The Numbers Are In: The Buckley Institute's Yale Divinity School Ideological Diversity Report

The William F. Buckley Jr. Program at Yale has released an Ideological Diversity Report on Yale Divinity School, and the findings will surprise absolutely no one who has ever set foot on that campus as anything other than a progressive. Of the 117 Yale Divinity School employees examined—excluding emeritus faculty—91, or 77.8 percent, are registered Democrats or have donated heavily or exclusively to Democratic campaigns and causes. The Republican share? 1.7 percent. Two people. Both on the professional staff.

I spent three years at Yale Divinity School earning a Master of Divinity degree. I wrote about the lack of viewpoint diversity in real time, starting in the fall of 2019, when I observed that “there is diversity in backgrounds and religious traditions, but very little actual viewpoint diversity” and that “everyone just assumes everyone else is politically liberal.” I wrote about cancel culture when a Russian Orthodox bishop’s lecture was shut down before he could deliver it. I wrote about the obsession with oppression that had turned every classroom discussion into an exercise in identifying power dynamics. I described the experience of being a conservative at Yale as something like being Sasquatch—people had heard enough about conservatives to believe they might exist, but had had so little exposure to them that they could only think of them through blurry photographs and caricatures.

Now there are numbers to go with the anecdotes. And the numbers are worse than I would have guessed.

What the Report Found

The Buckley Institute’s report breaks down the political affiliations of Yale Divinity School’s employees across three categories: administration, professional staff, and educators. The results are striking in their uniformity.

Among administrators, 15 of 16—93.8 percent—are Democrats. One is unaffiliated. Zero are Republican. Among professional staff, 26 of 38—68.4 percent—are Democrats, with 10 unaffiliated and two Republican. Those two Republicans on the professional staff are the only Republicans in the entire institution. Among the 77 people classified as educators—a category that includes faculty, visiting and adjunct faculty, lecturers, instructors, and denominational studies directors—62, or 80.5 percent, are Democrats. Fifteen are unaffiliated. Zero are Republican.

The faculty numbers are even more concentrated. Of the 39 Divinity School faculty members, 34—87.2 percent—are Democrats. The remaining five are unaffiliated. Not a single one is Republican. The report notes that this makes Yale Divinity School’s faculty more ideologically uniform than Yale’s faculty overall, which itself registers at 82.3 percent Democratic, 15.4 percent unaffiliated, and 2.3 percent Republican. And of the 43 undergraduate degree-granting departments at Yale, all but 11 either had at least one Republican faculty member or had a greater percentage of unaffiliated faculty than the Divinity School.

Let me put that plainly: Yale Divinity School is more politically homogeneous than nearly every other corner of an already overwhelmingly progressive university. A Christian divinity school—ostensibly a place where the deepest questions of human existence are examined, where the tradition that produced Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin is studied and transmitted—cannot locate a single Republican among its faculty.

What It Means

I want to be careful here, because the argument I am making is not the one most people will assume I am making. I am not arguing that Yale Divinity School should hire Republicans for the sake of hiring Republicans, or that political affiliation is a reliable proxy for theological seriousness, or that a 50-50 partisan split among faculty would solve the deeper problem. The deeper problem is not partisan. It is intellectual.

The problem is what happens to an institution when virtually everyone within it shares the same basic assumptions about politics, theology, ethics, and culture. As I wrote when reflecting on the Buckley Program, “when an entire institution proceeds from shared assumptions, something corrosive happens. Those assumptions stop being examined. They become the water you swim in rather than the ground you stand on.” The Buckley Institute’s report provides the empirical confirmation of what anyone paying attention already knew: there is no meaningful ideological diversity at Yale Divinity School. There is a monoculture. And a monoculture does not educate. It catechizes.

Consider the practical implications. A student at Yale Divinity School who holds traditional Christian views on, say, the sanctity of unborn human life—a position held by the Catholic Church, the Orthodox churches, and large segments of evangelical Protestantism, representing well over a billion Christians worldwide—will not encounter a single faculty member who shares that conviction, at least not one willing to register it politically. A student who believes that free markets produce more human flourishing than centralized economic planning will search the faculty directory in vain for an ally. A student who thinks the progressive capture of mainline Protestantism has been a theological and institutional disaster—a view held by serious scholars and millions of ordinary believers—will find no faculty mentor to help develop that argument with rigor and care.

