Yes, clearly the non-profit sector is far less influential than the for-profit one, in spite of donating vastly more money. Education as a whole donated $6.3M to Obama, the for-profit sector donated $145k to John Kline and $107k to Romney [1].

Clearly the for-profit sector is vastly more influential.

This influence is proven by the fact that the politicians are making special rules for the non-profit sector and explicitly exempting the for-profits from them.

Oh wait, my mistake - I live in the real world, where $6.3M > $145k, and politicians target for-profits for special rules and throw more money at non-profits.

[1] Unfortunately OpenSecrets doesn't explicitly break the non-profit sector out of education as a whole.

Please look up the lobbying organizations for Head Start and some of the higher education institutions which also have lobbying organizations for individual federal programs that benefit the public universities. My giving was rather less than organic.

> Organic giving from individuals who work in the educational sector doesn't come hand in hand with organized, well financed political pressure

As long as you don't count union lobbying as "organic giving from individuals".

I'm at Stanford, and if you think that Stanford doesn't use every bit of its institutional influence to promote liberal political power, you have rocks in your head. This university, like its peers, works tirelessly with media such as the NY Times to promote their candidates. They aren't allowed to donate institutional money directly to a candidate, which politicians need to buy media ads to get their message out. Instead, Stanford only employs those who support the institutional liberal political agenda (calling this policy "celebrating diversity"), then those people go to their partners in the media as "Stanford professor so-and-so" with "news" about what they've just "discovered" that has implications for how you should vote: "Stanford professor finds that [conservatives are mentally ill, people who vote for conservatives are bad, Republican claims are wrong, Obama is awesome, businesses need more regulation by liberals with elite degrees and no business experience...."]

Conservatives have to donate money to buy ads. Stanford gets to post its political campaign messages directly as "news."

Meanwhile back on campus, every effort is made to indoctrinate thousands of students and send them out as an army of "individuals" to do heroic things in the service of those who people at Stanford are expected to support. I had to break off my work a few weeks ago and go to another building when the second floor was taken over by a law professor who was leading a pep rally for Obamacare called a "discussion of the issues."

The notion that universities such as these just have some left-leaning individuals acting privately while the institution itself remains resolutely neutral politically "seems rather disingenuous to me."

That's the only way to make the argument, though, which seems to speak to the validity in and of itself.