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Alumni possess wisdom and perspective that current students do not yet possess. They also have something that current students don’t: money that can be used to get the attention of university leaders. Sometimes alumni can make the greatest contribution to their alma maters by not contributing. For me, four decades after graduating from MIT, this is one of those times.
Yale University has finally achieved the academic version of Nirvana, a state of perfect peace and enlightenment. A recent study found that the faculty had finally purged every Republican donor from its ranks. While 98 percent of the political donations went to Democrats, not a single professor could be found who gave to a single Republican candidate. The complete lock for Democrats is in a country that is split evenly between Republicans and Democrats.
The Yale Daily News reviewed more than 7,000 Federal Election Commission filings from 2025 listing Yale as the employer: “Of 1,099 filings that included ‘professor’ in their occupation, 97.6 percent of the donations went to Democrats, while the remaining 2.4 percent went to independent candidates or groups,” the student newspaper reported Jan. 14.”
The study reinforces the recent Buckley Institute report, which found that, of the 43 departments surveyed, 27 entire departments contained zero Republican professors.
Samuel A. Church and Cam N. Srivastava, Crimson Staff Writers
Harvard Crimson
Excerpt: Harvard Salient editor-in-chief Richard Y. Rodgers ’28 announced on Tuesday that the conservative student magazine would remain active despite a Sunday statement from its board of directors suspending its operations pending a conduct investigation.
Rodgers wrote in an email to the Salient’s mailing list that the board’s decision to temporarily halt its operations was “an unauthorized usurpation of power by a small number of individuals acting outside the bounds of their authority.”
Academic Freedom Alliance statement on the assassination of Charlie Kirk
The Academic Freedom Alliance (AFA) is a coalition of faculty from across the country and across the ideological spectrum who are dedicated
to upholding the principles of academic freedom and free speech for faculty at colleges and universities throughout the US.
Located in Princeton, the AFA was founded by Keith Whittington, former Princeton professor of Politics now a professor at Yale Law School; Robert P. George, a professor of jurisprudence at Princeton; public intellectual and former Princeton professor Cornel West; Jeannie Suk Gersen, a professor of law at Harvard Law School; and Nadine Strossen, the former national President of the American Civil Liberties Union and professor emerita at New York Law School. Since its founding in 2021 the AFA has grown its membership to over 900 faculty from across the country.
FIRE
Excerpt: Today, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression sued Secretary of State Marco Rubio, challenging two federal immigration law provisions that give him unchecked power to revoke legal immigrants’ visas and deport them for protected speech.
Since March, Rubio and the Trump administration have waged an assault on free speech, targeting foreign university students for deportation based on bedrock protected speech like writing op-eds and attending protests. Their attack is casting a pall of fear over millions of noncitizens, who now worry that voicing the “wrong” opinion about America or Israel will result in deportation.
FIRE
Excerpt: The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression agreed to drop its First Amendment lawsuit against Chappaqua Central School District after the district’s board of education adopted a robust First Amendment regulation that will protect the constitutional free speech rights of its students.
FIRE sued the district in 2024 on behalf of O.J., an LGBTQ+ student suspended for violating the district’s “hate speech” definition in its code of conduct because he used the words “faggot” and “twink” in a rap song recorded in his friend’s home after school.
