Posted on 08/14/2007 8:13:48 AM PDT by Sopater
(CNSNews.com) - Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama received about $1.5 million in contributions this year from college professors and others in the education field, outpacing the party's front-runner, Sen. Hillary Clinton, who got $940,000 from academics.
Still, Clinton's near-$1-million second-place finish was almost as much as academia's total combined donations to leading Republican candidates Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani and John McCain. (See Complete Candidate Breakdown)
That many college professors and academics lean to the political left is no surprise -- 76 percent of their donations went to Democratic candidates in the first two quarters of 2007. But the volume of their donations is increasing, according to an analysis by the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics (CRP), which tracks money in politics.
"College professors and others in the education field have contributed more money than the oil industry and drug makers, with the nearly unanimous goal of putting a Democrat in the White House," the report said.
Faculty members from Harvard University led the way in overall political contributions -- $266,044 -- with 81 percent of those gifts going to Democrats so far in 2007, according to the report.
The second largest sum came from the University of California -- $248,488 - with 90 percent of those donations going to Democrats. (See Complete School Breakdown)
On a related note, employees of the University of California, which has nine campuses, contributed more to 2004 Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry's campaign than any other employer, including corporations.
In the 1990s, political giving from university employees hovered around $7 million, the CRP said. That jumped to $17 million in 2000 and nearly doubled in 2004, when academics spent almost $30 million to defeat President George W. Bush.
The jump is partly a result of great dislike for Bush, according to professors interviewed in the CRP report. But it can also be attributed to increased faculty pay, as professors at elite universities can often earn as much as top lawyers and corporate chiefs.
It's often liberal professors who demonize industries for their political giving, said Sara Dogan, director of Students for Academic Freedom, a conservative group that monitors what it considers liberal indoctrination on college campuses.
"When you consider how much some professors bash the oil and pharmaceutical industries for trying to get Republicans elected, you see they are trying to influence elections just as much, if not more," Dogan told Cybercast News Service.
"We've heard directly from conservative professors who can't speak their views for fear of losing their job," Dogan said. Also, "students have difficulty at these universities if they are conservative and disagree with a professor."
Gary Jacobson, a professor at the University of California-San Diego, said that more professors are Democrats. "If your sensibilities are Republican, you think you should go out in the market and get rich," he said. "If your interests are in ideas and you don't plan on getting rich, you'll be attracted to academia."
Dogan disputed that point.
"There are plenty of conservatives in academia, and they work at think tanks," Dogan said. "They can't get hired at universities because of academic blacklisting."
The analysis falls short of demonstrating a bias on college campuses, said Nicole Byrd, a government relations associate with the American Association of University Professors. She said the CRP did not provide the methodology for the study, which does not differentiate college professors from other university and college employees.
"It's a little tricky to read into that," Byrd told Cybercast News Service. "As a faculty organization, we take methodology very seriously when someone throws numbers around."
Though Students for Academic Freedom asserts that liberal professors outnumber conservative professors 9 to 1, Byrd believes the group's studies cherry-pick schools and disciplines to obtain such results.
"There are a lot of accusations against the professoriate that have not borne out," Byrd said. "Whatever a professor's political views, it depends on their level of professionalism and their willingness to leave one hat in the classroom and one hat in their personal life."
If it’s not Socialist they cannot admit it exists.
Many families these days spend more money on college for their kids than they do on thier house. We are BUYING the rope they use to hang us from them. It’s pitiful.
College has been sold as a necessity. It is not a necessity. There are many other routes to financial security.
The Universities and the Academics that populate them are the “Church of Holy Liberalism.”
College has been sold as a necessity. It is not a necessity. There are many other routes to financial security.
___________________________________________________
I agree. Particularly when a liberal arts education is now a miseducation and so worse than valueless.
We have to educate ourselves anyway. Who had to read the Federalist Papers in college? Not me . . . I think I read 2 in four years. I was a political science and an economics major.
Businesses should just ask for an IQ test or SAT score, and personal references to get an idea of intelligence and work ethic of a new hire rather than this $200,000 toilet paper diploma game that they play now, where the name of the University substitutes for what they really want to know anyway, which is how smart is the prospect and how hard do they work? It’s bogus.
The reason that the vast majority of academics are socialists/communists is simple. They are very frustrated and very angry because they think of themselves as “the smartest people” on the planet but at the same time they make much less money than the people in the business world. Therefore they think that the free market economy is not fair to them, “the smartest people” on the planet, and because of this they adopt the utterly failed socialist/communist ideology and all other types of destructive and stupid liberal ideas.
But why wait?
If a private sector job is okay, then some certification is the ticket. There are a lot of possible certificates that don't require college and college is a useless and expensive detour for most of those.
Also, not all colleges are secular and not all colleges are liberal. There are alternatives and those who do decide to send their children to college have choices.
It’s a parent’s responsibility to teach their children how to recognize truth and how to discern error. It’s also a parent’s responsibility to guide their children. It is NOT a parent’s responsibility to pay for college, but a parent’s choice. A parent can offer help in paying for college based on certain criteria, which is completely up to the parent to decide.
I used to be a college professor, but I hated it. People often asked me if I missed teaching. I loved teaching, but I hated working for the government. Those jobs are the same no incentive civil service system as any other agency.
Thank you for sharing your experience and be honest about it.
Attend State. They are no nonsense technical, none of this Liberal stuff. Not much on Philosophy either, which also means the Das Kapital component would be missing.
Yah, the system is set up where the college diploma is a ticket to a certain type of career. I don’t condemn anyone caught up in the system as it stands or who encourage their kid to go to University. I am saying that it’s past time to change the automatic behavior we’ve been conditioned to though. Go to the better, more conservative, but lower “prestige” school. More importantly, HIRE from the better and lower prestige school. Give a chance to the non-degree holder that shows initiative or hard work. Scr#w the college professors. They are ripping us off and miseducating us and our kids.
It’s the damn subsidized federal Stafford loans and Pell grants. If you get rid of these, tuition prices will fall drastically. Kids will work summers and save like the good-old days.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.