Last week, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression released a study of political donations by college faculty, purporting to show the “narrowing range of political views among faculty donors.” This is yet another study telling us the obvious—that college faculty are more liberal than the public—but with much less precision or value than many other studies.
Unfortunately, all studies of faculty campaign donations are essentially worthless at accurately measuring faculty viewpoints. Faculty who donate to political candidates are not typical of all faculty—they tend to be more politically active and more extreme ideologically than the average professor. As a result, this is a study of an unrepresentative sample of faculty at an unrepresentative sample of colleges based on an estimate of the ideology of politicians resting on the assumption that donors always agree with candidates. All the fancy charts and extensive analysis can’t change this fundamental and fatal flaw in this study.
All the data tell you nothing except to confirm the obvious hunch that faculty are more liberal than the average American. It definitely doesn’t give you any accurate information about how liberal the typical professor is or what this means.
