I heard someone say in conversation something like, I’ve talked to the members of the Harvard Board of Overseers. They’re on the left, they don’t really know how radical the campuses have become—or they approve of the transformation. They don’t ever talk to anyone outside of their bubble to tell them that there’s a problem in higher education.

The Buckley Institute’s new report, The Echo Chamber on Top: Governance in the Ivy League, substantiates that anecdote with numbers. Echo Chamber examines the Boards of Trustees of the eight Ivy League universities—Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, Brown, Dartmouth, Cornell, and the University of Pennsylvania—and provides their party affiliations and their lifetime political donations. The Boards aren’t as left-leaning as the Ivy League professors and administrators, but it’s still a dramatic skew.

Of 233 identified trustees across the Ivy League (267 total), at least 155 are registered Democrats, 26 are Republicans, and 52 are unaffiliated. There are 34 trustees whose voter information was not identified.

206 trustees have contributed to Democratic causes, while 112 have donated to Republicans. 46 trustees have made no political contributions.

Total giving to Democratic causes is $85.5 million; to Republican causes, $22.4 million. Echo Chamber breaks down the analysis by each university: Yale is the most politically skewed, with no Republicans on its Board and by far the smallest proportion of donations to Republicans. The reader may suspect that these financial disproportions would be even more dramatic if Echo Chamber had confined itself to donations from the last 10 years.

Trustees were far more conservative in 1969. The leftward drift of university boards since then has been an essential part of the broader leftward drift of higher education.

Boards of Trustees that are largely composed of registered Democrats, and which largely give to Democrats—well, these are facts that one should treat as suggestive proxies for attitudes rather than as dispositive evidence of intent. But let us say that it suggests reasons for why these Boards have not provided much in the way of corrective measures to administrations and faculty as they descended into race-Marxist tyranny—and for why we cannot expect them to provide much corrective measures going forward. Their likely ideological predilections make them reluctant to believe that anything has really gone wrong in the institutions they govern.

The Boards’ ideological skew also helps explain why their attempts at self-criticism have been so timid. Yale recently issued a Report of the Yale Committee on Trust in Higher Education that was notably timid, whose “recommendations are narrow and procedural.” There are many reasons why Yale’s Report was so cautious—but it is reasonable to infer that the authors knew that the Republican-free Yale Board was a major audience of the report, and there was only so much truth they could stomach. Board ideological skew is a major factor inhibiting university members’ ability to even propose reform.

My colleague Kali Jerrard asked whether the Yale Report was more likely to end as “lip service” or actually to be “a harbinger of change.” Echo Chamber’s report on the ideological predilections of the Yale Board suggests that lip service is the more likely outcome.

What then? Private Boards of Trustees are not easily subject to public policy interventions. Nor is it easy to formulate a proper policy. A state law requiring Board members to invite the presidents of NAS, ACTA, and FIRE to their houses once a year for an earnest discussion about problems on campus? It seems an unfruitful line of policy reform. Requiring Boards to select more conservative members? That seems unconstitutional and impractical.

One could require Boards of Trustees to affirm annually, on penalty of perjury, that their institutions have not violated federal civil rights law. That incentive might encourage some curiosity among Board members about precisely what is going on on their campuses.

But it also suggests that the Trump administration’s tactic of seeking to fine colleges and universities for misbehavior is the proper way to go. Boards may be fundamentally incurious about illiberal discrimination carried out in their names, but they are likely to notice $200 million fines—and to tell their underlings, whyever that happened, don’t let that happen again.

The Buckley Institute’s Echo Chamber tells us that arguments for reform are not likely to persuade the Ivy League’s Boards of Trustees any time soon, or the Boards of their peers at other private universities. If sweet reason is unlikely to work, then, faute de mieux, fines for breaking the law are the best way to incentivize their institutions’ good behavior.

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