Higher Education

New study finds college faculty lean heavily left

August 12, 2026

Ray Carter

A recent review of university faculty ideology, based on professors’ political campaign contributions, shows that college faculty nationwide are extremely liberal, including in Oklahoma, although the problem is less pronounced at Oklahoma’s two major universities than at most of their counterparts.

A recent report from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), authored by David M. Primo, professor of political science at the University of Rochester, reviewed college faculty contributions nationwide to determine their ideology.

“My analysis shows that faculty members at these schools who make campaign contributions can be fairly described as heavily concentrated on the left,” Primo wrote. “This is a descriptive claim, not a normative one. Using the same measure of ideology for legislators and faculty contributors, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren would rank as the furthest-left members of their respective chambers in 2024, yet would appear only slightly left of center in a legislature composed of faculty contributors.”

The review included faculty from 55 institutions of higher education, including the University of Oklahoma and Oklahoma State University.

For his analysis, Primo relied on information from the Database on Ideology, Money in Politics, and Elections (DIME) dataset at Stanford University, which includes over 850 million campaign contribution records at the state, federal, and local levels and around 40 million distinct individual donors, with a dataset of 112,516 faculty members at the 55 state universities.

At the 55 universities, Primo found that 30,289 faculty members, about 27 percent, had sufficient contribution history to be assigned a score measuring ideology. He found 16,253 faculty members, or about 14 percent, gave $200 or more to a particular candidate or political committee in at least one election cycle.

Among the 55 institutions reviewed, giving rates varied widely. Brigham Young University was at the low end with just 15.7 percent of faculty contributing any amount to a political campaign and only 3.9 percent contributing $200 or more to a single candidate or committee. Stanford University represented the high end with 43.4 percent of faculty contributing any amount and 30.5 percent giving $200 or more to a political campaign.

At Oklahoma State University, the share of faculty making any reported contribution between 1979 and 2024 was the second-lowest among the 55 universities reviewed. Less than 20 percent of Oklahoma State University faculty made any contributions.

The University of Oklahoma was also among the bottom tier, ranking 42nd with just over 25 percent of faculty making contributions.

There was also greater ideological diversity among contributors at Oklahoma State University than at most of the 55 colleges studied, with only 10 universities demonstrating more diversity among political contributions made by faculty staff.

The University of Oklahoma trailed Oklahoma State University by seven spots on that measure but still had more diversity in faculty contributions than the majority of faculty at the 55 universities reviewed.

Primo found that “the humanities is the most left-leaning discipline, and business is the least left.”

“However, and importantly, the medians are essentially the same across fields,” Primo wrote. “Even business faculty who make campaign contributions lean strongly to the left. The difference in the means between the humanities and business is driven by the fact that business faculty have at least some conservative representation …” [emphasis in original].

Primo noted his study bolsters other research that has determined college faculty are overwhelmingly skewed to the political left, and often to the far left. He noted that a 2022 study of more than 12,000 professors in the 30 states that included party affiliation found Democrats outnumber Republicans by a ratio of 8.5 to 1.

“The results I present in this paper raise serious concerns about viewpoint diversity in academia, and they are consistent with findings from previous studies using different methodologies,” Primo wrote. “Faculty donors are very liberal, and the least ideologically diverse fields contain the most donors. And, even relatively less liberal fields like business are still dominated by liberals.”

[For more articles about higher education in Oklahoma, visit AimHigherOK.com.]