The odds of a UW-Madison pre-tenured professor’s political donation going to Republican are only 1 in 490, according to an analysis by outgoing UW political science professor Ryan Owens and his colleague, Alex Tahk.
And when it comes to faculty in social sciences and the humanities, where professors’ viewpoints on politics and culture have more of a bearing on the lectures than fields like engineering, the odds of finding a Republican donor fall to just 1 in 530.
The numbers back-up in stark terms comments Owens made in a recent interview with the Badger Institute in which he discussed the skewed ideological climate at the Badger state’s flagship university and said the atmosphere is full of an omnipresent “left-wing, dogmatic orthodoxy.”
Owens substantiated this with another staggering statistic in that interview: over 99% of political dollars contributed by UW faculty went to Democrats and left-wing groups over the past decade.
The pair looked at data from the Federal Election Commission on contributions to candidates or PACs between 2011 and 2022. Their study looked at all UW faculty, excluding medical school donations.
Owens’ and Tahk’s study has its limitations. It might be the case that conservative professors are less likely to make political donations, given that the records are publicly accessible, in which case the count of Republican versus Democrat donors would underestimate the true ratio of conservatives to progressives among the faculty.
But that wouldn’t let the school off the hook. Rather, it would be an indictment of a collegiate atmosphere where only one side of the ideological spectrum feels safe openly expressing their beliefs and publicly supporting political causes. If a conservative feels he must remain silent and hide his political positions for fear of being outed as a conservative, the disservice done to students is the same.
Owens told the Badger Institute how students would tell him that prior to taking one of his courses, they never had a professor show both sides of the issues. By contrast, Owens, a self-styled Reagan conservative, would assign readings from both Reagan’s and Obama’s addresses.
The university’s lopsided ideological environment has cascading effects on the rest of the institution. In the interview, Owens referred to the “double standards” that conservative students face when working with the administration to host events, for example.
Conservatives have to “make sure every ‘i’ is dotted, every ‘t’ is crossed” and “engage in multiple meetings with university administration and UW PD to make sure events don’t get hijacked,” Owens said, “[w]hereas I think liberal student groups just get a pass, right? You know the procedures are sort of dealt with very loosely for them.”
Though on his way out, Owens made a few recommendations for how the school could improve its ideological climate. More teaching jobs should be made available to people from private-sector backgrounds, Owens says, along with other hiring reforms.
Ultimately, Owens said, lasting solutions will require leadership by governors to appoint members to the Board of Regents who will uphold a firm commitment to diversity of opinion and fix the skewed ideological landscape of the university.
Wyatt Eichholz is the Policy and Legislative Associate at the Badger Institute. Permission to reprint is granted as long as the author and Badger Institute are properly cited.
