ANALYSIS: President Donald Trump won nearly 60 percent of Utah, but the University of Utah heavily favors Democrats
University of Utah faculty heavily favored Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party during the latest election cycle, according to Federal Election Commission data.
The College Fix searched for all donations in the 2023-24 election cycle as of Nov. 12. The Fix searched for donors who listed their occupation as “professor.”
In total, faculty at the public university in Salt Lake City donated nearly $75,000 between the Harris Victory Fund and the Harris for President fund. Another $175,000 went to Democratic candidates, political action committees, or aligned causes, such as pro-LGBT groups. Committees that sent more than 60 percent of its donations to one political party were grouped as Republican or Democrat.
In contrast, around $8,158 went to Republican candidates or aligned causes. The Fix could not identify a single donor to President Donald Trump. However, Republican fundraising platform WinRed processed a total of $2,583.71, so the exact recipient is not known for all donations.
This means that Democratic causes received 32 times more donations than Republicans from University of Utah faculty. However, the state is heavily Republican, voting nearly 60 percent for Donald Trump. Both chambers of the state legislature, along with the governor’s mansion, are controlled by the GOP.
Around $3,400 dollars went to political committees that did not clearly favor one party.
After emailing and making phone calls between last week and Monday, the university responded yesterday afternoon to The College Fix.
“The University of Utah will not have a statement for your story,” Director of Communications Rebecca Walsh told The Fix via email.
The Fix asked for comment on the numbers, if the university would be interested into looking at why there are so few Republicans, and for comment on the political climate on campus.
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The campus Young Americans for Freedom group said the results are not surprising.
“These numbers do not surprise me,” Chairwoman Rachel Flynn told The Fix via email. “It is hard to find conservative professors on our college campus, but we have seen many of our professors stand with the leftist groups on our campus and support them.”
Flynn did say there are “many different viewpoints on our college campus.”
However, liberal views dominate – and some try to shut down conservative voices, she said.
“While there are conservative beliefs on our campus, there is also a big student population at The University of Utah that has leftist views,” Flynn said. “In our experience on campus, people are not always open to conservative ideas and there has been a lot of pushback.”
“We have seen students, as well as some administrators, in the past intervene to block free speech and conservative views at events like our[s],” she said.
Earlier this year, the university threatened to dissolve the chapter for allegedly violating posting rules prior to an event with detransitioner Chloe Cole. The school backed down after a legal threat, as The Fix previously reported.
“We at YAF at Utah love free speech and think that everyone deserves the right to express their views and opinions,” Flynn said. “We will continue to do our part to ensure that all viewpoints are able to be freely shared on our college campus.”
An education commentator at the Heartland Institute also provided comments about if the university should look into the situation.
“State lawmakers are reluctant to assert much authority over the universities on which they spend taxpayer dollars, and not just because they trust the faculty and administrators to have students’ and taxpayers’ best interests at heart,” Sam Karnick told The Fix. “Thousands of graduates in each state occupy important positions in government , business, the media, and other influential institutions. There are more than 668,000 University of Michigan alumni alive today, and more than two million from the University of California. One and a half million Cal alumni still live in the state.”
He said further:
Crossing those alumni means looking for trouble. The resulting lack of oversight frees universities to adopt trendy, irrational, and self-serving policies such as diversity, equity, and inclusion. They are free to fill their campuses with students who are unlikely to make trouble for their professors and bloated administrative staff because the university holds unchallenged power and wields it ruthlessly by valuing demographic check-boxes and political correctness over academic ability.
He said the public must be the ones to raise objections.
This is the latest College Fix report to find Democratic professors predominating at a public university in a red state. The Fix found 99 percent of donations from faculty at Ohio State University went to Democrats, versus only 1 percent to Republicans.
Similarly, Democrats outnumbered Republican professors in the humanities departments at University of Arizona by a ratio of 28 to 1, as The Fix reported.
The Fix also could not find a single Republican professor in seven departments at North Carolina State.
MORE: ‘Please grow up’: Harvard Democrat asks peers to stop whining about Trump
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