Yale's Ideological Echo Chamber
Conversations about fixing America’s college campuses often go nowhere. Conservatives split between giving up on the university and wanting to tear the ivory towers down altogether. Progressives divide between seeing speaker shout-downs as going a step too far and believing that the campus is where needed radical change begins, in any form that it comes.
Despairing of the dramatic political imbalance in the faculty room, even conservatives aren’t sure how to make diverse voices more welcome, while some progressives don’t want conservative voices on campus in the first place, let alone leading a classroom. Others understand that perhaps the shout-downs can be traced to the liberal echo chamber on campus, the “mutual massage between liberal students and professors,” as former Yale College Dean Donald Kagan once put it.
On campuses across the country, there is much division, it seems, about division itself. Yale is no stranger to this problem, but in New Haven at least, we may be making some progress.
New data from the Buckley Institute show that the faculty imbalance at Yale is as bad as ever. After examining some of the most relevant departments, including political science and history, and the law school, we found that 83% of Yale faculty are Democrats. They either registered to vote as Democrats or donate exclusively or almost exclusively to Democratic candidates. By contrast, only 3.5% registered as or donated to Republicans. Just 13% had registered as unaffiliated.
This breakdown is entirely out of proportion to the rest of the country. According to the most recent Gallup figures, not only is the Democrat-Republican divide nowhere near as stark, but Republicans actually edge out Democrats, 30% to 27%. In contrast to Yale’s paltry 13% who identify as independent, 41% of Americans see themselves that way.
That’s no outlier poll. Self-identified independents accounted for less than 40% of the populace in only three monthly surveys over the past two years, with both Democrats and Republicans oscillating between the low thirties and mid-twenties in terms of identification. When asked which way they lean, independents split almost evenly between Republicans and Democrats, with no clear trend in either direction.
Clearly, the Yale faculty lounge is a poor representation of America at large. Yale seeks to educate “aspiring leaders worldwide who serve all sectors of society,” but how can it do that if it has shut out the voices of half of the country?An affirmative action-style effort for conservative faculty to correct the imbalance would be at best a long-term solution. The large number of bureaucratic hurdles, including DEI statement requirements and other pernicious methods of ideologically filtering candidates, would make it unlikely to succeed. Additionally, conservatives, who tend to prefer a meritocratic approach, would likely resent such a hiring process.
Some universities have made free speech a priority, creating new institutes dedicated to open dialogue or other means of promoting free speech on campus.
At Yale, we are trying a different approach. We counteract the 23-to-1 ratio among the faculty with a different ratio: 1 in 10.
Back in 2011, a small group of Yale students came together to form a speaker series named after one of Yale’s most prominent graduates, William F. Buckley, Jr. The effort sought to bring diverse voices to campus. Now known as the Buckley Institute, the group grew to invite former secretaries of state, host regular debates about controversial issues, and fight for free speech at Yale.
At the end of the 2023 academic year, the Buckley Institute counted 623 student members, making up almost 10% of Yale’s 6,590 enrolled undergraduates. This means that Buckley Fellows, individuals dedicated to hearing diverse views and supporting free speech on campus, account for nearly 1 in every 10 Yale undergraduates.
The presence of such a large group of students who value ideological diversity makes a big difference. Several students have remarked that knowing that many of their peers have joined an organization dedicated to free speech makes it easier to speak up in class. If students know that they are more likely to be sincerely argued with than canceled, they will be more willing to share and hear the best ideas, not just those that fit the campus orthodoxy. An increasingly large body of students dedicated to free speech can help make open debate the norm rather than the exception.
Yale students are demonstrating that they want exposure to diverse opinions. They are likely not unique in that regard. There is a reason that this model is being emulated on other campuses like Bucknell and the University of Virginia.
Yale still has much work to do. It was ranked toward the bottom for free speech last year, it threatened some of its students over a party invitation, and it did little when a panel on free speech was disrupted by protesters.
But even as the Yale administration remains unconcerned by a political imbalance in the faculty lounge, a growing portion of the university’s student body is showing that free speech matters.
