KU, MU faculty and administrators donate vastly more to Democrats than Republicans | Opinion

I didn’t believe it when I first saw the data, but there it was in black and white. Not long ago, a majority of political donations from faculty, staff and administrators at the University of Missouri and the University of Kansas went to Republicans. (1994 and 2000 respectively.)

That sure has changed. Now the two schools are Democratic fundraising powerhouses. In the last presidential election year, faculty, staff and administrators at Missouri gave Democrats more than $880,000. Faculty, staff and administrators at Kansas gave more than $620,000. And that only includes federal candidates in the Federal Election Commission database, not state races such as governor and state senate.

The ratio of Democratic donations to Republican donations changed from fairly even in the 1990s to 8 to 1 at Missouri and a whopping 15 to 1 at Kansas in 2020.

What changed the schools from minor political players relatively uninterested in partisan politics (donations to both political parties in 1994 were a mere $32,000 totaled across both systems) to fundraising juggernauts that will likely donate more than $2 million to federal political campaigns in 2024 if recent trends continue?

Why did the schools go from relatively balanced between the two parties to becoming overwhelmingly Democratic institutions?

Since I don’t know, I asked a couple of smart people what they thought.

Centrist Jonathan Rauch, author of “The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of theTruth,” sees the schools following a broader social trend. ”The biggest change is that the parties sorted into opposing ideological and cultural camps, so the perceived stakes of losing went up,” he told me, also blaming partisanship becoming people’s primary identity, partisan media bubbles and extreme candidates.

All that he argues is ratcheted up on campus by progressive faculty and administrators replacing older centrist staff with “people like themselves.” “On campus,” he said, “most of that activity is on the left because progressivism is the dominant ideology.”

Jennifer Kabbany, editor of The College Fix, a site that tracks liberalism on campus around the country, has a darker view, “Generally speaking, there’s an ongoing generational change among professors,” She told me. “The older, classically liberal ones who tended to support free speech, academic freedom and intellectual diversity are retiring … replaced with younger, more radical scholars who use the classroom for activism and indoctrination rather than education.”

“These new scholars tend to be far more politically active because they view their profession as a means to an end: to convince young people that Republicans are evil and America is irredeemably racist,” she said.

A backlash is brewing in Republican states, she says, “Emerging laws and edicts by lawmakers and campus leaders to beat back DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) … show that they realize they let things go too far.” She cites events in Texas, Florida, Iowa, Idaho, North Carolina and Arizona to make her case.

That backlash is fueled by a voting public more skeptical of expertise and authority than ever, especially when it comes from a campus that has become a political monoculture. Parents, like me, are worried if they send their kids to college, their kids will come back with more indoctrination than education, that schools reject the fundamental values of most people in Kansas and Missouri.

I know I am wary of anything that comes out of America’s knowledge industry anymore. And that’s not good for anyone.

It is not good for society. It makes it harder for diverse people to live together if each group doesn’t just have its own interests and values, but its own reality too.

It is not good for individuals trying to make their own way in life to have to figure out whether they share the same values and live in the same reality as an expert before taking their advice.

It is not good for universities who need broad support and respect to justify generous state funding and a ready supply of young students eager to learn.

I don’t think the University of Kansas and the University of Missouri can go down this one-sided partisan path without paying a huge price in the years to come.

David Mastio, a former editor and columnist for USA Today, is a regional editor for The Center Square and a regular Star Opinion correspondent.