Some Good News About Free Speech from Our Undergraduates

As free-speech controversies continue to flare up around our nation’s colleges and universities — even virtually — surveys continue to show that viewpoint diversity is under attack, that students are regularly censoring themselves, and that they are fearful of expressing their real views. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education — FIRE — has just released the largest study of student attitudes to date, and the data are sobering.

Sixty percent of students reported, for instance, that they could not express an opinion because of how students, a professor, or their administration would respond, and just 15 percent of students reported feeling very comfortable publicly disagreeing with a professor about a controversial topic. While findings such as these rightly generate considerable attention, I want to also note that there is a considerable amount of good news in the data that deserves mention and suggests that there is a sizable constituency on campuses that rejects the move to silence dissent.

As such, the FIRE data ask a bit about the ideological breakdown of almost 20,000 currently enrolled students from 55 colleges around the nation. While there are many more schools and students, this is by far the most comprehensive sample collected to date and captures most of the elite schools — including Harvard, Stanford, and UC Berkeley, which are notoriously liberal in orientation.

The FIRE data find that over a quarter of college students identify as conservative, and this is actually greater than the figure for Gen Z as a whole. Across the 55 schools, 26 percent of the surveyed students are conservative to some degree, and 50 percent of students are liberal in some capacity. In contrast, if we look at Gen Z adults — Americans age 18 to 24 — new data from the Survey Center on American Life show that the breakdown is 42 percent liberal and 19 percent conservative — showing that there are actually more conservatives on campuses than in the population more generally. And, for comparison, 28 percent of Americans in general presently identify as conservative — so conservative students are a minority on campuses, but it’s not necessarily as bad as many think.

Further, the FIRE data initially show some dispiriting numbers with respect to students’ willingness to shut down speech. Sixty-one percent of students believe, for example, that shouting down a speaker is an acceptable form of action, and another 37 percent believe that it is acceptable to block an entrance and try to prevent others from entering the room to hear a speaker. Seventeen percent maintain that violence is acceptable to stop a speech or event on campus.

However, given the ideological breakdown of the students, the aggregate numbers can be misleading. Take blocking an entrance: Almost half of all liberal students (47 percent) believe that blocking an entrance to a speaker is acceptable, the number drops to under a third (30 percent) when moderates are considered, and under a quarter (23 percent) when conservatives are asked. The other forms of disrupting speech show the same general directional trend, and most disturbing is the question about violence. Almost a quarter of liberal students (23 percent) think that violence can be justified to silence speech, compared with just 15 percent of moderates and 12 percent of conservatives.

Additionally, the data show an appreciable difference between how students are willing to behave with their professors and among themselves. The survey asked about one’s comfort level publicly disagreeing with a professor about a controversial topic and discussing a controversial political topic with one’s peers. Unsurprisingly, given power dynamics and the liberal ideological imbalance of most professors, 55 percent of students claim to be uncomfortable disagreeing with their professors. But when their peers are considered, the number drops considerably to just a third (33 percent). And there is almost parity ideologically when it comes to ideology and disagreeing with a professor — so it may not be about politics at all. But when it involves students, conservative and moderate students are less comfortable (61 percent and 64 percent, respectively) compared with liberal students (72 percent) when it comes to discussing a controversial political topic. Nonetheless, a majority of undergraduates across the board are open to discourse with their peers, and this is a sign of optimism as our students are not being silenced.

These positive findings about the state of free speech and open discourse should be considered in context. Free speech and the ability to question, engage honestly over ideas, and offer opinions that run against the common wisdom on campus is under threat from administrators and faculty who are too focused on issues of social justice, and by small numbers of very active, media-savvy, and politically engaged and connected undergraduates. However, the new data from FIRE make it clear that the battle for viewpoint diversity is not lost; there are still significant numbers of conservative and moderate students on campus who are not extreme in terms of silencing speech, and they are willing to engage with their peers and have tough talks. We must support these students along with the promotion of speech and ideas, and we must not abandon our campuses to liberal extremists. Too many great ideas concerning how we make society truly great have emerged from these special and even sacred places.