Truman Scholarship Reviewers are Overwhelmingly Democrats
“Almost all of the panelists were themselves Truman scholars, potentially creating a self-perpetuating cycle”
This scholarship program has been plagued by left-wing partisanship for years.
The College Fix reports:
75% of Truman scholarship reviewers are Democrats, analysis finds
Democrats dominate the Truman Scholarship’s 17 regional review panels that make the final decision each year on who is awarded a lucrative, taxpayer-funded scholarship to attend graduate school.
In total, 60 are Democrats — roughly 75 percent of the reviewers — while 10 are Republicans, and 10 could not be categorized based on their public footprint, newly conducted research by The College Fix determined.
The Truman Scholarship program is currently facing serious oversight efforts from House Republicans, who want to fire its current leadership under a new bill introduced in mid-March by New York Rep. Elise Stefanik.
The bill would also require “that no more than half of each board of interviewers who select Truman winners be from the same political party, to prevent interview panels from being dominated by one political party.”
The proposed legislation was prompted in part by a decade’s worth of reporting by The College Fix about the scarcity of conservative students awarded the $30,000 scholarship. Of the 653 winners reviewed from 2015 to 2025, only 29 conservatives have been identified compared to 397 liberals.
One reason for the severe imbalance in winners may be that very few of the regional review panel members are themselves Republicans.
The panelists, appointed by executive secretary and former Clinton staffer Terry Babcock-Lumish, are mostly Democrats. Babcock-Lumish also sits on every panel.
The Fix reviewed public bios, LinkedIn profiles, public comments, and federal donation records to determine the political identity of the reviewers.
The regional review panel determines who is ultimately awarded the scholarships after applicants make it through a round of reviews by the “Finalist Selection Committee.”
Almost all of the panelists were themselves Truman scholars, potentially creating a self-perpetuating cycle: Democratic students are favored for the scholarship, and then down the road, they are chosen to serve as panelists.
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Comments
“that no more than half of each board of interviewers who select Truman winners be from the same political party”
So they’ve just mandated an even number of panelists, and all the deadlock that entails… until some conservative gives up and crosses over, because you know liberals always vote in absolute hive unanimity,
Unless they intend to engage third parties, in which case you know the “independent” members will be Green — heaven forbid they even be as sympathetic to conservative thought as Libertarians.
Don’t tell me Stefanik can’t do the math. She just wants to signal that she’s Done Something,
It’s a bit like being shocked that the KKK only awards scholarships to whites.
You can’t politically tweak it. Just cancel it as an intrinsically biased scam.