Conservative college students aren't extinct; they're just (mostly) silent

An Opp Now commentator isn't the only non-Leftist who found that suppressing their individual viewpoints in college was easier, far less scary, than making waves. In the Free Press, Bari Weiss analyzes data from an array of studies, showing that the majority of conservative students self-censor.

A recent national study from the Cato Institute found that 62% of Americans say they self-censor. The more conservative a group is, the more likely they are to hide their views: 52% of Democrats confess to self-censoring compared with 77% of Republicans. But still: 52% of Democrats.

Two studies published this week round out the picture.

One is Heterodox Academy’s annual Campus Expression Survey Report, which found that in 2020, 62% of college students the group surveyed “agreed the climate on their campus prevents students from saying things they believe.” In other words, the majority of college students say that they cannot tell the truth in institutions that exist for the purpose of pursuing the truth. Read the whole thing.

The second is a report from the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology conducted by Eric Kaufmann. Again, it’s worth reading the whole thing, but one item stands out: seven in ten conservative academics in non-STEM fields say they self-censor.

Do ten conservative American academics even exist? (Try naming ten outside of Hillsdale College. I’ll go: Harvey Mansfield, Niall Ferguson, Ruth Wisse, Robby George. Struggling to come up with a fifth without Google.) Then again, we wouldn’t know because they are closeted.

This article originally appeared in the Free Press. Read the whole thing here.

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