Yale Professor: There Is Zero Political Diversity in Faculty

Yale Professor David Gelernter told the institution’s newspaper last week there is very little political diversity amongst faculty members at the prestigious Ivy League university. According to Gelernter, increasing Yale’s political diversity would make it stand as the “one intellectually serious elite university in the country.”

According to a report by the Yale Daily News, a small cohort of right-leaning professors at Yale University is making a push to increase political diversity on campus.

Gelernter told the student newspaper last week that he suspects that political diversity amongst the faculty is approximately “zero percent.” Now, Gelernter is encouraging Yale to recruit right-wing scholars onto their faculty.

“If Yale chose to be intellectually serious, it could hire them all — all that have interesting things to say, at any rate,” Gelernter wrote. Gelernter claims that hiring right-leaning professors would make Yale “one of a few dozen top American colleges,” and the “one intellectually serious elite university in the country.”

English professor Mark Oppenheimer told the student newspaper that conservative professors are been outnumbered by their liberal counterparts for decades. Oppenheimer pointed out that William F. Buckley was criticizing the ideological motivations of Yale professors as early as 1951.

“My sense today is that the social cost that one would pay for having certain conservative views is very strong,” Oppenheimer said in a short comment. “And that effectively is a form of censorship, because to say people can say what they want, but they might pay for it by having far fewer friends, or being shunned, is not really to say that they can say what they want.”

Yale Professor David Bromwich argued that conservatives are more likely to feel outnumbered on campus in the modern era because of how politicized American society has become.

“I don’t think the Yale faculty are less politically diverse now than thirty years ago, but politics is more at the front of people’s minds in the Trump years than it was in the time of the elder Bush and Bill Clinton, and social media have made minorities in opinion, as in other areas, understandably warier than they used to be about saying unpopular things,” Bromwich said.

Breitbart News reported in August 2019 that Gelernter, a renowned computer scientist, had abandoned Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.