While not in any sense a fresh idea, investigations into a university faculty’s political contributions remains a typical and respected measure of political affiliation within the faculty.  In this case with a look at UCLA employee contributions, we have the advantage of a black-or-white issue that also helpfully boils down to mathematical values.  Better yet, it was an activity in which UCLA employees participated broadly.

From our previous look at the voter registration records within UCLA’s six big social science and humanities departments, we already know that an overwhelming proportion of the faculty is a registered Democrat Party voter.  And, from our in-depth look at over thirty faculty members through a wide range of departments (other than science and mathematics), we know that this Democrat and radical predominance manifests itself in unprofessional behavior, up to and including classroom indoctrination.  Yet, as we will see in this study, the one-sided nature of UCLA’s employees and faculty is a broader-based phenomenon.  No matter how widely or narrowly we select the criterion, we found a persistent predominance of contributions to Democratic Party candidates for the 2004 federal election cycle.

The methodology of the study itself is thankfully quite simple.  While the FEC makes its raw data available to anyone, several simple websites, among them, FundRace.org, OpenSecrets.com, and PoliticalMoneyLine.com, offer this information repackaged in searchable database form.  Based on its comprehensive data and ease of use, we chose OpenSecrets. 

Data aggregation itself was quite simple.  One of the FEC data points is “employer.”  Our search included the terms “UCLA,” “University of California Los Angeles,” “University of California at Los Angeles,” “UC Los Angeles,” and a number of other reasonable derivations (and misspellings) of the essential employer name.  The one essential limitation to the survey, of course, is that we would in fact miss a UCLA employee who omitted their employer, wrote a different name, or misspelled it beyond all reasonable measure.  There is nothing, however, to suggest that a particular group of donors would be statistically less likely to enter the employer information as requested by the FEC than another group.  If there was a failure to follow directions, it seems reasonable to assume that non-compliance was randomly distributed.

Once we finished collecting the raw data, we appended it with the following information as report by the online UCLA Directory, at or around July 10, 2005:

-         Category: Administration, Emeritus, No Record, Professor, Staff, or Student

-         Type: Undergraduate, Graduate, or Medical (If Professor)

Note: all Categories other than Professor were the final classification.  For Professor, a final classification of Department was added.  As before, the information came from the UCLA Directory.  In cases of multiple classification, the first classification was the only one appended.

            Assigning a party affiliation to the donation recipient was in most cases simply.  In the case of more obscure political action committees, a party classification was assigned based on which party received a majority of the PAC’s funds (this information provided by PoliticalMoneyLine.com).

            Much like the imbalance of faculty voter registration, our results in this survey yielded dollar-to-dollar ratios of anywhere from roughly 1.7 to 1 all the way up to 17 to 1.  In fact, Democrat to Republican proportions became more imbalanced as the focus came closer to the original group we studied in the voter registration survey.  This corroborates general impressions of the UCLA faculty as a radical bubble within a more generally liberal university.  However, while the political imbalance within undergraduate professors was most severe, and least troubling among the almost equally-generous medical faculty, no group within the survey ever approach a political parity which resembles that of the United States itself.