This essay was originally published by the American Enterprise Institute on June 2, 2026.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) recently released a study by David Primo measuring faculty viewpoint diversity through campaign-contribution data. The average faculty donor scored only slightly to the right of progressives like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
The findings and criticism traveled quickly. John K. Wilson, writing in Inside Higher Ed, pronounced the study “worthless” because most faculty never make campaign contributions, so a sample of donors cannot describe the average professor. On the narrow point he is right: a sample of donors is not a sample of all faculty. “Worthless” is a serious conclusion — a verdict that, applied consistently, would discard nearly every measure we have.
Surveys, voter-registration data, and donation data all have weaknesses; none is complete. The question is not whether Primo’s measure is perfect — it isn’t — but whether it tells us something useful. It does.
Campaign-contribution data record a particular behavior: writing a political check. They tell us about the faculty engaged enough in politics to spend money on it — a minority of the professoriate. Primo matched roughly a quarter of 112,000 faculty to the Stanford contribution database and scored them using the CFscore system, a standard measure that places donors and politicians on the same ideological scale.
Why do students censor themselves?
In our College Free Speech Rankings survey, we ask students how often they feel they cannot express their opinions. Around one in six say they self-censor fairly often or very often. What can we say about what causes this? First, self-censorship is more common on the right:
Political scientist John Holbein has correctly emphasized how much of the professoriate lies outside that sample: 73% of faculty never appear in the matched data, and restricting the analysis to 2024 leaves 87% out. Those are important cautions.
Yet the study’s limitation points toward its most interesting finding.
Among faculty active enough to donate to political candidates, conservatives are nearly absent.
That is worth noticing because the selection effect should run in the opposite direction. If campaign giving captures the most politically engaged faculty, committed conservatives — who donate too — should be easier to find, not harder. Think of the Federalist Society law professor, the supply-side economist, the Hoover fellow.
Instead, the conservative tail remains remarkably thin — and even granting every caveat, the imbalance is difficult to ignore.
What the study does not show deserves equal attention. It does not prove discrimination, that conservatives are silenced, or that campuses with overwhelmingly liberal faculties necessarily have poor climates for free expression.
Ideological imbalance is not the same as a hostile climate. A department can lean heavily left and still argue well — air disagreement, tolerate dissent, change its mind. Donation data capture composition, not conduct: they show who is in the room, not how the people in it treat one another. The most homogeneous campus need not be the most repressive, and treating skew as proof of repression claims more than the evidence supports.
Still, composition matters.
Universities are not legislatures, and no one should expect departments to mirror the partisan distribution of the electorate. The issue is not partisan representation but whether important assumptions are still being contested. Universities work best when smart people disagree, and a discipline that loses its dissenters loses some of its capacity for self-correction. A department can stay civil, professional, and committed to free expression while growing less willing to question its own assumptions. The danger is not that disagreement becomes forbidden, but that certain questions stop being asked.
Some of the imbalance may reflect self-selection rather than discrimination; conservatives may be less likely to pursue academic careers in particular disciplines. But whether they are filtered out or opt out, the consequence is largely the same.
Other evidence points in the same direction. FIRE’s 2024 faculty survey found that only 20% of faculty believed a conservative scholar would fit well in their department, compared with 71% who said the same about a liberal scholar. Nearly half of conservative faculty reported self-censoring. Survey data and contribution data have different weaknesses, yet they point toward a similar conclusion.
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History offers a reminder of why this matters. Ideas once dismissed as unfashionable — from school choice to deterrence in criminal justice — advanced because dissenting scholars remained part of the conversation. Academic fields stay healthy when important assumptions remain open to challenge and there are heterodox voices and ideas in room; when disagreement narrows, so does the range of questions scholars will pursue.
The donation study justifies neither panic nor ideological quotas. A faculty assembled through political audits would be no healthier than one assembled through ideological conformity. FIRE is right to reject that cure.
But the study does justify attention. It does not prove universities are hostile to conservatives; it does suggest that many disciplines have become substantially less ideologically diverse than they once were. Whether that narrowing reflects hiring, graduate-school pipelines, professional incentives, self-selection, or some combination remains an open question. But first we have to acknowledge what the evidence increasingly suggests: the narrowing is real. Explaining it is the next task.
Disclosure: I serve on the board of directors of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. FIRE commissioned the study discussed here; the analysis was conducted independently by David Primo, a Stanford-trained political scientist and chaired professor at the University of Rochester.
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