Georgetown University employees donated the fourteenth largest amount of money to Obama for America, Inc., over the summer, based on a ranking of employee groups released by the Center for Responsive Politics.
According to the CRP, Georgetown University employees and their families donated $38,201 to the Obama campaign. Nine of the top 25 contributors to Obama for America, based on employee donations, were employees of universities, including Georgetown, the University of California, Harvard University, and Columbia University. Educators donated a total of $2,301,668 over the summer, according to the CRP’s study.
Donations from Georgetown employees to the Obama campaign have exceeded donations to John McCain, 2008, Inc., by a wide margin. In June and July alone, University professors, administrators, and other personnel donated $38,201 to Obama for America, Inc., while only $2,200 was donated to John McCain 2008, Inc., according to data from the CRP.
The numbers reflect donations from all of the University’s employees, including professors, administrators, and cafeteria workers, both on the main campus and at the Law School, Douglas Webber, a researcher at CRP, said. But he added that most of the donations came from professors.
“Given Georgetown’s location in Washington, DC and the interests of so many members of our community in important issues of the day, I don’t find it surprising that so many individuals are active in a range of political issues and electoral races,” University spokeswoman Julie Green Bataille wrote in an e-mail.
Clyde Wilcox, a professor in Georgetown’s Government department who specializes in campaign finance, agreed that Georgetown’s location probably increases the faculty’s financial presence in political campaigns.
“People here just get invited to a lot of fundraising events,” he said. “We’re on more lists, we’re a lot more networked into politics.”
According to Wilcox, the University’s location also brings in a number of adjunct professors who have previously worked in the government. Because the Republican Party was in control of Congress for over a decade and still controls the White House, more of these adjuncts have been Democrats in recent years, Wilcox said.
Wilcox believes that the Government department’s emphasis on policymaking, rather than on the abstract models which are the basis of political science departments at other universities, probably encourages more active participation in politics.
He also said the prominence of the Jesuit tradition of community involvement, particularly in the University’s theology department, promotes political activity.
But Patrick Deneen, a professor in Georgetown’s Government department and the founder of the Tocqueville Forum on American Values, said that he did not think that professors’ preference for Obama reflected anything more than a liberal bias in American universities.
“I think it’s a well known fact that the professoriate in general leans to the left, and that professors tend to lean Democratic,” he said.
Wilcox said that although professors do tend to lean to the political left, many academics are supporting Obama specifically in response to the Bush administration’s “assault on science.”
“I know quite a few Republican political scientists who are just not going to McCain, and who would have in the 1980s,” he said. “This has nothing to do with conservative or liberal, it just has to do with standards of evidence.”
Joseph Neale, a professor in Georgetown’s biology department, said that medical research has suffered under the current administration.
The budget of the National Institutes of Health, a government agency responsible for health research, doubled over the course of the Clinton administration, but has remained static through most of Bush’s tenure.
“At least 85 percent of the grants that are written are not funded,” he said. “That certainly has scientists a bit irritated.”
Deneen suggested that Obama’s popularity among the academic elite reflects his detachment from average Americans.
“Obama kind of limped out of the primaries with exceedingly little support from the kind of working class people he’s going to need to win the election,” he said.
