Recent News

At a recent Intelligence Squared debate, an audience filled an auditorium at Yale University to weigh the timely proposition, “Free speech is threatened on campus.” The debate concerned higher education generally, not just the host institution. And at the event’s conclusion, having heard arguments on both sides of the question, 66 percent of the crowd agreed: free speech is threatened. That represented a 17-point shift from a poll taken as the event began.

While the University has made a concerted effort across the past decade to promote gender and racial diversity among its faculty, Harvard has not made any explicit attempts to bolster representation from across the ideological spectrum.

It’s a tale as old as time, the stereotype of the liberal professor pushing his opinions on impressionable students. But the stereotype reflects real numbers. In 2017, only 8 percent of Yale’s faculty reported being conservative. In 2021, only 3 percent of Harvard University’s faculty reported being “conservative” or “very conservative.”