The exact number is 98.4 percent. A few things should immediately jump out at anyone otherwise assessing this fascinating statistic. It isn’t the percentage, which is unsurprising. It isn’t even nearly unanimous support — a single ideological bloc — for one political party, nor is it surprising that faculty would even financially support Biden, despite his qualification for emergency removal under the 25th Amendment. And it isn’t the “groupthink” sociology within Yale University, as an institution, that is remarkable.
What is fascinating about this report is that an institution of higher education could be assembled, organized, operated, and governed with nearly completely monolithic political beliefs. That is, there is no actual diversity in the diversity that actually matters: thinking.
But there’s more. What kinds of signaling within the “silent curriculum” does this send to students (many who are, or will be, voters), who are subject to rewards and penalties from the same faculty, such as scholarships, grades, degrees, research stipends, and job placement recommendations? How does such an ideological concentration affect how law is interpreted, or even business and medicine? And moreover, how can students trust and have confidence in professors who display such poor judgment by financially feeding a single political party system?
That may be the key takeaway from the data: that Yale faculty, not unlike nearly all university and college faculty (and administrators), perceive opportunity and allegiance through institutional terms. They reward and patronize the DNC corporation, regardless of who may be elevated from within it.
This is also an important, inconvenient aspect of former president (and candidate) Donald J. Trump: he came into the political market through the GOP, but not from it, and not from within it, as an incumbent careerist. That is what he symbolizes as well: an element of institutional independence. Independence undermines both the DNC and the GOP.
Conversely, Yale faculty will not likely support any candidate from other parties, regardless of his qualifications: independent, Constitutionalist, Libertarian, or even moderate Republicans. All are persona non grata, in the face of corporate allegiance to the financial and favor bank that is thought by Yale’s faculty to be the special qualification of the DNC. The DNC is their gravy train of endless grants, funding (and COVID bailouts), federal jobs, labor laws, regulations, agency growth, student loan guarantees, and an equally endless supply of fresh college recruits backed by mandated favoritism (even if judged unconstitutional by the SCOTUS), or the party most willing to support faculty’s intellectually distorting identitarian preferences. Indeed, even illegal migrants will be processed and financially supported in tuition and expenses by DNC policy, as part of their “welcome package.”
When Yale’s faculty vote as a bloc for one political party that feeds their ideological trough, regardless of the party’s national security competence, fiscal and monetary policy, enforcement of law and order, or national objectives such as space exploration (which China, Russia, and even India are pursuing at full throttle), then the only logical conclusion one can make is that Yale’s faculty are themselves corrupt, and corrupting to students. These are among the reasons why I ranked Yale Law School as the most corrupt law school in America. It is there that “law is politics” is solidified as formal progressive legal doctrine, and that doctrine is consolidated into one monolithic bloc of limited perception, ideological extremism, and institutional obedience.
Ironically perhaps, it was Yale researcher Stanley Milgram who asserted the “groupthink” phenomenon (coined by Yale psychologist Irving Janis), from his experiments in obedience under conditions of authority symbols (doctors in white coats, for example). He also advanced the perhaps more unsettling behavioral trait that he called the Cyrano Effect, which explains how individuals will mimic and repeat words, concepts, ideas, and orders that originate from another person. Nothing could perhaps more accurately describe the effect on students, when their professors invite them into, and reward them by, joining the academic political herd. But the professors themselves are the “Cyranoids” who simply mimic what they hear and repeat what they receive as ideological instructions from political special interests and the state. This means that universities may not be autonomous learning centers, but are effective political base camps.
Even at more traditionally conservative institutions such as the University of Chicago, the extreme progressive partisan solidarity is nearly as high, and growing, while the effects on young adults and the development of intellectual, cognitive, emotional, and perceptive judgment, is compromised in often subtle, insidious ways. They show up years and decades later with a handicap in thinking and a preference for the group, even, or perhaps especially, if the group runs off a cliff on behalf of beliefs. Comfort, safety, consensus, and ideological illusion characterize the sociology of the modern university like Yale, and perhaps in some ways mark the deterioration of Western, and American, independent character.
Matthew G. Andersson is the author of the upcoming book Legally Blind. A former CEO, he has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time Magazine, the National Academy of Sciences, and the 2001 Pulitzer Prize report by the Chicago Tribune. He received the Silver Anvil award from the Public Relations Society of America and has testified before the U.S. Senate. He attended the University of Chicago, Yale University, and studied with White House national security adviser W.W. Rostow at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin.
Image via Picryl.