New FIRE study finds narrowing range of political views among faculty donors

I’m not even sure I disagree with the argument, but this feels like a classical “DEI” argument FIRE would be skeptical of because it’s politically convenient.

What if there’s just something about academics (and I do actually think this is true) that is not attractive to conservative professionals. The prestige of academics has been falling. Salaries aren’t equivalent to the private sector.

So why are we looking at equality of outcomes and assuming there’s a problem with equality of opportunity?

Also and of course like this may be the most relevant point, the political realignment of the past 15 years has been around educational attainment! How can you design a Republican Party that specifically realigns around education level and not expect that to show up in academics.

Why is it inherently bad that university faculty lean left?

Did the author consider if communists are fairly represented?

The study itself: https://www.fire.org/research-learn/faculty-ideology-measuri...