UW-Madison Hasn’t Hired ‘Conservative Political Thought’ Professor Promised in 2023 Deal
Asked for comment, school parrots line it used a year ago
This article by University of Wisconsin-Madison senior Rebecca Draeger was originally published in The College Fix.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison has yet to hire a “conservative political thought” professor despite agreeing to do so several years ago in exchange for funding from the state legislature.
Asked about the status of the position, a campus official gave the exact same answer he provided last year to The College Fix.
“UW–Madison continues to actively work on the creation of an endowed chair in conservative political thought,” spokesman John Lucas told The Fix via email.
He said university officials “don’t have other updates to share at this time,” repeating what he told The Fix in February 2025.
However, Lucas did say “the university has hired multiple scholars with a broad range of perspectives, including those who self-identify as conservative.”
Lucas did not clarify the timeline for the university’s hiring process, define which steps the school has taken since the agreement was made, or list which organizations they reached out to identify candidates or secure funding.
As previously reported by The Fix, UW-Madison agreed to the deal as part of a broader $800 million funding agreement between the regents for the University of Wisconsin system and state legislative leaders that also included cuts to “diversity, equity, and inclusion” programming.
In exchange, the university system received money for pay raises, and UW-Madison specifically received $347 million for a new engineering building.
The deal, first passed in December 2023, requires the university to create an “endowed chair to focus on conservative political thought, classical economic theory, or classical liberalism.”
The 2023 agreement was, in part, a reaction to a survey that found most UW–Madison students were afraid to express their views on controversial topics in class. Students identifying as “conservative” and “very conservative” were especially likely to self-censor.
About 40 percent of survey respondents said they were worried their grades would suffer if they spoke up.
Later, a 2024 analysis by political science professor Alexander Tahk found that “over 99% of political dollars contributed by UW faculty went to Democrats and left-wing groups over the past decade.”
They found that the odds of a UW–Madison humanities or social science professor making a political donation to a Republican were 1 in 530.
Higher ed experts weigh in on potential bias at UW-Madison
Several higher education experts recently spoke on campus about “scholar-activist faculty hiring,” and gave comments afterward to The Fix about potential bias in the university’s hiring system.
The Center for Research on the Wisconsin Economy, the Tommy G. Thompson Center, and the Center for the Study of Liberal Democracy sponsored the March 4 event.
A former University of Wisconsin regent said hiring processes must be fixed to weed out bias.
University hiring practices “have to become less biased and homogeneous,” Free Speech for Campus President Tim Higgins told The Fix in person after the UW-Madison event hosted by several centers on campus. The former University of Wisconsin regent said the Madison campus tends to “hire woke people.”
In response to a question on how the Wisconsin Legislature should respond, Higgins said: “Our next governor really needs to look at holding the state agency to producing the kinds of changes that need to be done.”
“The university system has gone so far off track,” he said.
Higgins referenced a famous UW–Madison plaque that commits the university to the “fearless sifting and winnowing” of information and academic freedom in pursuit of the truth and said, “We need to get back to that.”
John Sailer, an investigative journalist and fellow with the Manhattan Institute, spoke at the event.
When asked by The Fix about how the university could increase viewpoint diversity in the Q&A portion of his talk, Sailer responded, “I’m not advocating for Make America Great Again statements as a replacement for diversity statements.”
He expressed that the issue is the personnel pipeline, beginning at the undergraduate level. Sailer commented that there aren’t many conservatives who enter into higher education in the first place.
“One thing that needs to happen is a lot of universities need to say ‘Hey, we are interested in and enthusiastic about hiring conservatives. That doesn’t mean we’re going to give you some leg up if you’re a lousy scholar, but also conservative … but we desire to be a place that welcomes conservatives, and we mean it.’”
Sailer further recommended the creation of scholarship opportunities that would interest conservatives, such as American history, constitutional studies, and the classics.
Sailer suggested that increasing viewpoint diversity will require long-term efforts to encourage more conservatives to pursue academic careers.