According to a Yale Daily News survey of this year’s freshman students, more students belonging to the class of 2022 identify as LGBTQ than as conservative.
While nearly three-quarters of respondents said they are at least “somewhat liberal”, only 11% declared being conservative. The number of freshmen identifying as “questioning” and/or LGBTQ was 22%.
More students also appear to identify as LGBTQ than as Protestants (16%) or Catholics (15%). As a point of comparison, a 2018 Gallup poll estimates that just 4.5% of the general population falls somewhere along the LGBQT spectrum.
Carson Macik is part of the conservative minority at Yale, a freshman who originally hails from Texas. He reported that while he was initially most concerned about encountering intolerant liberal professors, it has actually been his fellow classmates who’ve made things difficult for him.
“My professors have been very welcoming of discussing certain topics that wouldn’t otherwise be discussed,” Macik said. “But the student body is different, there are some students who I’ve run into where our conversations have quickly devolved into them yelling at me, and I just wanted to escape.”
The survey results are based upon a total of 864 respondents, or just over half the number of present freshman students at the university.
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It is perhaps no wonder that conservative students are so hard to come by at the ivy league school. According to The College Fix, “a 2017 Daily News survey of Yale professors found that three-quarters identified as liberal while less than 10 percent identified as conservative. Over 90 percent of faculty members in the humanities identified as liberal while that number hovered in the mid-60s for STEM faculty.”
Cameron Koffman, president of the school’s William F. Buckley, Jr. Program, remarked that it is “not surprising” that such a large percentage of Yale students are liberal. He went on to add that it would be obvious “if one were to spend a few days at Yale, sit in on classes, and talk to people.”
“The best thing the University can do is make sure that conservatives on campus feel comfortable voicing their opinions and ensuring that students understand that the administration firmly supports free speech and intellectual diversity,” Koffman said.
However, a 2016 Yale Daily News survey indicated that 95% of Yale’s conservative students believed that their conservative views were unwelcome. Perhaps even more telling was the fact that 75% of Yale students overallagreed that the university “does not provide a welcoming environment for conservative students to share their opinions on political issues.”
Jamie Kirchick is a Yale College graduate presently hoping to become a candidate for the Yale Board of Trustees. He wrote to The College Fix in an email that, “Central to the American college experience must be not just exposure to people of different racial backgrounds but also different life experiences and viewpoints.”
“Yale is increasingly out of touch with America,” wrote Kirchick, “and America is increasingly out of touch with Yale.”
On a college campus that is roughly 75% liberal, and where LGBTQ students outnumber conservatives by two to one, that certainly does appear to be the case.
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