Harvard Employees Top Donor Rolls

When picking the next President, Crimson faculty bleed blue—and back it up with plenty of green.

Harvard employees donate more to presidential campaigns than do educators at any other school, and their money overwhelmingly goes to Democrats, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education.

As of April 18, 2007, Harvard affiliates had donated a sum of $150,000 to 2008 presidential candidates. When The Chronicle reported its findings on Dec. 21, Harvard employees had given $281,050, an amount more than double that donated by the runner up.

Since then, the Harvard figure has jumped to $405,872, according to the latest figures from the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP), a non-partisan research group that tracks campaign donations.

Harvard donors backed Democratic candidates by a large margin. Democrats received 86 percent of University employee donations, while Republicans received just 14 percent, according to the CRP.

“It’s no secret that conservatives are a relatively small minority in academia,” said Filipe R. Campante, an assistant professor at the Kennedy School of Government and a specialist in campaign contributions.

As evidence, Campante cited a recent study co-authored by Harvard assistant sociology professor Neil Gross, which found that 9.2 percent of academics nationwide considered themselves conservatives, compared to roughly 44 percent who self-idenitified as liberal. Campante added that Democrats have been out-fundraising Republicans by a huge margin in this election, breaking with recent trends.

Kennedy School Lecturer Timothy P. McCarthy ’93, who spoke to The Crimson on his way to campaign for Barack Obama in New Hampshire, said it was not surprising to find a liberal bias among the intelligentsia.

“I think there’s a general consensus among smart, educated people that this country has been moving in the wrong direction for a long time,” McCarthy said, adding that the Bush administration has been hostile to “everything that we as a community of intelligent people prize.”

“It’s not surprising that now you’re seeing money flowing into the coffers of people that are more in line with our value system,” he said.

LEADING THE PACK

Harvard’s peer institutions lagged far behind University employees’ donation totals.

At press time, the CRP reported that Stanford employees had donated $173,036; Columbia employees had donated $163,558; Georgetown employees had donated $131,940; and Yale employees had donated $120,326.

University Professor Lawrence H. Summers donated $1,000 to the Democratic National Committee, while law professor Alan M. Dershowitz donated $1,000 to the Hillary Rodham Clinton campaign, according to the CRP.

Overall, college administrators, faculty members, and other employees have donated over $6.2 million to presidential campaigns this election season at the time the Chronicle article was printed.

Obama is the clear favorite in academic circles, receiving more than $2.1 million. Clinton ranked second with $1.6 million, of which $67,100 came from Harvard and only $16,750 came from Yale, where she earned her law degree. As in national polls, John Edwards trailed far behind, receiving only $351,261 from academics.

Former Mass. governor Mitt Romney led Republicans with $563,795 from contributors in higher education, while Rudolph W. Giuliani brought in $461,925 as of December, when The Chronicle published its findings.

Harvard employees’ donation patterns reflected national trends, and University staff were the top donors among academics to Obama, Clinton, and Romney.

—Staff writer Alexandra Perloff-Giles can be reached at aperloff@fas.harvard.edu.