“Academe is a uniquely vulnerable target.”
Several months before the 2024 election, an infographic made the rounds on social media, showing donations to Biden vs. Trump in 2020, broken down by profession. The most pro-Trump profession: homemakers. The most pro-Biden profession: professors. Another studyfound that at elite colleges, the ratio of Democratic- to Republican-voting faculty was 8.5 to 1, with the ratio only getting larger as the institution becomes more elite. The ratios in certain disciplines are staggering: for instance, 42 to 1 in anthropology. (My discipline, geography, wasn’t included in the study.)
Given this situation, it is hardly surprising that the Trump White House has universities in its crosshairs. Academe is a uniquely vulnerable target: an ideological enemy camp dependent on state largesse (especially in the form of grant funding, for both public and private institutions) and accordingly subject to federal oversight. This means that academics need to contend with the fact that campuses have become ideological monocultures out of sync with the surrounding political landscape. Self-preservation demands significant reform. By and large, these are reforms we academics should have done anyway, and years ago.
Now, apologists for the monolithic partisan status quo in academia often attribute it to self-selection. Republicans, these apologists say, tend to value commerce more than Democrats do, and are thus a lot likelier to wind up in the commercial sector than in a doctoral program. Democrats, this reasoning also says, are likelier to have non-commercializable values (concerning matters such as art, culture, justice, and the environment). Since academia is a setting where ideas are ostensibly not under constant pressure to be commercially profitable, it would make sense for commerce-averse Democrats to wind up in the academic profession.
