The Buckley Institute at Yale has just released its 2025 Faculty Political Diversity Report, finding a more than 36 to 1 ratio of Democrats to Republicans across all of Yale’s undergraduate departments, the Yale Law School, and the Yale School of Management. The email announcement of the report’s publication today includes this summary (links and emphasis omitted):
“For the third year in a row, our research has highlighted the significant political and ideological imbalance among Yale’s faculty,” said Buckley Institute Founder and Executive Director Lauren Noble. “Yale has committed repeatedly over decades to fostering an environment conducive to open debate and discussion but has all but excluded diversity of opinion through its hiring process. With such a dramatic ideological chasm between the Yale campus and the country, it is not hard to see why trust for higher education is so low.”
Across Yale’s 43 undergraduate departments and two of its graduate schools, the Buckley Institute’s research found that Democrats make up 82.3% of faculty while Republicans make up 2.3% and unaffiliated/third party faculty make up 15.4%. That is a more than 36 to 1 Democrat to Republican ratio and a 5 to 1 Democrat to independent ratio. 27 of the 43 (63%) undergraduate degree-granting departments have no Republicans at all. Three departments, East Asian Languages and Literature, French, and Italian, have neither independents nor Republicans.
By contrast, Gallup polling has found Democrats and Republicans fairly even at around 30% of America’s population each over the past 15 years, while independents have made up around 40%. Yale’s faculty political alignment is a dramatic departure from its home state of Connecticut as well where only 35% are registered as Democrats, 21% as Republican, and 44% as independent or third party.
Continuing a trend from previous years, the greatest disparity was in the humanities, where political and ideological leaning arguably have the greatest impact. Across 18 humanities departments, Democrats outnumber Republicans at a ratio of 72 to 1 and outnumber independents at a ratio of 8 to 1. In total, across 409 faculty identified in the humanities, Democrats made up 88.0% of the faculty versus only 10.8% for independents and 1.2% for Republicans.
The management school, new to this year’s report, also showed a shocking political misalignment with the outside world. Across 101 faculty identified, the Buckley Institute’s research found that 77.2% were Democrats while only 1.0% were Republicans, a 78 to 1 ratio.
Yale Law School too fared poorly. Across 66 faculty identified, Yale Law was 93.9% Democrat, 4.6% independent, and only 1.5% Republican.
Page 51 has the results for the Political Science Department. The authors were able to identify one Republican. The chart on that page has the number of Republican asymptotically approaching zero, which is an achievement the other departments mentioned above have already attained.
The Buckley Insitute is of course named after Yale alumnus William F. Buckley, Jr. Buckley focused much of his interst and attention on the campus setting. Until he gave up public speaking in 1998, his frequent campus speaking engagements were part missionary work, part performance art, and like nothing else available on the campuses he visited.
In the decades following Buckley’s founding of National Review, the conservative movement experienced successes that must have exceeded even Buckley’s visionary imagination. Yet the university — not just Yale, but our universities as a whole — remains almost entirely untouched by Buckley’s call to action. In fact, it understates matters considerably to say that circumstances on campus have not improved since the publication of God and Man at Yale in 1951.