This is not education. It is intellectual quarantine.

The Divinity School Problem

There is something especially troubling about these numbers coming from a divinity school, as opposed to, say, a political science department or an economics faculty. Political science and economics are disciplines that deal with contested empirical questions where reasonable people can and do disagree along broadly partisan lines. A divinity school is supposed to deal with something deeper: the nature of God, the meaning of Scripture, the shape of the moral life, the claims of tradition. These are questions that have sustained genuine and serious disagreement for two millennia—disagreement that does not map neatly onto contemporary American partisan categories.

And yet Yale Divinity School has managed to produce a faculty whose political uniformity exceeds that of nearly every other department at the university. This tells you something important: the theological questions are not being treated as genuinely open. They have been settled—not by argument, not by the weight of evidence and tradition, but by the ambient pressure of an institution that has confused progressive politics with the gospel itself.

I wrote about this tendency when reflecting on my time as a Buckley Fellow: “Jesus had become less the incarnate Son of God and Savior of mankind than a progressive mascot—a first-century activist whose ‘real’ teachings, properly decoded by sufficiently enlightened scholars, aligned with remarkable precision with the agenda of the contemporary Democratic Party.” The Buckley Institute’s report suggests this is not merely the impression of a disgruntled conservative student. It is the measurable reality of the institution.

What I Would Say to Conservative Students

I have written before, and I will say again, that I would not discourage a conservative student from attending Yale Divinity School. I went there on purpose. I knew what I was getting into. And the experience was, in many ways, profoundly valuable—precisely because the relentless pressure to justify my convictions forced me to understand them more deeply than I ever would have in a comfortable environment. Iron sharpens iron, and the faith that cannot withstand rigorous challenge was not worth holding in the first place.

But I would say this: go in with your eyes open. The Buckley Institute’s report confirms what I experienced firsthand—that you will be, for all practical purposes, alone. Not persecuted, not expelled, not formally silenced. But alone in the way that matters most in an academic community: without faculty who share your basic intellectual commitments, without institutional support for the tradition you represent, without the assurance that your perspective will be treated as a serious option rather than a curiosity to be studied and overcome.

And I would say: find the Buckley Program. It was, for me, the most important intellectual community I found at Yale—a place where conservative ideas were examined as ideas rather than dismissed as symptoms of moral failure. Without it, the experience would have been far lonelier than it was.

The Institutional Question

The question raised by the Buckley Institute’s report is ultimately an institutional one: does Yale Divinity School want to be a place where the Christian intellectual tradition—in its full breadth and depth, including its conservative expressions—is taken seriously? Or is it content to be what it currently is: a progressive seminary that uses the vocabulary of the Christian faith to advance a set of political and cultural commitments that would have been unrecognizable to every generation of Christians before the present one?

I do not ask this rhetorically. I genuinely do not know the answer. I suspect that most people at Yale Divinity School—faculty and students alike—would say that they value intellectual diversity, that they welcome different perspectives, that the institution is enriched by disagreement. I have no doubt that many of them believe this sincerely. As I noted during my time there, “most of even the most progressive students here are kind and willing to listen to others.” The problem is not individual malice. It is institutional gravity. When 87.2 percent of your faculty belong to the same political party and zero percent belong to the other, the institution has created a gravitational field so strong that certain ideas simply cannot achieve orbit. They are not forbidden. They are simply not present—and in an academic community, the absence of an idea is functionally equivalent to its prohibition.

The Buckley Institute has done a service by putting numbers to what was previously a matter of impression and anecdote. The numbers confirm the impression. Yale Divinity School is, by any measurable standard, an ideological monoculture. Whether it chooses to do anything about that is another question—one I suspect I already know the answer to.

But the report exists. The data is public. And for those of us who experienced it firsthand, there is a certain grim satisfaction in seeing confirmed what we always knew: the diversity that Yale Divinity School celebrates does not extend to the diversity of ideas.

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• The Buckley Program at Yale: Intellectual Diversity on a Progressive Campus
• God and Man at Yale: Why Buckley’s First Book Still Matters
• The Obsession with Oppression at Yale Divinity School
• Week 8 at Yale: Cancel Culture Comes to YDS
• What Rich Lowry Taught Me About Conservatism at Yale—and Why It Matters Now