Trustees who identify as Democrats greatly outnumber those who identify as Republicans at the nation’s Ivy League schools and, as a result, Democrats receive far more money in political donations from members of these governing bodies than do Republicans, a study by the Buckley Institute reveals.
“The trustees have ultimate fiduciary responsibility for their respective universities, hire and fire the university president, and have oversight over the faculty, among other responsibilities,” Buckley Institute noted in a press release stressing the importance of the study’s findings.
The study identified the political parties of 233 trustees from the eight Ivy League universities:
- Brown
- Columbia
- Cornell
- Dartmouth
- Harvard
- University of Pennsylvania (Penn)
- Princeton
- Yale
Democrat trustees outnumber Republican trustees six to one at Ivy League schools, as fully two-thirds (67%) of trustees from these governing boards identify as Democrats, while just one in nine (11%) identify as Republican. Another 22% are unaffiliated with either party.
Yale has no Republican trustees. And, while Penn’s governing board has the highest share of Republicans (25.8%), they’re still outnumbered by Democrats by about two to one.
Political donations by Ivy League trustees also greatly favor Democrats over Republicans, the study found. Nearly twice as many Democrat trustees as Republican trustees made political donations. However, of the total dollar amount of contributions by all Ivy League trustees (including unaffiliated), Democrats’ receipts trounced Republicans’ by almost four to one ($85.5 million to $22.4 million).
The imbalanced political makeup of Ivy League trustees is particularly striking, given that Gallup polling finds that roughly the same percentage of Americans identify as Democrats as identify as Republicans (around 30%).
The mission of the Buckley Institute, named in honor of iconic conservative commentator and author William F. Buckley, Jr., is “to promote intellectual diversity and freedom of speech at Yale University,” the Institute’s website explains:
“We aim to foster robust and open debate, provide a home for enlightened conservative thought, and expose students to often-unvoiced views. We believe that genuine intellectual diversity is essential for advancing critical inquiry and seek to challenge ideological complacency wherever it exists.”
William F. Buckley, Jr. graduated from Yale in 1950. A year later, he published his first book, “God and Man at Yale,” exposing the intellectual conformity and dogmatism of Yale’s increasingly secularist, left-wing climate, the website explains.
Read the Buckley Institute’s full report, “The Echo Chamber on Top: Governance in the Ivy League,” here.
