U.S. colleges show systemic bias — against conservatives

UW–Madison data points to bias in hiring, speech, and punishment

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A new survey of University of Wisconsin-Madison faculty, released this month by the school’s Tommy G. Thompson Center on Public Leadership, offers a clear look at how ideological imbalance shapes the campus climate at a flagship public university. Read alongside FIRE’s 2024 faculty survey, it tells a familiar story — just with sharper numbers.

Among tenured and tenure-track faculty at UW-Madison, 70% identify as liberal, 21% as moderate, and just 9% as conservative — a ratio of almost 8-to-1. That’s not an outlier, but is part of a broader trend. Nationally, another recent analysis shows 74% of faculty identified as liberal and only 11% as conservative. By these numbers, compared to the general public, liberals are overrepresented in academia by 186% while conservatives are underrepresented by 70%.

This gap also may be widening as junior faculty at UW Madison skew more liberal than senior faculty, suggesting that as older professors retire, ideological homogeneity will deepen.

Ideology in hiring

The Thompson Center survey also tested for possible downstream effects of this ideological imbalance. Faculty respondents were randomly assigned to evaluate hypothetical job candidates expressing liberal or conservative views. The result: candidates with conservative views were consistently less likely to be supported for hiring, with gaps ranging from 11 to 38 percentage points depending on the topic. The topic of immigration produced the largest disparity.

Because the statements were randomly assigned, these results don’t reflect response bias or a general aversion to candidates expressing political opinions. Rather, the results reflect bias against academics with conservative viewpoints, plain and simple.

These findings mirror a growing body of independent studies and national surveys. FIRE’s 2024 survey also shows the same pattern. Among UW-Madison faculty in FIRE’s survey, only 44% said knowing an applicant was conservative would never count against them, compared to 69% who said the same about a liberal applicant. And while 76% said a liberal individual would be a good departmental “fit,” only 17% said the same about a conservative. These numbers were similar to faculty overall in FIRE’s survey. Importantly, in academic hiring, “poor fit” often translates into “not hired.”

Chilling effects

The imbalance doesn’t just shape hiring either. It also shapes who feels comfortable speaking.

At UW-Madison, only 23% of conservative faculty say they’re highly comfortable discussing controversial topics with colleagues, compared to 55% of liberals. The classroom also shows a similar divide. Similarly, FIRE’s 2024 national survey shows that nearly half of conservative faculty report self-censoring due to fear of backlash, compared to one in five liberals.

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And when conservative faculty do speak up, they’re more likely to pay for it. Among UW-Madison faculty who expressed views on controversial topics in class, 20% of conservatives reported institutional consequences, compared to just 1% of liberals. On social media, the gap is 30% to 8%.

This is despite the fact that liberal faculty are more likely to say they express controversial views in the first place. In other words, one group speaks more freely and faces fewer consequences while the other speaks less and gets punished more when it does.

The bigger picture

None of this is happening in a vacuum, and this pattern extends beyond UW-Madison. FIRE’s 2024 survey of faculty finds that 55% of conservative faculty reported at least occasionally hiding their political beliefs from colleagues to protect their jobs, compared to 17% of liberals. And among the broader faculty population, the share of faculty self-censoring in their writing is nearly four times the rate recorded among social scientists at the end of the McCarthy era.

Taken together, the data point to a system where ideological imbalance doesn’t just describe who’s on campus but who gets hired, who speaks up, and who gets punished when they do.