Forty percent of college faculty would oppose hiring a Trump supporter.
Half the country voted for the man. Four in ten professors would blackball a student for it.
The number comes from a new report by the America First Policy Institute. Michael Shires, Vice Chair of Education Opportunity at the institute, laid out the findings in terms that don't require a Ph.D. to understand. "If you think about it, half the electorate voted for President Trump, yet on a university campus, you know, 40% of the faculty wouldn't hire them," Shires said.
It gets worse. Twenty-five percent of social sciences and humanities faculty said they would "support a campaign" to remove colleagues who hold conservative views. Not disagree with them at a faculty senate meeting. Not avoid them at department parties. Actively campaign to have them fired.
The ideological composition numbers explain how we got here. Liberal faculty grew from 59.8 percent in 2016 to 74.2 percent in 2022. Conservative faculty declined from 12.1 percent to 10.8 percent over the same period. That's not a shift, that's a purge.
"When you have institutions that are being captured and co-opted by this kind of woke, DEI, critical theory mentality, this is the result," Shires said. "You chase out people who have even mainstream perspectives."
The report also found that Black professors outnumber Republican colleagues at 11 elite institutions, including Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. Universities have spent two decades insisting that demographic diversity is an existential institutional value. Intellectual diversity apparently didn't make the list.
Shires pointed to the chilling effect that extends beyond hiring. "They're silencing the voice of the right, and the right's nervous about saying things, and they're even nervous about hanging out with them because it might hurt their careers," he said. So it's not just that conservatives can't get hired. The ones who slip through learn to keep quiet or risk becoming the subject of that 25 percent's next removal campaign.
"During that same time, we have allowed an environment to flourish where we chase out faculty who don't buy into the progressive leftist views," Shires added.
The standard defense is academic freedom — universities must be free to hire based on scholarly merit, and political views shouldn't factor into employment decisions. Which is precisely the point. Forty percent of the people making those decisions just admitted political views factor into employment decisions. The defense and the offense are the same sentence.
Shires framed the public interest angle plainly: "In the case of our public institutions, and in institutions that are taking federal money, there's a legitimate public interest in saying, part of why we pay for higher ed is to teach our students how to navigate the complexity of competing ideas."
A university with 74 percent liberal faculty and 10 percent conservative faculty isn't navigating competing ideas. It's hosting a monologue and charging $60,000 a year for the privilege of attending.
The 40 percent number will get debated, contextualized, and explained away. But the number isn't the revelation. The revelation is that they said it. For decades, conservative academics described a hiring environment that punished their views, and the response was always the same — anecdotal, unproven, paranoid.
Now there's a percentage. And it came from the professors themselves.
