Fish Don’t Know What Water Is and Faculty Don’t Know How Far Left They Are

WILLIAM A. JACOBSON JUL 14, 2026 9:30 PM

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.

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:

https://x.com/akazlev/status/2076733352837808337?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

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.

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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