Stephen Moore, in today’s Political Diary:
There’s an old saying that the only Marxists left on the planet are found in the faculty lounges at America’s elite universities. Now the Leadership Institute has helped quantify the leftwing bias at our premier institutions of higher learning.
Its new report, “Deep Blue Campuses,” raked through Federal Election Commission records of political donations in 2004 by university faculty and found — surprise, surprise — that the vast preponderance of these donated dollars went to John Kerry for President. This is a free country, and donating to political candidates is, or at least should be, a protected expression of free speech. But this report blows through the facade that the political views of university faculty are in anyway representative of the general community.
For every dollar that the professors at the top 20 elite universities gave to George Bush, they gave $10 to John Kerry. The ratio at Princeton was $302 to Kerry for every dollar given to Bush. The ratio for Harvard was 25 to 1. At Yale and Penn, the ratio was greater than 20 to 1. At Dartmouth there wasn’t a single recorded donation to Bush.
These are more lopsided results than one finds in the phony elections in Castro’s Cuba and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Universities have become fanatically committed to the idea of “diversity” as an overriding objective on campus — diversity on the basis of income, religion, disability, race, gender, sexual orientation. But political diversity? When it comes to the kind of diversity that would seem to matter most for promoting debate, intellectual curiosity and free speech, there is apparently little tolerance for differing views. What is demanded is conformity. And our top universities suffer greatly as a result.