Perhaps a less lopsided faculty is ours for the asking, but have elected officials insisted?
A political scientist laid out the grim numbers about lopsided ideology among his fellow Florida professors — whose donations go to Democrats by a 9-to-1 margin over Republicans — and ended up giving Wisconsinites who want exposure to a fuller spectrum of ideas something to dream about.
Because when that political scientist, Ryan Owens, was a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he found in 2024 that the margin there was more like 490-to-1.
This tilt isn’t just a curiosity or fodder for talk-radio segments. It leads, Owens tells me, to blind spots that weaken universities’ place in society.
“We all see the data on a decline in trust in higher education,” he said, and “decreasing levels of legitimacy.” One reason is that higher education hasn’t done well at “making sure it’s asking questions that people care about.”
A question that much of Wisconsin might care about comes from reading Owens’ findings that at the University of South Florida — a well-ranked “R1” research school with 49,000 students — 22 percent of faculty donations went to Republicans. At Florida International University — again, R1, well-ranked, and at 59,000 students the eighth largest public university in America — 27 percent of faculty political giving went to Republicans.
Twenty-seven percent isn’t so great, but the question in 500-to-1 Wisconsin would be: How do we improve to a 3-to-1 ratio?
This matters. “Groupthink is never a good thing,” said Owens. It harms students to be taught only one of many valid perspectives. And society funds academics not only as teachers but as researchers because they’re supposed to be digging up new answers to help us all. If a field is overwhelmingly made up of people who think alike, they’re “just missing out on alternatives because they’re either not aware of them, they don’t think to ask the right questions.”
So how did giant state research universities in Florida get so much less lopsided than UW-Madison?
For one thing, Florida’s a different culture, said Owens — a Kronenwetter-bred guy who once called Madison “the most intolerant place I have ever lived.” For one thing, FIU is in Miami, home to many Cuban-Americans who “still remember the destruction caused by communism.” And on the whole, said Owens, now based in Tallahassee, “it’s just much more religious here than it was in Wisconsin,” and so more culturally conservative.
But that’s broader society. Academia is infamously insular, an archipelago of blue dots even in red states. What’s at work in Florida’s giant state schools?
Florida’s politics, suggests Owens, which are more confidently conservative than in Wisconsin.
“I think there are some realists around here who understand that if they’re not intellectually diverse, if they don’t try to make sure that higher education appeals to all ends of the political spectrum, there will be consequences,” he said.
There’s a self-selecting nature to academia, said Owens — from faculty who find potential colleagues’ work less hire-worthy when it comes from a conservative perspective, to grad students who filter themselves out of a professorial career because they don’t want to be the one conservative token in a department. “Pretty soon, you have a machine that just goes of itself,” he said.
It’s up to political leaders to interrupt the cycle. But, he said, “When was the last time you heard any Republican politician in Wisconsin come forward with a serious plan for higher education reform? I can’t think of one.”
Owens credits some of Floridian campus pragmatism to money — the state’s legislators have given a lot of funding to state colleges, “so you’ll get a lot of students who are going here that are paying either zero or, like, $1,700 a year in tuition.” Parents, he said, “love the deal they’re getting here,” and college faculty enjoy fiscal stability — so they have a stake in not enraging lawmakers.
Whether that would be effective or even doable in Wisconsin is a deeper question. But the turning point constituted by the retirement of Gov. Tony Evers presents an opportunity.
“Anybody who’s sitting in the Legislature in Wisconsin right now who says, ‘I don’t like what the university is doing and I would like to do something to help it change,’ I don’t think they’re going to see any assistance at all from the governor’s office,” said Owens. “If that were to change, then I think Wisconsin could see a tremendous reformation in higher education that would be imposed externally by the Legislature, the governor, the board of regents.”
But such reformation, said Owens, needs to come from outside the university.
Wisconsin’s flagship state school has never been chastened sufficiently, he said. “I just don’t think that they worry at all about the political ramifications of their behavior. And until they are disabused of that, I think it’s going to continue.”
Patrick McIlheran is executive editor at the Badger Institute.
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