Roger Pielke writes about the negative impact of higher education focused on partisan goals.

The lack of diversity among professors is problematic for both education and research, ostensibly the overriding purposes of universities. A more insidious and fundamental issue is that some extremely partisan faculty (and administrators) have commandeered university departments, centers, institutes — even entire campuses —and repurposed them for political advocacy. …

… Plummeting confidence in higher education among Americans … reflects a widespread belief that universities have become institutionally politicized in ways that are contrary to the values and politics of most citizens. As you’ll read below, such beliefs are backed by evidence. Universities are supposed to serve common interests, not the narrow political agendas of the faculty. 

Data on the contemporary politics of professors shows that university faculty as a group hold views very different than most Americans. For instance, a 2020 survey by Joshua Koss, a political scientist at Michigan State University, of tenure-track faculty across 67 universities that are members of the American Association of Universities revealed a striking partisan imbalance across the main social science disciplines. …

… A similar survey was published in 2020 by the National Association of Scholars of more than 12,000 tenure-track faculty in the top-ranked universities in each state, based on publicly available information. Results are presented as a ratio of Democrats to Republicans among faculty who were registered voters and who had donated to political candidates. The results show that among those registered to vote by party ID, professors are almost all Democrats. That ratio is even stronger among those who donate to campaigns, as shown in the figure below. Consider that chemistry, a discipline far from partisan politics, has a ratio of 113 donors to Democrats for every one donor to Republicans.

A 2017 analysis by Samuel Abrams of Sarah Lawrence College showed that the political orientation of faculty members had moved to the left over several decades, with a notable increase starting about 2004. In contrast, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans among students and citizens changed little over the same period.