Methodology
How the monitored population is defined, how a subject is confirmed, and what the map shows.
The denominator
The monitored population is 500,000 tenure-line faculty and senior administrators at accredited four-year institutions. This figure is real, and it is the only real figure on this site.
The AAUP put full-time tenured and tenure-track appointments at about 32 percent of all US faculty in fall 2023. The NCES counted 842,400 full-time faculty at degree-granting postsecondary institutions in fall 2022, within a total faculty of roughly 1.5 million. Thirty-two percent of that total is approximately half a million people, which is the number this organization monitors.
- AAUP, Data Snapshot: Tenure and Contingency in US Higher Education, Fall 2023
- NCES, Digest of Education Statistics, Table 315.20
The numerator
The numerator is 4. It is invented, as are the four people it counts.
Confirmation
A subject is confirmed on evidence of an avowed conservative disposition. Evidence is graded on four levels, and the grade is printed on every file.
| Grade | Meaning | Files |
|---|---|---|
| DIRECT | The subject has said a thing, in public, that they meant. | 1 |
| SINGLE UTTERANCE | One statement on file. Undisputed. Also the only one. | 1 |
| CIRCUMSTANTIAL | Assembled from conduct. No statement on file. | 2 |
| INFERENTIAL | Assembled from objects. No conduct and no statement. | 1 |
Exclusions
A preference for price allocation, an objection to a fee, a stated wish to be left alone, and the ownership of a vehicle are each, on their own, insufficient. All four are laissez-faire dispositions and this organization does not count them.
Three of four current confirmations rest on a preference for price allocation, an objection to a fee, and a bumper sticker. The published criteria exclude all three. Applied consistently, the criteria yield a monitored population of one. The criteria are under review.
The map
The map plots 171 accredited four-year institutions at their true coordinates, and 1,251 faculty records clustered around them. The institutions and their coordinates are real. Every faculty record is generated: the names are drawn from a pool of constructed surnames that were chosen for being uncommon, the department and research line are drawn from fixed lists, and the classification — liberal, progressive, socialist — is assigned by a hash. It is arbitrary by construction.
No record on this map corresponds to a real person, and any resemblance between a generated name and a real academic is coincidence rather than reference. The four red dots are the subjects, and they are invented too.
Each generated record carries the line BASIS NOT RECORDED. This is accurate. The organization has never recorded why any of the 500,000 were classified as they were. It has recorded, at length, why four were.
Cost
The organization’s annual budget is $6,800,000 against a monitored population of 4, or $1.7 million per subject. Staff number 31, or 7.8 per subject. No field office was sited in relation to a subject.
Corrections
In March 2022 a subject wrote to this organization to note that “conservation status” is a designation applied by the IUCN to populations and not to individuals, and that Conservative Watch has been using it wrongly since 2017. The correction was proposed, opposed, and not made.