Professors Like Democrats. But Do Democrats Like Them Back?

It is well known that college professors vote overwhelmingly Democrat. But do the Democrats return their love? The question is rarely asked. Common sense implies that if a group votes a certain way, they have an interest in doing so. Yet in this instance, that assumption is by no means self-evident. 

A middle school analogy is appropriate. Professors are like a nerd who hovers around and idolizes the cool kid (the Democrats). The cool kid mostly ignores the nerd, though every now and then he condescends to say something nice. Meanwhile, the school bully (the Republicans) makes the nerd’s life miserable. The bully is a lot meaner than the cool kid. Yet unlike the cool kid, the bully notices the nerd. Granted, the bully does so to hassle and abuse him. But the nerd gets a kind of recognition from the bully. The nerd’s alternative is between lukewarm validation verging on indifference and recognition manifesting itself primarily as hostility. The paradox of professorial politics is that they gravitate towards a party that takes them for granted while fleeing a party that, because it considers them a threat, treats them with a twisted kind of respect.

The evidence that professors overwhelmingly support Democrats is considerable. During the 2022 midterms, according to one study, 95 percent of professor donations from the ten largest universities in North Carolina went to Democrats. According to another report, in the current cycle, almost 97 percent of contributions from UNC-Chapel Hill faculty and employees went to left-leaning organizations.

If professors typically vote Democrat, this has little to do with what Democrats do for them as professors.

If professors typically vote Democrat, this has little to do with what Democrats do for them as professors. It has been widely discussed that the Democrats have abandoned their traditional anchoring in the working class and have become a party of college-educated professionals. Despite this trend, Democrats have almost nothing to say about the state of higher education. President Biden’s Federal Student Loan Debt Relief program is the exception that proves the rule. Though it focused on the problem of student debt, it had little impact on universities. Faculty are acutely aware that they are living through a time of profound change. The academic profession is being transformed. Universities face formidable financial challenges. Students’ academic preparedness is alarmingly low. And public confidence in universities is at an all-time nadir. At best, Democrats have presided indifferently over these trends. At worst, they have contributed to them. Consider the evidence:

The end of tenure 

The defining feature of the American academic profession in the twentieth century was tenure. While official decisions to end tenure still spark debate, tenure—at least as a prevailing norm—is essentially dead. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) noted in a 2025 report that “most” American professors are on contingent—that is, non-tenure—contracts. This trend is as evident in states governed by Democrats as in those governed by Republicans. California has not had a Republican Governor since 2011 or a Republican-dominated legislature since 1970. And yet the state’s premier public university system has aggressively scaled back tenure lines. According to a 2022 report by UCLA’s Luskin Center for History and Policy, “the growth of lecturer positions has outpaced the growth of tenure-eligible positions in nine of the last ten years.” Over this period, non-tenure-track positions grew by 50.13 percent, while tenure-track positions increased at a rate of only 16.69 percent. If one considers graduate student teaching, the share of tenure-track faculty in the University of California system is closer to 19 percent. The same trend is evident even in deep blue New York City. In 1975, most faculty were on the tenure track in the City University of New York system, but only a third of the faculty had this status by 2009. 

Democrats have a similar record at the national level.  In 2021, Senator Bernie Sanders proposed, in a bill aimed at expanding college education, linking funding to the goal of ensuring that “not less than 75 percent of instruction at public institutions … is provided by tenure-track or tenured faculty.” Yet neither the Biden administration nor any other prominent Democrat got behind or even said much about this proposal. If you’re a Democrat, praise Gavin Newsom, Zohran Mamdani, and Joe Biden to your heart’s content—just don’t pretend that they have done anything for the academic profession. 

Faculty salaries

Strikes for higher salaries are a strange metric for favorable work conditions. In recent years, faculty compensation has stagnated and possibly decreased. According to the AAUP, average salaries in 2025 “increased about 3.4 percent overall in nominal terms, or about 0.7 percent after adjusting for inflation.” The AAUP further notes that “real average salaries still have not fully recovered from the cumulative decrease of 7.5 percent observed during the COVID-19 pandemic.” 

Faculty in blue states regularly complain about inadequate compensation, particularly in urban areas with high costs of living. True, faculty in red states often pine for the collective bargaining rights found in Democratic states. But strikes for higher salaries are a strange metric for favorable work conditions. During a strike in the California State University system last February, the faculty union declared that the system “was virtually the only public employer in California to give no raises to any workers in 2025—except for huge increases to overpaid executives – despite continuing increases in our cost of living.” The union noted that these decisions were made even though CSU had “received full funding in the state budget.” Meanwhile, in ultra-blue Massachusetts, a faculty organization claims that the state “trails other states in public higher education faculty salaries [in its peer group], when adjusted for the cost of living.”

Closures, Cuts, Retrenchment

Blue states are also confronting the program cuts and threats of closure that send chills through the higher education industry. Consider the case of Oregon, where Democrats have had a trifecta for most of the past twenty years. In March, Portland State University in Oregon, facing a $35 million budget deficit, declared “retrenchment,” which allows the administration to make targeted program cuts and layoffs to improve the institution’s financial situation. In February, Southern Oregon University (SOU) predicted that, within a year, it would not be able to make payroll. The Oregon legislature did allocate SOU $15 million in emergency funding, but this measure is unlikely to solve the underlying problems.

