According to a recently released report, only one undergraduate professor from the top 50 liberal arts colleges has given a donation to a Republican candidate during the current election cycle.
The third quarter report from the FEC, released on October 16, found 47 professors from the top 50 colleges as rated in US News and World Report to have donated to a presidential campaign. Of that number, Hamilton College History Professor Robert Paquette was the only one to have donated to a Republican candidate. Pacquette offered $150 to Carly Fiorina’s campaign, reports James Mietus for Campus Reform.
The other money, totaling 99.51% of donations, went to Democrats Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. In all, the 46 professors donated $20,875 to Clinton and $8,417 to Sanders. Professors donating to the Clinton campaign have given an average of $1,043.75. Those donating to Sanders gave an average of $323.73.
“I do believe these numbers give an accurate representation of the political leanings of faculty on most college campuses,” Paquette wrote in an e-mail, “especially allegedly elite liberal arts colleges like Hamilton College,” where he claims to be the “only out-of-closet conservative in a faculty of 200.”
An article by Phoebe Keller for The Cornell Daily Sun reports 96% of the $600,000 donated by faculty members at Cornell University has gone to support Democratic campaigns, with only 15 of the 323 professors supporting Republican candidates.
According to an analysis of Federal Election Committee data performed by The Sun, faculty at Cornell donated $573,659 to Democrats, $16,360 to Republicans and $2,950 to Independents between 2011 and 2014. While 99% of donations made from faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences went to Democratic efforts, the law school was found to be the most conservative, with 26% of the money, totaling almost $20,000, going to Republicans.
After the article was released, Jesse Watters, a producer for FOX’s The O’Reilly Factor, was sent to Cornell to interview students concerning the findings. However, Watters was kicked off campus by media officials for the school, who would not give him the permission he needed to interview students while on campus.
Bill O’Reilly had sent Watters to interview students at the school because he did not believe the findings correlated to the diversity the school is labeled as having.
The first three minutes of the segment features Watters asking students about their viewpoints. However, he was then interrupted by deputy director of media relations Melissa Osgood, who asked him not to interview students on campus.
Although Watters had the permission of the student to interview him, the segment was not allowed to continue. Watters then interviewed Cornell’s senior director of media relations, John Carberry, asking if he could interview students as long as he had their permission to do so, to which Carberry replied with a no.
Watters was sent a statement from the university on the matter which he read on the show, saying, “Cornell does not consider a person’s political stance in its hiring practices.”
