Image: “Yale University Old Campus” by Ad Meskens on Wikimedia Commons

Student Essay: A Slow March Left

A short take on the decades-long development of ideological imbalance in higher education.

A late December report from the Buckley Institute found that of Yale’s 43 undergraduate departments, 27 have no Republican faculty members. Across the university, nearly 83 percent of faculty are registered Democrats or primarily support Democratic candidates, while fewer than three percent identify as Republicans.

The pattern holds elsewhere.

A Duke University report from 2024 found that more than 60 percent of its faculty identified as liberal, with more than 23 percent identifying as “very liberal.” Less than 10 percent identified as “somewhat conservative.”

Harvard’s spring 2023 faculty survey found that nearly 32 percent of its arts and sciences faculty identified as “very liberal,” with more than 45 percent identifying as “very liberal,” and fewer than three percent as “conservative.”

The lean leftward extends beyond the humanities as well.

A 2025 analysis by the College Fix sampling ten university math and engineering departments found that Democrats outnumbered Republicans four to one on faculty, with at least three departments having no identifiable Republican professor at all.

Today’s education reformers have been right to flag the imbalance, but fewer seem to know how long in the making it has been.

Yale has no Republican faculty today because it has spent decades shedding its original Christian foundations—a process already well underway when William F. Buckley Jr. arrived as an undergraduate in 1946.

His 1951 book God and Man at Yale was a direct response to a faculty that had captured an institution then widely regarded as a bastion of conservative tradition and was using it to advance collectivist, Keynesian, and secularist ideas.

The language has changed since 1951. The problem has not. The ideological capture of American universities was not the work of a single decade, but of a long march left—and it will not be undone quickly.

Yale, like many other universities, has had 75 years to drift this far. Reformers should plan accordingly.

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Discussion

  1. Dr. Ed

    Bill Weld, Mitt Romney, and Charlie Baker are all Republicans, although I don’t think anyone would objectively consider any of them actually conservative. Conversely, Joe Lieberman and Joe Manchin were both Democratic US Senators.

    Lieberman clearly identified himself as a Jack Kennedy Democrat, while Charlie Baker clearly identified himself as a Never Trumper. That’s the problem with party affiliations, the D or R really doesn’t tell us that much anymore.

    Likewise, self identification as liberal or conservative doesn’t tell us as much as one might think, particularly on a college campus. When compared to the insane leftism of UMass Amherst, I appear to be to the right of Atilla the Hun. But when compared to normal people in a sane community, I’m only slightly right of center, maybe not even that.

    Academia has skewed so far to the left that the campus “moderate“ would be considered to the left of Vladimir Lenin anywhere else.

    And the other variable that’s missed is age — there are senior faculty who would never get hired today and hence the more telling survey would be of untended faculty with five or less years of experience. The young faculty, as that not only is where the institution is going to be in 30 years, but it’s the young family that I dynamic and energetic and shape the culture of the institution.

    And what are the political views of the graduate students? These are the professors in training, should higher education survive the next 40 years, these are the people who will be running it.

    As someone who tried to maintain sanity in what I often referred to as the Graduate Student Circus, and who has since watched the antics of both graduate student governments, and the graduate “employee” unions (which are often in interchangeable), the graduate students are far more radically leftist than even the existing faculty. (And way more anti-somatic as well.)

    Nothing here should be interpreted as degrading the argument of the author, I’m nearly arguing that the situation is both worse than it appears to be and also inexorably worsening — the leftward tilt of the ship is continuing to accelerate.

    So the question I have is how long before the ship simply rolls over and sinks?

    Reply
  2. Dr. Ed

    As to Buckley‘s 1951 book, what I find most interesting is McGeorge.Bundy’s attack on it — Bundy who would go on to give as Vietnam under Kennedy and Johnson, Bundy then going on to head to Ford Foundation.

    See: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1951/11/the-attack-on-yale/306724/

    My jaw dropped when I saw Bundy attacking Buckley for being Catholic, particularly knowing that a decade later, Bundy would become a national security advisor to the quite Catholic Jack Kennedy, according to some reports seriously considered for Secretary of State.

    “Protestant America” is not a term we even use anymore, the country itself has changed, i’m not sure if we should look at this as a linear transition.

    Reply

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