Accusatory Postcards Mailed to Professors en Mass

Two anti-liberal postcards were mailed to the personal residences of Loyola professors from an anonymous sender

Numerous professors have been sent postcards to their personal addresses accusing them and the university of holding liberal biases. The postcards — first sent in September and again in October  — describe Loyola as an ivory tower which has constructed a liberal bubble for its students and professors to exist in.

“It’s time to defund this scam,” the postcard reads. 

It’s unknown who sent these letters and how they selected recipients or gained access to their personal addresses.

Six of the 29 professors in the History Department received postcards, according to the Department of History Chair Brad Hunt. 

Associate Professor of European history and postcard recipient Suzanne Kaufman stressed the seriousness of the postcards being sent to private residences and from an anonymous sender. 

“In that sense, I think the cards were sent to unsettle and intimidate,” Kaufman said. “These are not cards that are inviting conversation.”

“Professor Oppressor” is written in bold at the top of each postcard above the words “seeing through the liberal bias.” The first postcard accused professors of confining themselves to a liberal bubble and suggested the only solution is to come in contact with different view points. 

“Your ivory tower is a bubble,” one postcard reads. “It renders you clueless. Viewpoint diversity would be the cure, but we know you’ll never give up your monopoly. That’s why you’ll be defunded. We don’t want to pay for your bias.”

The back of the card reads, “as Democrats become more educated, their misperception of what Republicans believe increases.” The side also features a bar graph which suggests highly educated democrats are less likely to correctly estimate the views of Republicans than Democrats with less education.

The data used for this was sourced from a study by More In Common titled “The Perception  Gap: How False Impressions are Pulling Americans Apart.” The postcards didn’t include data from the study, suggesting Republicans’ perception gap wasn’t correlated to education level, but the study actually reports that the perception gap among educated Republicans was higher than Democrats at all education levels except for at the post-grad level. 

“The cards need to be seen as a deceptive rhetorical effort to frame higher education as biased and to present professors as biased,” Kaufman said.

She said universities are places where students and faculty can discuss issues and disagreements, and the sender of the postcards, which lack return addresses, isn’t interested in discussion. 

“Clearly there’s a bit of intimidation going on,” Hunt said. “This is not a dialogue.”

The other postcard had a similar message.

“Faculty there almost never have to defend their ideas in front of colleagues who disagree with them on the big issues,” the second letter reads. “The libs like that, in fact, because it’s easier to reach a consensus about their version of the truth inside their federally-funded monopoly.”

The backside of the second postcard has a Loyola specific diagram displaying what percent of political donations made by Loyola faculty went to left and right wing groups. The postcard claims 1.5% of contributors gave to right-wing groups while 98.5% gave to left-wing groups in 2024. 

Loyola faculty contributed $1,324.18 to right-wing groups and $171,022.92 to left-wing groups in 2024, according to the Federal Election Commission. The contributions to left-wing groups include $41,020.25 to Harris For President and $71,063.57 to Act Blue. 

The Office for Equity & Compliance (OEC) was notified about the postcards, but OEC director Tim Love said in an email to The Phoenix that the letters weren’t discriminatory and fell outside of the office’s purview. He said Campus Safety had been notified.

“The University is treating the situation with the utmost seriousness; any efforts to intimidate or harass any member of the Loyola community will not be tolerated,” a Loyola Spokesperson Christian Anderson wrote in an email to The Phoenix.

Campus Safety referred the matter to law enforcement agencies, according to Anderson. 

“We think that these are based entirely on donations made to candidates in the Democratic party,” Hunt said.

All of the professors who spoke with The Phoenix after receiving a letter made contributions to liberal candidates or PACs, according to FEC records. 

“It’s a fallacy to make a leap that says ‘I support someone in the Democratic party, therefore I’m a liberal oppressor,” Hunt said. “That’s just illogical, that makes no sense.” 

Hunt said it would be “a waste of time” to respond to the postcards, which he said were poorly argued and illogical.