In 2025, “Yale professors made 1,099 donations to federal political campaigns and partisan groups . . . Not one of the recipients was Republican.”[1] Other than the 2.4% of the donations that went to independent candidates or groups, the rest—97.6%—went to Democrats. In that same year, U.S. President Trump became very publicly critical of elite private universities receiving federal research dollars while being so partisan (i.e., Democrat-leaning). Trump may have been more concerned that the universities benefit by receiving the indirect-expenses portions of federal research-grants while the professors infuse their personal ideologies, which are in conflict with conservatism, into their lectures. I took many, many courses, including at Yale, in my formal and post-doctoral education, and the infusion of a professor’s ideology—nearly always progressive—was not uncommon, especially at Yale.
At a “Roundtable Conversation,” albeit without any table whatsoever being used, in March, 2025, Yale’s “Race, Migration and Coloniality in Europe” working group sponsored three speakers to speak on “Europe’s Authoritarian Turn: Right Wing Politics and Where to Go from Here.” The focus was on the AfD (Alternative for Germany) party, which had finished second that February in the Bundestag election behind the CDU (the Christian Democratic Union). Yale’s own Fatima El-Tayeb touted academia in general, and the humanities more specifically, as having great potential in building and maintaining a repository of knowledge immune from the push and pull of political autocrats. El-Tayeb’s blind-spot, however, was on the salience of political ideology operating under the subterfuge of neutral scholars and scholarship.
Jeff Klein of the Multitudes Foundation advocated that Germany should ban the AfD party because, he said, it wants to get rid of democracy. Extricating the votes of the Germans who had voted for the AfD was somehow in line with democracy. This inconsistency alone attests to the salience of Klein’s anti-conservative ideology. He argued that were the AdF group to get a plurality of votes in the next election without any other groups joining in a majority coalition with the AdF group, democracy itself would be discredited and weakened. To have a governing party with only a plurality rather than a majority in the Bundestag would at the very least render democratic governing unstable in that legislative chamber, but not anti-democratic. Klein’s next statement, that “the AfD should be banned in Germany,” evinced questionable reasoning from a democratic standing. Out of a concern that AfD might curtail democracy, Klein was curtailing democracy by advocating that a significant number of voters be effectively disenfranchised. He was utterly unaware of his own contradiction.
That virtually none of the Yale students and faculty in the room would have even questioned Klein’s anti-conservative ideology (nobody raised a critical question in this regard) supports my experience that an overwhelming proportion of students and faculty in Yale College and the Graduate School (excluding the professional schools) are and have been at least since the early 1990s (in my experience) anti-conservative progressives, politically (including social issues). Even though Yale interviews prospective faculty members because of their past outstanding scholarship, I suspect that the interviews serve as a litmus test on how well the applicants would “fit in” at Yale. It is not that political progressives are smarter than conservatives, so the scholarship is not what makes the Yale faculty so liberal as a group. Rather, while on campus both in the 1990s and in 2023 and 2025 (one term each), I could not help but pick up on the severity of the ideologically-left intolerance in too many students and even faculty members. The distinction of “insider” vs “outside” is not lost on Yale’s professors as well as even the non-academic managers whose arrogance vastly outstrips their academic credentials. The comfort in acting out unfairly on the basis of ideological intolerance is the elephant in the living room at Yale. The university’s public statement on December 23, 2025 that “Yale hires and retains faculty based on academic excellence, scholarly distinction, and teaching achievement, independent of political views” is an outright lie; if that statement were true, the extreme ideological bias in the political donations by the faculty would be a statistical anomaly that could only have truth-value on the island of misfit toys.[2]
The charge that Yale is and has been rife with progressive, or “liberal” political ideology even infused in academic lectures has much more validity than Trump’s accusation that Ivy League universities were antisemitic since 2023 just because they allowed pro-human-rights students to protest against what the ICC and UN both determined to be a genocide in Gaza being committed with impunity by Israel. In fact, Yale’s “police department” arrested 47 students in 2024 for protesting Israel’s genocide even though those students had the same kind of tent-protest-area in Beinecke Plaza that striking graduate-student teaching-assistants had had in the 1990s. Yale did not break up that encampment. Also, Yale’s presidents both in the 1990s and in 2024 were both Jewish. That Yale went after the protesting students was actually a move in the pro-Zionist favor. So Bruce Ackerman, a law professor at Yale and presumably a Zionist, was on an utterly wrong-headed crusade when he tried to “out” anti-Semites at Yale. That the administration could alternatively have valued and even encouraged students to value human rights and thus oppose crimes against humanity is something that Ackerman and other Zionists on Yale’s faculty would have been at pains to outwardly oppose.
Back in 2023, when I was back
at Yale translating a theological and ethical text, I walked out of the main
library one day to spontaneously join a march for the innocent residents of
Gaza. Three young men, aged in the mid-20s, were walking next to me. “We’re
Jewish,” one said to me. “I don’t care what background people come from; we are
standing up for human rights.” The three guys and I even stood together at the
end of the march in New Haven’s central park, the Green. Bruce Ackerman would have
been at a loss to explain us had he been present. Maybe he was busy writing a
check to the Democratic Party, which, like the more conservative major group in
the U.S., was busy taking orders from the AIPAC at the expense, ironically, of liberal
Democrats. If Yale’s faculty were at all concerned about the crimes against humanity
that Israel was committing from 2023 at least through the time of the study on
the donations, sending money to the Democratic Party was not the smartest move
by “the smartest guys in the room.” This is obviously not to say that all of the
professors’ respective donations were made to support the Zionist genocide or
other conservative causes. After all, Yale’s “police department” arrested 47
students who were protesting against the genocide in 2024.
2. Ibid.
