five employees of Regent University, founded by Pat Robertson, have contributions in the database -- all to Republicans.
Even places where people make more donations to Kerry than Bush don't always fit the liberal stereotype. Three employees of Morehouse College, a historically black institution in Atlanta, have made federal campaign contributions since the start of last year. A $300 donation went to Kerry, $400 to Joe Lieberman's doomed (and not terribly liberal) presidential bid, and $500 went to Republican Senate candidate Johnny Isakson.
The data also show a willingness of academics to support Republicans. In the presidential race, the University of Pittsburgh looks solid for Kerry. But more employees made contributions to Sen. Arlen Specter, a Republican, in his reelection bid than to his challenger, Rep. Joe Hoeffel. Specter was once a prime liberal target for his role in pushing the confirmation of Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court. But he's attracted the respect of many academics for his support for education spending and for easing President Bush's limits on stem-cell research.
Those who think there are only a handful of W. supporters in academe may want to consult a national survey of faculty attitudes by a research center at UCLA. The survey, last conducted in 2001, found that 18 percent of faculty members identify themselves as conservative and less than 1 percent as far right. The percentages for liberal and far left were 42 and 5, and the percentage for middle of the road is 34. Jennifer Lindholm, who directs the study, which is done every three years, says that the conservative figures have been fairly steady. "You always find a smaller, but significant segment of the faculty that is conservative."
