To the editor:
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) recently released a study by David Primo, a professor of political science and business administration at the University of Rochester, measuring intellectual diversity using campaign donation data. The average faculty donor has come a little to the right of progressives like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
Disclosure: I serve on FIRE’s board of directors. FIRE approved the study; analysis was performed independently by Primo.
Last week, John K. Wilson declared that this study is “null” because many faculty do not give, so the sample of donors cannot describe the average professor (“Flawed Study of the Fire of Political Contributions and Diversity of Opinion”, June 1, 2026). On a small point you are right. But “useless” is a serious decision—one that, if applied consistently, can throw off almost every means at our disposal. Polls, voter registration data, and donation records all have weaknesses; nothing is perfect. The question is not whether Primo’s estimate is perfect. That’s not the case. The question is whether it tells us anything useful.
It happens. Primo matched nearly a quarter of the 112,000 intellectuals in Stanford’s donation database and scored them on the same scale used for politicians. Critics rightly note how many professors fall outside that sample—73 percent do not appear in the matched data. Those are important caveats. But the margin points to the study’s most interesting finding: among intellectuals active enough to donate, conservatives were almost absent.
Here the selection effect cuts through the simple dismissal. If giving captures the most politically engaged intelligence, committed conservatives—and donors—should be easier to find, not harder. Think of a Federalist Society law professor or a supply-side economist. Instead, the conservative tail remains remarkably thin.
What the lesson doesn’t show deserves the same attention. It doesn’t show racism or that conservatives are being silenced. It is designed to capture contribution data, not behavior—who is in the room, not how the people in it treat each other. The door can lean too far to the left and continue to argue well. Treating skew as evidence of oppression claims more than evidentiary support.
Creativity still tells us something, even if it’s not moral. The issue is not party representation but whether important ideas are still contested. A discipline that loses its opponents loses its power to correct itself. The danger is not that dissent is denied, but that certain questions cease to be asked.
History shows why this is important. Ideas that were once dismissed as unfashionable—from school choice to criminal justice obstructionism—were promoted because dissenting scholars remained part of the conversation. Fields remain healthy when their assumptions remain open to challenge; where the disagreement is reduced, so is the list of questions to be asked by scholars.
Some evidence is coming together. A 2024 FIRE survey found only 20 percent of faculty believed a conservative academic would be a good fit in their department, compared to 71 percent of liberals. Different tools, same end.
Research does not justify panic or opinion polls. But it justifies the attention. It suggests that many fields have grown more ideologically divided than before. Whether that reflects recruitment, pipeline or discretion remains open. First we must acknowledge what the evidence continues to show: the decline is real.
