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Comment by cherrycherry98 | Hacker News Reader

Would love to see some statistics on party affiliation of faculty at these universities as a proxy measure for ideological diversity.

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Heavily Democrat:

- Of 12k donors from University of California faculty, only 6% donated to Trump, 94% to Biden

- MIT, 5% Trump, 95% Biden

- Stanford, 5% Trump, 95% Biden

- Harvard, 4% Trump, 96% Biden

- University of Colorado, 4% Trump, 96% Biden

- University of Washington, 3% Trump, 97% Biden

And so on: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2020-election-trump-biden...

A straightforward conclusion from that data would be that universities are overwhelmingly conservative, having donated to the more conservative candidate. But really it just shows the futility of discussing things in terms of group affiliations when one of the major parties in the middle of an upheaval.

A straightforward conclusion would be that you are spinning that data really hard to try to make it support your narrative.

I didn't spin anything. The comment I was replying to said that 95% of faculty donations went to Biden. Biden was the conservative candidate - he respects institutions, supports gradual changes to the status quo, and goes to church regularly.

What I was doing was being a bit facetious, by using the plain definition of the word conservative rather than the contemporary stretched definition referring to a movement that is better described as radical populism. And I obviously don't believe that colleges are full of conservatives - that was a reductio ad absurdum.

My actual point is that it's foolish to be looking at that 2020 presidential race as a proxy for conservatism on college campuses, especially tolerance of conservatism, when the candidate calling himself "conservative" is nothing of the sort. Put another way, shunning Trump supporters is in no way shunning conservatives.

A fair point - once you bother to make it. You could have made the same point in your previous point without sounding like you went full-on troll, though...

This is a weak proxy in this case. Could be ideological conservatives that didn't want to donate to a particular candidate

>Heavily Democrat

You are making an assumption that Republicans only donated to Trump and not to Biden. The Bloomberg article is about donations based on profession and large employers, not political affiliation or party.

He did. He's also probably correct. I'm pretty sure R/D affiliation is a fantastic feature for tracking the end target of any specific donation. A small subset of R's might donate to Biden, but those are likely swamped by the general split across party lines.

> He's also probably correct.

Then prove it. Linking to an article to support an argument is fruitless if it doesn't support the argument.

I haven't thoroughly investigated this study or its methodology, but it doesn't seem very hard to believe:

https://econjwatch.org/articles/faculty-voter-registration-i...

>We looked up 7,243 professors and found 3,623 to be registered Democratic and 314 Republican, for an overall D:R ratio of 11.5:1.

That kind of makes sense though - university jobs rely on government funding and it's usually the Republicans who (at least claim to) try to reduce government spending.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/146786/democrats-lead-ranks-uni...

Across federal employees, that doesn’t seem to matter much. I also wouldn’t expect republicans to care so much that they’d put monetary source before job type/location — it’d be quite difficult to be a republican teacher and find a job that’s not significantly government-funded

It's not a good proxy, at least not anymore, so I'm not sure why you would. Plenty of fairly conservative people had been registered Republicans for a long time up through and maybe including 2016. Maybe this was different in the 90's or 00's and may have worked then?

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