Vocational education

Many faculty lament that universities no longer value the liberal arts, choosing instead to prioritize workforce training. Yet this focus was given momentum by none other than the Obama administration, with its Career and Technical Education initiative. Michelle Obama encouraged young people to pursue “professional skills … for a good job in a high-demand field” that can be completed in a “fraction of the time and …  a fraction of the cost as compared to a four-year university.” To be clear, there is much value in vocational education. But this trend has also exacerbated the higher education crisis.

A perplexing preference

Whatever one thinks of Democrats’ education policies, it is hard to argue that they have done much to help the academic profession or address the higher education crisis. Professors are a constituency the Democrats take for granted. This is not entirely irrational. Professors make up a significantly smaller group than K-12 teachers (1.5 million vs. 3.8 million). Most importantly, faculty have little political heft. Previously, a significant share of the professoriate joined their main professional organization, the AAUP. That organization is now a shadow of its former self, with only 44,000 members in 2022. 

Professors are a constituency the Democrats take for granted. The deeper problem is that college faculty fit uneasily into the constituencies that define the current Democratic Party. Professors are too plebeian to have pull with party elites, and too middle-class to become the focus of social justice concerns. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu once defined university professors as the dominated segment of the dominant class. This description remains accurate. Professors share the values, tastes, and even lifestyle of the other professional classes that identify with the Democrats, while often earning significantly less money (particularly if they are non-tenure-track). Moreover, despite the party’s deep dive into cultural progressivism, many establishment Democrats have economic views that are only slightly to the left of Republicans. Consequently, they have little to offer in response to the severe financial threats bearing down on higher education. In many ways, university administrators are more aligned with the current Democratic mindset than most professors. Think how easy it is to imagine Kamala Harris as a university president. 

Think how easy it is to imagine Kamala Harris as a university president. The reason why professors nonetheless remain loyal to the Democrats is simple: they see Republicans as an existential threat. Whether it be the Trump administration’s attacks on Harvard and Columbia, the fear that anti-DEI policies will result in dismissals of faculty who don’t tow the Republican line, the belief that ICE agents are eager to arrest students in classrooms, or plain old budget cuts, professors are convinced that Republicans have drawn targets on their backs. If your choice is between a party content to inflict a slow death by a thousand cuts and one that seems prepared to haul you before a firing squad at any moment, most will choose the former.

Yet this preference is in many ways perplexing. Even though—and largely because—conservatives are so critical of it, they show a concern for higher education that is decidedly lacking among Democrats.  Higher education is in a crisis, for a wide range of reasons: a demographic cliff meaning fewer students and, ultimately, fewer universities; the extraordinary cost of a college education; the end of tenure and the obsolescence of the academic profession; the declining importance of the liberal arts; the prioritization of some political viewpoints over others, resulting in diminished public trust; and the potentially devastating effects of AI on education and the broader job market. Republicans may describe this predicament in excessively paranoid terms, but they understand that there is a crisis. They tend to see universities as Democratic bastions of progressivism that disseminate radical ideas into the culture. One can disagree with this assessment yet appreciate that it recognizes that something is amiss. Among the Democrats, the crisis barely registers. The few paragraphs devoted to higher education in the 2024 Democratic platform are so trite as to sound virtually brain-dead. 

In such soul-destroying circumstances, is it so bad that somebody cares about reading great books? Precisely because they are concerned about liberal bias, Republicans and conservative organizations are also interested in curricular issues. The civic discourse movement and religious institutions place a strong emphasis on the liberal arts. In North Carolina, this has resulted in the creation of UNC-Chapel Hill’s School for Civic Life and Leadership, which offers courses like “Pursuing the Good Life” and “Classics of Civic Thought: Plato’s Republic,” as well as the UNC Board of Governors’ “Foundations of American Democracy” requirement, which asks students to read the Constitution and Martin Luther King, Jr.  Most progressives criticize these programs for focusing on hegemonic discourses and “outdated” notions like Western Civilization. Yet many humanities professors are condemned to watch helplessly as administrators (often Democrats in good standing) cut tenure lines, slash requirements, force departments to trivialize their course offerings, and do whatever it takes to keep students enrolled, irrespective of their academic performance. In such soul-destroying circumstances, is it so bad that somebody cares about reading great books? 

One way to think about professors is as an educated demographic that trends progressive. This is how Republicans typically view professors (and many professors would agree). But another way to think of professors is as practitioners of a dying form of work that is threatened by brutal economic and technological change, to the general indifference of elites. If, in the upcoming years, professors began thinking of themselves in the latter terms, they would start to resemble the groups that, in the past decade, have been drawn to the Republicans’ populist message. Progressives have veered increasingly towards “postmaterialist” concerns, but university closures and the AI revolution could compel a severe reckoning with their material interests. While it is not particularly likely, such circumstances could lead professors to seriously rethink their political allegiances.

Michael C. Behrent is a professor of history at Appalachian State University.