This article originally appeared in The Telegraph.
By Eric Kaufmann, July 15, 2025
Harvard University is reportedly mooting the idea of establishing a conservative centre for research and teaching in its bid to placate the Trump administration, which has threatened to cut Harvard’s research funding, accreditation and ability to recruit foreign students, while taxing its $53 billion (£39.4 billion) endowment.
Critics claim that this is affirmative action for conservatives, and will not produce good scholarship. Others argue that conservatives are not discriminated against, they just do not apply for jobs at universities. Few on the Right are interested in an academic career, they say, because they are anti-science or not good enough to make the grade. The most popular comment on a recent New York Times column on the lack of conservatives in academia nicely sums up liberal prejudices: “What [conservatives] are really demanding is that colleges teach their versions of pseudoscience and pseudohistory, which have no real basis in fact and are just an attempt to clothe the usual racism and religious extremism in an academic framework.”
We might pause and imagine how progressives would react if the word “conservative” was replaced by “black” or “woman”. Regardless, such claims are nonsense.
How so? First of all, academia has shifted massively Left in the past 60 years. In 1969, a major faculty survey found more than 40 per cent of American academics to be liberal and just under 30 per cent conservative. However, by 2016, Mitchell Langbert and colleagues, using voter registration data, found that Democrats outnumbered Republicans by almost 12 to 1 across five fields at leading universities.
This is not because of Trump or populism. The change was well underway before he arrived, and the same shift seems to have occurred in Britain, where the proportion supporting the Conservatives has slipped from nearly 30 per cent in 1976 to just under 20 per cent in 1989 and then to around 10 per cent in 2015. In Canada, a Macdonald-Laurier Institute report found that only 9 per cent of academics back Right-wing parties compared to about 40 per cent of the population.
The second clear finding is that academics discriminate against conservatives. The Black Christian sociologist George Yancey reported in 2011 that nearly 30 per cent of sociologists admitted that they would be less likely to hire a Republican. In 2020, I found that 40 per cent of US social scientists would not hire a known Trump supporter and one in three of their British equivalents would not hire a known Brexit supporter.
Research which compares people’s willingness to discriminate on the basis of race and politics show almost none of the former, but plenty of the latter. The important stigma attached to engaging in discrimination on the basis of race is largely absent when it comes to politics. Indeed, in many quarters of academia, it is positively encouraged. As an academic, I have routinely experienced a professional culture of joking about conservatives, Brexit voters or Trump supporters. This would not be a problem if the humour ran in both political directions, but it never does.
Are conservatives uninterested in academia? I believe that the intellectual curiosity of conservatives is no weaker than it was in the 1960s. However, the mood music is now extremely hostile. When I surveyed masters students in the social sciences from the US, Britain and Canada, one of the leading reasons why conservative students said they would not consider a career in academia is that they believed their political beliefs would not be a fit. Among conservative academics in the US, UK and Canada, around seven in 10 say their departments are a hostile climate for their views. Remove the political discrimination, and academia would be more likely to shift back to its moderate 1960s position.
The notion that conservatives are uninterested in science and facts is patronising nonsense. I find that conservative students achieve the same average grades as liberal students. While there are conservative science deniers and conspiracy theorists on questions such as global warming and vaccines, the same is true on the Left when it comes to topics like the existence of the sex binary. And conservatives do not have lower research output than others. One study from 2016 shows that conservative academics in law are better published and cited than their Left-wing counterparts, suggesting that anti-conservative bias rather than lack of interest is the cause of their underrepresentation. None find conservatives to be less productive than their liberal colleagues.
Anti-conservative bias means that only ring-fenced centres like the one mooted by Harvard can protect academic freedom and foster viewpoint diversity.
Having said all this, it is true that many professions beyond academia have been drifting Left over the past few decades. Doctors, lawyers, tech employees and even engineers now give considerably more money to Democrats than Republicans, which was not true in the 1980s. Cultural Leftism, which was only dominant among social scientists and artists in the 1960s, has spread far more widely today with each new generation, to the point it has become an elite sensibility.
Until that humanitarian-egalitarian-cosmopolitan ideal – whose fundamentalist expression is wokeism – is dethroned as the fount of all human value, academics are unlikely to change their spots.
Eric Kaufmann is professor of politics at the University of Buckingham and a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
