Can elite universities be reformed without replacing their professors?

Yale’s president, Peter Salovey, will be stepping down June 30. His announcement predated the political and plagiarism fumbles of his counterparts at Harvard and Penn, Claudine Gay and Liz Magill. In New Haven, all eyes are on Salovey’s potential successor. Leadership matters.

Yet it’s hard to see how Yale is going to reform itself while intellectual conformity persists in respect of its faculty. Given that almost 100 percent of politically active Yale professors donate to Democrats, a strong president may not make much of a difference. And the Democrat-saturated lineup of university faculty is not unique to Yale, nor is it a response to dubious Republican claims of an illegitimate presidential election.

In 2018, an associate professor of business at Brooklyn College, Mitchell Langbert, disclosed that many university departments do not employ even a single Republican. At Williams, there are 132 Democratic professors to every one Republican professor. That same year, 96 percent of political donations by Yale faculty went to Democrats. 

Some 98 percent of donations from Yale professors to political campaigns, the Yale Daily News recently reported, were directed to Democrats in 2023. The donation analysis included 3,041 professors, about 60 percent of Yale’s faculty. So most Yale professors are going beyond voting to actively support Democratic campaign finances.

A Yale School of Management professor, Edward A. Snyder, argues that the data show Yale is detached from American society. But what the data also show is that Yale professors represent the attitudes of the base of the Democratic Party.

A Yale education offers a deep dive into what Democrats will believe in the years to come. Professors attempt to shift the party platform through publications, lectures and teaching future Democratic leaders. Students absorb the ideas through coursework and extracurricular activism which they will carry forward into their own work.

Even the titles of some courses reflect the focus of many professors: “Race, Class, and Gender in American Cities;” “The Inclusive Museum: Gender, Race, Disability, and the Politics of Display;” “Pleasure in Plato and Aristotle;” “Latinx Activism in the United States;” “Gender and Sexuality in Modern Europe.”

If the fixation on race, gender and sexuality is prevalent among university faculty who almost exclusively donate to Democrats, it is a sign that current and future Democratic leaders will carry on with identity politics. 

Students who want to receive a liberal arts education at an elite institution instead find themselves receiving an indoctrination in Democratic politics. Professor Jeffrey Alexander has argued that professors’ support for Democrats does not influence their teaching. But however he handles this personally, students witness firsthand the intellectual intolerance in the classroom. Half of the student body believes the university is unwelcoming to unpopular political opinions and 43 percent self-censor in class either somewhat or very often, according to a survey of 500 Yale undergraduates.

Personal introductions require preferred pronouns. Professors often digress to disparage conservative ideas or politicians, and teaching assistants build “safe spaces,” which are more accurately dubbed “echo chambers.” They are “safe,” but only from views that deviate from the accepted orthodoxy.

Students walking into the classroom find little room for intellectual disagreement from the right of center, or really from anywhere rightward of the far-left baseline. How are students supposed to strive for truth and knowledge without exposure to dissenting views and rigorous examination of preexisting convictions?

The presidential search process at Yale carries some weight. The university does not want President Salovey’s successor to end up like Gay or Magill. Yet until the faculty roster gets more intellectually and politically diverse and course offerings start to change, Yale’s liberal arts education, like that available at many other “elite” universities across America, will remain a pedagogy in illiberalism. 

Gabriel Diamond is a senior at Yale University studying political science and a research assistant at Yorktown Institute.