Campus Reform: Gustavus Adolphus College

Editor's Note: This week we'll highlight reports from conservative student groups across the country that highlight the overwhelming disparity in political donations made by their campus faculty. If you're eager to demonstrate blatant bias at your college, and earn recognition for your group by doing so, click here for step-by-step instructions on how to conduct this research and click here to contact CampusReform.org staff for advice and support.

Gustavus Adolphus College has a reputation in Minnesota of being a very liberal university.  Using FEC reports and opensecrets.org filings of campaign contributions by Gustavus faculty, some students have uncovered evidence suggesting a liberal bias of Gustavus Faculty members.

In fact, researching the public information about contributions, Gustavus students revealed that:

• 100% of all campaign contributions from Gustavus professors since 2006 went to Democratic Party candidates, with zero money for Republican or other party campaigns (FEC, Opensecrets).

The poster-child of potential faculty bias at Gustavus turns out to be Max Hailperin, a Professor in the Math and Computer Science Department.  Since June of 2006, Hailperin's house has contributed $21,600 to Tim Walz and Al Franken (OpenSecrets.org). This number is confirmed by the FEC Website which states his contributions since 2006 to be $21,590.  

That is a lot of money going towards bankrolling campaigns to keep conservatives out of office!   While nobody claims that Professors don't have the right to spend their money as they please, the numbers can be illustrative of the ideological makeup of faculty and administrators of a campus. 

In fact, this investigation was inspired findings in a study titled "Deep Blue Campus" which said:

American colleges and universities are very different from the nation that surrounds them.  The differences are especially profound when it comes to politics.  The United States is closely divided between the two major parties, but no such division exists on any major college campus.  The buzzword on campus is diversity..  The reality on campus is conformity.

Those findings have been corroborated by students investigative activities on numerous other campuses; 12 of which are reported here.  These campuses are from all sorts of geographic locations and represent different areas of the country.  They include Boston College, The University of Texas, and the Georgia Institute of Technology. 

Most interesting is perhaps what came after sharing these findings:   Various students, alumni, and professors of the College made some comments:

• Money well spent in my opinion.
• So Gustavus employs stingy, politically apathetic Republicans. Sounds like their problem, not Gustavus's.
• Get off telling us how we should use your tuition money.  I am glad Max is sending money where he does, that he is on the right side of history, and that he is for humanity.
• Speaking of being on the right side of history, it is impossible for someone to be "biased" just for being someone as opposed to someone else.
• Consider how over-educated your professors are. Do you see bias there? Consider their accomplishments, most of them.
• Would you like to see uneducated or historically illiterate people better represented on campus?
• Now remember that one point of education is to protect citizens from being mesmerized by the likes of Glenn Beck and other transcendental corporate media celebrities.
• If you learn in early childhood civics class who the Constitution says has to declare war, you will only make trouble.
• We will continue to hire faculty who are too educated for our times, who have also paid dearly for it. If you're lucky, you too will be educated. It's expensive but fun.   Nevertheless...that's the "liberal bias" in higher education: Education. Whom did you expect would teach liberal arts, tea baggers?
• A university is a business... If you don't like its employees or the service, leave.
• Truth has a liberal bias.
• ...You're criticizing how specific individuals spend their money and how you believe that impacts Society as a whole.  Your demand for equal representation and demand for 'justice' is Democratic in nature. So the good news: You're probably a Democrat! Congratulations.
• I've never heard of gustavus, but it sounds like great place with professionals who care about the larger world.   However, this post shows some flaws with the school.1) it enrolled a student more suited to one of the christian colleges for 'special' children2) it failed to develop this 'special' (and really i mean retarded here) kid. i loathe the democrats, but no one with even the slightest sense of moral decency or honest intellectual capacity can be a contemporary republican.
• [You're] wrong if [you] think there are no conservative professors. Where do you think ideas that support and prescribe military expansionist capitalism came from in the first place? Right out of academia. Plenty of the key players took classes from Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago, and they still study with Henry Kissinger at Harvard. You will see much U.S. policy coming out of academia, and where that fails these guys go off and start their own private universities---unaccredited, without students. They can afford it. Think tanks, in other words. Academia in exile.
• Marx is a deep and diverse intellectual tradition that has occupied the attention of both conservative and liberal philosophers, historians, sociologists, economists, and all manner of social theorists for nearly 150 years, both pro and contra, and we're still at it. There is substance there, and it takes some training to get in the game. It takes no training to get into the game of tea bagging. All you have to do is show up. A misspelled sign is an emblem of membership.
• The point about education automatically leaning to the left is also wrong. The point about education is that not all ideas are equal...  The idea that all ideas are equal is tied in with the Fox view that objectivity means "fair and balanced"---all myths and superstitions represented equally. Just not at college. We are very authoritarian that way.