WASHINGTON (TNND) \u2014 A new analysis of campaign donations from faculty at dozens of top universities nationwide found a surprising lack of ideological diversity.<\/p>\n
The study, which was commissioned by the “Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression,” found that the least politically diverse faculty bodies are those on the West Coast and in the Ivy League. (TNND)<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
The study, which was commissioned by the “Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression,” found that the least politically diverse faculty bodies are those on the West Coast and in the Ivy League. Meanwhile, the most politically diverse are in the south. DePauw University, the University of California Berkeley, the University of Illinois Chicago, Columbia University and Brown University ranked at the bottom. With BYU, Texas A&M, Kansas State, Clemson and the University of Texas at Dallas at the top.<\/p>\n
This is not terribly surprising. It’s just another piece of data that adds to the story of what is happening on campus,\u201d said Angela Erickson, Fire\u2019s Vice President of Research.<\/p>\n
Erickson said to put the study together, the organization gave a professor from the University of Rochester, David Primo, a list of more than 100,000 faculty members at 55 universities. He then cross-referenced those names with a database of over 850 million state and federal campaign contributions. Faculty members who could be matched with donations were given a score, used to estimate a person’s political ideology based on who they donate to. The median score, negative 1.02, which Fire says is slightly less left-leaning than Sen. Bernie Sanders,D-Vt., at negative 1.14<\/p>\n
Over time, faculty have become more and more concentrated on the left in a narrower, narrower band,\u201d said Erickson.<\/p>\n
The study comes as the Justice Department ramps up its efforts to investigate and take legal action against multiple universities for allegedly allowing antisemitism on campus. That includes some of the schools identified by \u2018Fire\u2019 as having less politically diverse faculty bodies. In early 2025, the federal government canceled $400 million in grants to Columbia University, amid an antisemitism investigation into the school. Months later, a settlement was reached.<\/p>\n
I’m hoping that this negotiation that we were able to get to with Columbia will be a template for the other universities around the country that have these same kind of practices,\u201d Education Secretary Linda McMahon told Fox News\u2019 Sean Hannity in July 2025.<\/p>\n
Plus, Brown University, which in July of 2025 announced an agreement with the federal government to restore $510 million in suspended federal research funding. Including, “Codifying Brown\u2019s sustained commitment to initiatives, programs and services to ensure a thriving Jewish community, and launching a third-party campus climate survey.\u201d The DOJ\u2019s Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, Harmeet Dhillon, further emphasized the department’s mission earlier this week.<\/p>\n
My division is willing to act and is determined to make sure Jewish Americans feel the full protection of United States federal law,\u201d Dhillon said while speaking at the American Jewish Committee Global Forum.<\/p>\n
Another school that made the bottom five on Fire\u2019s list is the University of California, Berkeley, which was among the ten university campuses last year slated for visits by the \u2018Federal Task Force to Combat Antisemitism.\u2019 Later that year, the school reached multiple settlements, including with a visiting Israeli professor.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WASHINGTON (TNND) \u2014 A new analysis of campaign donations from faculty at dozens of top universities nationwide found…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":350361,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[151,153,152],"class_list":["post-350360","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-bakersfield","tag-bakersfield","tag-bakersfield-headlines","tag-bakersfield-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/350360","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=350360"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/350360\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/350361"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=350360"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=350360"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=350360"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}