Fish Don’t Know What Water Is and Faculty Don’t Know How Far Left They Are
“Your median professor sits so far left that AOC, Sanders, and Warren would count as moderates in any faculty lounge.”
Saw a very interesting study referencing how far left faculty are. The Study was done for The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (the FIRE).
This tweet is what called my attention to it:
Your median professor sits so far left that AOC, Sanders, and Warren would count as moderates in any faculty lounge.
Faculty from 55 elite universities form one towering blue spike of ideology far out on the left, density exploding past 6, with virtually nothing on the conservative side.
This was built through decades of selective hiring, social enforcement, and the systematic purge of dissent.
And because they credential the people who run media, law, government, and tech, the monoculture leaks into every elite institution downstream.
Your median professor sits so far left that AOC, Sanders, and Warren would count as moderates in any faculty lounge.
Faculty from 55 elite universities form one towering blue spike of ideology far out on the left, density exploding past 6, with virtually nothing on the… pic.twitter.com/bHS2fgGYS0
— Rothmus 🏴 (@Rothmus) July 11, 2026
Here are the key bullet points from the FIRE’s summary of the study:
- A new analysis of faculty who donate to political candidates finds that the average donor is only slightly less left on the political spectrum than Bernie Sanders.
- The study finds politically active faculty are largely confined to a narrow band of liberal politics, with virtually no conservative counterbalance.
- The new findings align with past FIRE research in which faculty reported that conservatives are much less welcome within their departments.
And the key chart:
But that’s not why I’m writing this post. You know — because you’ve heard me speak and write on the topic — that higher education has become a political monoculture. That various studies back up my “lived experience” is gratifying, but not news.
And it’s only getting worse:
Continuing this graph, which is already several years old, showing that the situation is getting progressively more extreme. We are literally watching the implosion of an entire civilization in real time. pic.twitter.com/5GLjtoJoMK
— M. Alan Kazlev (@akazlev) July 13, 2026
I’m writing this because I saw someone reference a saying I had not heard before, something along the lines of fish not knowing what water is because it’s all they know. I can’t find the tweet referencing that, but I did find the source, This is Water, David Foster Wallace’s 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College:
Greetings parents and congratulations to Kenyon’s graduating class of 2005. There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?” …
The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.
The fish story struck a chord with me. I really don’t think leftist/liberal faculty, and administrators, and students, realize how far left they are, because it’s all they know on a university campus. There is no internal opposition left, and those that still exist are aging out (like me).
Can the universities reform themselves? Um, no.
That's it, I'm up to 17 million.
For the 17 millionth time, academia (particularly in the humanities and social sciences) is completely broken, it has been taken over by radicals more extreme than you can imagine, it cannot be reformed internally. https://t.co/j1xnXMQ6GE pic.twitter.com/w1zYWaLWb2
— William A. Jacobson (@wajacobson) April 24, 2026
The issue at this point is how society can protect itself from the extremes of the universities.
[Featured Image: Cornell Faculty ‘Take-a-Knee’ Protest, 2017]
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Comments
Burn it all down except for STEM and consider burning down STEM as well as it is likely heavily contaminated by immigrants with non-American views, The question is once it’s burned down how do you build it back up. As to that I’m not at all sure, We are probably well beyond the event horizon at this point so building it back might not be possible,
STEM is being infected as well. An alternative education system needs to be developed to compete with the legacy Big Education model.
* MEGASIGH *
One. More. Time.
Close the schools. Fire the staffs. Raze the buildings. Plow the land. Plant corn.
I’ve always liked that pic of you, Professor. It’s historical and worth a million words!
Fish don’t know what water is and faculty don’t know how far left they are.
At least Dorothy knew she wasn’t in Kansas anymore.
Curious. Just the other day I saw a staffer on another site claiming that the new Hard Left is actually the old Centrist-Right, presumably that the Overton Window has gone so far right that fascism and Nazism are now Left-wing. Obviously that’s garbage!
Of course the irony is that National Socialism has always had a Leftist basis, and even at its worst was more Hard-Centrist than Hard-Right.
It would appear the Left are now so divorced from reality that they can no longer recognise how Far Left they’ve dragged the Overton Window, insisting that the middle is where they and their Far Left echo chamber lies, and anything outside it is either dangerous evil Far Right nonsense, or communism which is good but just a little more extreme than they are.
For our hearing-impaired viewers…
And this…
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/4408b61baee76364dd3cf9d66de6623a74c14e63769673fd3da03b21e7402d40.png?w=800&h=462
It’s the other way around. Much of the Republican party is where the Democrat moderates and conservatives used to be in the mid-60s,
For further reference, the “Overton Window” is bullshit and always has been and any reference to it is stupidity.
“I really don’t think leftist/liberal faculty, and administrators, and students, realize how far left they are, because it’s all they know on a university campus.”
Also, because the overwhelming majority of the people they know and associate with (easily rounded up, if necessary, to 100%) think just like them, they perceive conservatives to be a tiny fraction of the population for lack of any sense of scale. Not having any such persons in their own orbits, and not realizing they’ve created a bubble that excludes them, they naturally believe they exist in a political environment that is representative of America.
Stop federal grants to universities and colleges. No money, get it from their graduates – all of it.
Also stop federal student loans, period. Most won’t be paid off thus we, the taxpayers will pay for it. NO MORE. Stop the gravy trains.
You know the activist judges won’t go for that.
