University faculty and staff across the country donated more campaign money to Barack Obama than to John McCain in the 2008 presidential election, according to a study released on April 12 by Campus Reform, an organization that supplies college conservative groups with resources and advice.
In a study that looked at 12 colleges, Campus Reform and other college groups found that faculty and administrators at colleges overwhelmingly supported Democrats and liberal organizations in the election. Staff at all 12 universities studied gave a total of $1,094,324 to Democratic candidates in 2008 and $91,302 to Republican candidates. U. Texas professors and administrators gave $42,791 to Democratic candidates in the 2008 election cycle and $4,150 to GOP candidates, according to the report.
Campus Reform national director Bryan Bernys said that each time groups research political contributions from academics, they always find more money flowing to Democratic candidates and organizations.
“All universities strive to promote a wide range of ideas, and I don’t know how you can get a wide range of ideas on campus if most of your professors, teachers and administrators are [of] one political persuasion,” Bernys said. “The main part of this project is to expose what many people think and often comment about, but say that there’s no way to prove it. Well, here’s a nuts-and-bolts way to say this is one metric to look at how professors give to political candidates or organizations. The numbers speak for themselves.”
Journalism professor Bob Jensen, who describes himself as a leftist, said universities create space in society for free thinking.
“To me, this is a good thing,” Jensen said. “To save the system from becoming nothing but [capitalist and inequitable], you want places for critical thinking, and if you think critically about systems of power, I think it’s not surprising that you’re going find people who pursue that [leftist] critique.”
According to data from OpenSecrets.org, a Web site run by the Center for Responsive Politics that tracks money in U.S. politics, then-Sen. Barack Obama’s top campaign contributors were faculty, administrators and staff at the University of California, who donated a total of $1,591,395. Faculty, administrators and staff at Harvard, Stanford and Columbia universities were also listed among the top-20 contributors, at numbers 3, 10 and 16, respectively. Obama was also the first candidate to decline public finance since the public campaign funding program was enacted, and his campaign relied on raising funds from individuals, according to data from the Web site.
The GOP’s most charitable academic contributors in the study were Washington State, Texas A&M and Baylor universities. However, employees of Texas A&M, considered by some to be a more conservative campus, still gave more than three times more to Democrats than to the GOP.
Dustin Matocha, chairman emiritus for the UT chapter of Young Conservatives of Texas and a government junior, was the study’s primary researcher for the UT data points in the Campus Reform study. Matocha said he used OpenSecrets.org to find out who contributed to the Obama and McCain campaigns from the University.
“There’s great evidence that academic [staff] leans to the left, and this is one of the primary evidences of that,” he said. “These universities are trying to promote diversity. If they’re true to their beliefs, why not promote intellectual and political diversity as well?”
There are no university-affiliated contributors listed among the John McCain campaign’s top-20 contributors, which include financial institutions such as Merrill Lynch, Citigroup Inc. and Morgan Stanley. The top contributor, Merrill Lynch, gave $373,595 to McCain’s campaign.
Associate journalism professor Maggie Rodriguez said that while working as a reporter, she became liberal after seeing inequities and people’s suffering. Rodriguez said that in many cases, the same process of seeing inequality can lead members of academia to become liberal.
“People that are drawn to exploring different ideas and maybe challenging the way the world is, [academia] lends itself to people who, if they weren’t liberal to begin with, they end up being fairly liberal,” she said. “So, it’s not surprising.”