Eleven Academic Departments at Cornell have Zero Republican Professors

According to a recent report, there are eleven academic departments at Cornell University with zero registered Republican professors.

The report, which was conducted by The College Fix, revealed that eleven of Cornell’s 19 academic departments don’t have a single registered Republican professor. Departments that should emphasize ideological diversity, like government and philosophy, were among those without Republican faculty.

According to the report, only 17 faculty members in Cornell’s College of Arts & Sciences were registered Republicans. Of the 17, five were in Cornell’s economics department, and three were in the school’s history department.

In addition to this discovery, a report last fall by the Cornell Daily Sun revealed that a vast majority of political donations from Cornell faculty have gone to Democratic campaigns: “Of the nearly $600,000 Cornell’s faculty donated to political candidates or parties in the past four years, over 96 percent has gone to fund Democratic campaigns, while only 15 of the 323 donors gave to conservative causes.”

The report on Cornell faculty’s party affiliation was conducted by cross-referencing faculty lists with public voter registration records for the 475-square-mile Tompkins County, where Cornell is located.

In response to the report, a Cornell spokesperson claimed that political affiliation plays no role in faculty recruitment at the university:

Cornell University is one of the world’s leading research institutions, and our faculty includes some of the most accomplished scholars from around the globe in a broad range of fields. Political affiliation has no role in our faculty recruitment or promotion processes, and it never will.

“Nationally, economists, chemists, business school professors and engineers are significantly more conservative than professors in social sciences and humanities,” Cornell Professor Mildred Elizabeth Sanders of the government department argued.

Government Professor Richard Bensel argued that the reason for the absence of political diversity is because “a lot of the time conservative professors don’t want to work [at Cornell].”

Cornell Law Professor William Jacobson said that by Cornell sustaining an environment without conservative faculty, they are depriving the entire community of a meaningful exchange of ideas.

“By that measure, Cornell is failing because there is a lack of political diversity on the faculty,” Jacobson said. “Considering how political viewpoints creep into so many subjects both academic and otherwise, and faculty often are opinion leaders, the lack of political diversity on the faculty necessarily deprives the entire university community of the meaningful exploration and exchange of ideas.”

Tom Ciccotta is a libertarian who writes about Free Speech and Intellectual Diversity for Breitbart. You can follow him on Twitter @tciccotta or email him at tciccotta@breitbart.com