I recently read this book:
Poisoned Ivies
Congresswoman Elise Stefanik reveals how America’s elite universities, once proud symbols of academic excellence, have become centers of far-left indoctrination, division, and moral rot in this riveting, behind-the-scenes inside account. Drawing on her experience as the highest-ranking woman in Congress and the chief questioner of Ivy League university presidents in the hearing heard around the world, Congresswoman Elise Stefanik exposes the failures of American higher education and the reckoning facing universities.
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Poisoned-Ivies/Elise-Stefanik/9781668087534
Studies show that most “teachers”come from the bottom third of their high school class. To expect anything other than idiocy from them is folly.
But oddly enough, nearly all of them graduate with honors, many summa cum laude!! I had the misfortune of deciding that secondary education would be a nice post retirement parachute to supplement my meager Social Security. That said, the classes were run by many Marxists; passing was a simple act of regurgitating their screed. Most or my class, say about 98%, were “early education,” presumably because it is easy to teach little kids (light years easier than middle school and high school). Nobody wanted to teach the hard sciences, because it is, well, hard. Getting in early give them ample opportunity to mold those young skulls full of mush (thank you, Rush!) into good little apparatchiks, We are seeing the results of that today, with the mindless, or at least uniformed, acceptance of socialism as anything but an abject failure.
“Faculty from 55 elite universities form one towering blue spike of ideology far out on the left, density exploding past 6, with virtually nothing on the…”
I think “big blue whoopie cushion or Marxism and wokeism” would be more apropos.
During my graduation, the college of education walked ahead of the college of engineering. All I heard repetitions was 4.0, 4.0,…ad nauseum. When they started announcing the engineering graduates, there was one 3.7, several 3.6’s, and about a dozen 3.5’s. My thought was then, as it is now: we are screwed. That was 35 years ago.
Then they are all fair targets no innocent ones will be lost
“Young skulls full of mush” is a nod to law professor Kingsfield in “The PaperChase” movie withJohn Houseman as Kingsfield and Timothy Bottoms as the first-year law student. Limbaugh took it without attribution.
Not exactly a conservative act.
Dr Jill. Need I say more?
Recently read like 3/4 of the Iranian people have only known rule under the Islamists. They don’t really know anything else. Don’t expect a revolution from the masses.
Culture Marxists Seminaries are the same way, I think the last 50 years has entrenched them and they are not going anywhere.
That’s where a trip to the U.S. would come in handy, as it did with the throngs of EU residents for the soccer World Cup.
Reality has a certain way of apply blunt force to one’s expectations, especially when formed by gov’t and media propaganda/shaping. That was a common theme I saw in many videos: “we were lied to about America.”
Maybe a field trip to North Korea and Cuba would be instructive for our students….or a summer camp.
103. The ideal, as we think of it, is unshakeable. You can never get outside it; you must always turn back. There is no outside; outside you cannot breathe.–Where does this idea come from? It is like a pair of glasses on our nose through which we see whatever we look at. It never occurs to us to take them off.
– Wittgenstein
Your interpretation is too kind. They know exactly how left they are, and relish it. I have had countless conversations with good, smart, conservative tradesmen working at my home. They all have stories of working in academics’ homes. Almost without fail, these learned nitwits bait the poor worker into agreeing to some horrible description of Trump or supporting some insane
new social fad. Once they sense resistance, they pontificate, excoriate and sometimes fire the poor sod on the spot. They are all extreme narcissists hooked on their self-image.
And it has been my observation that very few of them have ever had real jobs outside of academia, matriculating upward, shaped and molded along the way, but the many, many Marxists in their “education.”
Few, if any, have any real time experience with getting jobs, working under budgets, suffering under sphincter bosses. I was fortunately (although I did not think so at the time) one of the ones that had to work through college, and gained all the valuable insights and experience that the academic snowflakes in their gov’t sponsored ivory towers will never have or appreciate.
Nothing that a big recession in Academia wouldn’t solve. They need a big shakeup that only comes from widespread bankruptcies.
I’d propose a small cultural/social change for higher ED to parallel the recent borrowing limits imposed by Trump Admin; no eligibility for student loan/Federal financial aid nor use of tax advantaged funds for higher ED until the age of 21 …with the exception of Community College and VoTech/Trade Schools.
Yes that will ‘advantage’ the wealthy who can pay cash. The larger point is that it gets most HS graduates away from academia for a couple/three years. They might get a full time job. Might join the Military. Go to local community college living at home with a part-time job. Whatever they do it will take them away from the ideological echo chamber of leftist wokiesta academics. They’ll hit 21 and go to Univ with more real world experience, more grounded by interaction with ordinary folks and their issues. That first paycheck and experience of taxation is eye opening for some. They’ll hopefully be less willing to absorb the lefty indoctrination when they eventually arrive at Univ.
This is easy. Salmon are conservative, but only the wild caught ones. Tuna are all liberal. Flounders are trans.
In this world, conservatives have to be unapologetic about values and standards and you don’t need to explain yourself to anyone.
If my distrust of other people and other races has them “judging me”. I give zero figs. Tolerance, open mindedness, “kindness”—- all that is out the window.
If you want into my world, my circle, you live up to my standards and my values. My world is perfect by excluding everyone who does not. I do not seek the approval of those who not. I do not care about the scorn of those who do not. I do not seek to rescue those who do not (much like Christ, you need to knock on the door and ask for it to be given).
After all the emphasis on diversity, you would think that they would be more diverse – at least 50 percent should be on the right. The line should be almost level – no spikes anywhere.
A big academic recession would shake them up really good. Their revenue stream depends on people needing their product for career advancement. I got a feeling the Academic market has already passed its peak.
I’d be curious to know how many of these academics had a real-world where they had to produce something of value other than just their words and opinion.
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