According to a new survey, roughly 40 percent of college faculty would “oppose hiring a Trump supporter.” The results of the study are not surprising to many in the field of teaching. Indeed, it may be low given faculty reluctance to admit political bias or the delusion of others that they are without it. Yet, the virtual purging of Republicans from most departments reveals a long-standing ideological exclusion in higher education.
While far-left hires are common, even a moderate Republican is a rarity on faculties in a country with a majority of conservative and libertarian voters.
Even assuming that many faculty members will not expressly acknowledge their bias, this forty percent is willing to state that they will vote against candidates based on their political views without any consideration of the intellectual content of their scholarship.
In my book, “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage,” I discuss these arguments to justify the current levels of intolerance and orthodoxy in higher education.
I had dinner with a Harvard Law Professor, who expressed disbelief that I expected him to vote for any faculty applicants who held views he considered wrong. When I noted that I regularly vote for faculty candidates who hold opposing views, he just shrugged and said that, if he rejects their views, he cannot vote for those views to be taught to students.
There are few remaining conservatives or libertarians on law school faculties, which have been purged of dissenting voices through a biased hiring and promotion system. Despite years of complaints and declining public trust in higher education, faculty members continue to reinforce bias and orthodoxy in our schools.
I wrote about the rise of this new McCarthyism on the left seven years ago.
Recently, I discussed the example of Fordham University School of Law professor John Pfaff, who called for “repercussions” for professors who do not “recant” their view that the 14th Amendment does not protect birthright citizenship.
Tolerance is intolerable for professors like Pfaff. After the decision in Trump v. Barbara, Professor Pfaff went on BlueSky to vent against anyone who dared to voice a dissenting view in academia, calling such faculty “parasites” that have to be effectively stomped out of higher education. In his post, Pfaff declared:
“There MUST be repercussions for the lawprofs who advanced such untenable arguments. Their behavior is — and I mean this literally, not dehumanizingly — parasitic.
They exploit norms of collegiality and presumptions of integrity to advance trash. Which undermines the work of ALL of us.”
His rationale for punishing opposing viewpoints is an insight into the arguments used against intellectual diversity and institutional neutrality in higher education.
I recently participated in a debate with the President of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), who opposed the principles of institutional neutrality.
Some sites, such as Above the Law, have supported the exclusion of conservative faculty. Senior Editor Joe Patrice defended “predominantly liberal faculties” by arguing that hiring a conservative law professor is akin to allowing a believer in geocentrism to teach at a university.
Not long ago, I debated Professor Randall Kennedy at Harvard Law School about the lack of ideological diversity at the school. I respect Kennedy, and I do not view him as anti-free speech or intolerant. Yet when I noted the statistics on the vanishing number of conservative students and faculty in comparison to the nation, Kennedy responded that Harvard “is an elite university” and does not have to “look like America.”
Of course, the problem is that Harvard does not even look like Massachusetts, which is nearly 30 percent Republican.
At Yale, the faculty achieved a type of academic nirvana in reaching a point where not a single faculty member gave to a Republican candidate.
When pressed, faculty members often claim that they cannot find credible or competent conservatives. During my debate with Professor Kennedy, I noted that, if a university made such a claim to explain the virtual absence of minority professors, a judge would laugh them out of court. The virtual absence of conservative or Republican faculty in most departments shows a deep and unrelenting bias.
There is little self-reflection on the left in considering the historical or cultural implications of such bias. While often alluding to the McCarthy period in criticizing the right, professors rarely acknowledge their own effective black list against conservatives and certain Trump supporters. Few conservative applicants today would risk admitting to being Trump supporters in interviews.
The intolerance in higher education will not change because it is a cultural touchstone for faculty. Professors prove their bona fides with intolerant statements in meetings and even in classes. I heard from closet conservative students at Harvard how faculty routinely used their classes to rail against Trump and Republicans. They sit like a silent captive audience.
Surveys show that this intolerance has produced widespread self-censuring by students, particularly conservative students.
Some 49 percent of Republican students report self-censoring on three or more topics. Independents are the second most likely at 40 percent. Some 38 percent of Democrats admit to self-censoring.
Sixty percent of college students strongly or somewhat agree that “[t]he climate at my school or on my campus prevents some people from saying things they believe, because others might find it offensive.”
That is the environment of intolerance created and maintained by this generation of administrators and faculty. It will not change until donors stop giving money to schools without greater balance and intellectual diversity.
Tyler Durden Tue, 08/04/2026 - 20:05A new peer-reviewed study found that the fault system running beneath Los Angeles and the Inland Empire is carrying more stress today than at any point in the last millennium, and that a single rupture could tear across both the San Andreas and San Jacinto faults at once.
The research, led by Dr. Liliane Burkhard of the University of Bern and published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, simulated 1,000 years of earthquake cycles on the southern San Andreas and San Jacinto systems.
The flashpoint is Cajon Pass, the junction northeast of Los Angeles where the two systems meet, and where Interstate 15, freight rail lines, power corridors and the aqueducts that supply Southern California's water all cross.
The model puts Coulomb stress at 3.6 megapascals on the San Jacinto-Bernardino segment, the highest value anywhere in the entire 1,000-year reconstruction, and 2.8 megapascals on the San Andreas Mojave South segment. Both are elevated, and both are closely aligned, the same configuration that preceded joint ruptures in the past.
Researchers caution these are modeled values that depend on the simulation's assumptions, not direct measurements from underground. Burkhard's team describes Cajon Pass as an "earthquake gate," a junction that can either stop a rupture cold or let it through.
The 1857 Fort Tejon earthquake, magnitude roughly 7.9, stopped there, while the 1812 Wrightwood event is believed to have crossed both faults. A through-going rupture today, the study claimed, could reach magnitude 7.4 to 7.8. More than 160 years of slip has piled up since 1857. Caltech seismologist Lucy Jones, who helped build the widely cited magnitude-7.8 "ShakeOut" scenario, said the San Andreas is California's longest fault and therefore capable of its largest earthquakes.
The chilling scenario projects nearly two minutes of shaking, more than 1,800 deaths, 50,000 injuries and over $200 billion in damage. "It could go another 100 years. It could be tomorrow," Jones said in an interview with ABC7.
A 2008 USGS forecast put the 30-year odds of a magnitude-6.7 or larger quake on the southern San Andreas at 59 percent, the highest of any fault in the state. Burkhard stopped short of forecasting a date, telling Newsweek that while this does not mean an earthquake will happen tomorrow, "the system is as loaded as it has ever been in our record, and the question is not really if but when."
Tyler Durden Tue, 08/04/2026 - 19:40