The percentage of incoming Harvard students who identify as conservative dropped by nearly 50% compared to the 2017 graduating class.
While 15% of the Ivy League school’s class of 2017 identified as either somewhat or very conservative, that number has dropped to 7.4% for the class of 2024. The reduction in the percentage of conservative students is a sharp drop from last year’s freshman class, in which 12.4% of students identified as somewhat or very conservative.
The data stands in stark contrast to the political identity of Americans. In 2019, 37% of Americans identified as conservative and only 24% identified as liberal, according to a poll conducted by Gallup.
Only 5.2% of the students surveyed were affiliated with the Republican Party, compared to 57.4% who were affiliated with the Democratic Party.
Nearly 90% of Harvard students have either strongly unfavorable or somewhat unfavorable views of President Trump. Additionally, 90.1% of Harvard freshmen plan to vote for former Vice President Joe Biden.
Constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley said the results show that it “is demonstrably absurd to argue that this virtual absence of conservative students is somehow the result of accident and not design.”
“Liberal faculties routinely dismiss candidates who advance opposing views as intellectually unsound or simply not as intellectually ‘promising’ as more liberal candidates,” Turley wrote. “The bias is evident on every level. Faculty members tend to exclude conservatives from presentations, publications, and citations. The result is an echo chamber in academia that feeds upon itself.”
A study conducted by the National Association of Scholars shows that professors donate “almost exclusively to Democratic candidates and committees.”
