Conservatives Say Professors’ Politics Ruins College. Students Say It’s More Complicated.

AP Photo, Jacquelyn Martin

An analysis released on Monday underlined what is by now a familiar story: Hyperpartisan feelings have driven a wedge into what Americans think about higher education.

The shift has been driven almost entirely by Republicans, the Pew Research Center found: 59 percent of them now say colleges are harming the country, up from 37 percent in 2015.

A Pew survey last year found that most Americans say academe is on the wrong track, but they disagree why. One of the starkest divides comes down to one issue: professors purportedly bringing their social and political views into the classroom.

Among those who said colleges were heading in the wrong direction, 79 percent of Republicans said professors’ ideology was a major reason for the decline, compared with just 17 percent of Democrats.

What’s more, a curious age gap appeared: The concern was sharpest among older Republicans, the furthest removed from college. Virtually all Republicans 65 and older who said colleges were headed in the wrong direction — 96 percent — said professors’ political and social views were a major reason, compared with 58 percent of Republicans aged 18 to 34. (In general, Democrats took issue with the cost and quality of education, while Republicans focused on ideological concerns.)

But surveys conducted across the country and on college campuses show a different picture: Most students, including conservatives, feel that their colleges support free speech and open debate, and that they can speak freely in class. Hostile interactions are relatively rare.

Still, conservative students do feel more under fire than liberal ones, and there is wide variation in the ways in which all kinds of students feel comfortable to speak, when they do speak, and how they do it.

“It’s a tough nut to crack, and there needs to be more social-science research on it,” said Nico A. Perrino, director of communications at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a free-speech advocacy group. When it comes to specific relationships between instructors and students, and not just campus climate, there isn’t much data to parse what’s perception and what’s real, he said.

While many students and faculty members worry about the perception of political bias, other studies have found little evidence that it affects how professors grade or treat students.

“Even if it is a couple incidents, it’s serious and it can create a chilling effect,” Perrino said. “But we don’t know it’s only a couple incidents.”

FIRE, which surveyed 1,250 students in 2017, found that almost 90 percent were comfortable sharing ideas and opinions in class.

Still, most students said they’ve kept themselves from doing so at least once. When they do, it’s most often because they feared they would be mistaken. Generally, they were more worried about what their classmates might think, rather than their professors.

Those data points changed for the most conservative students. Very conservative students were 14 percentage points less likely than very liberal ones to say they were comfortable speaking up in class. They were also more likely to report self-censoring, and more likely to do so because of how their professor might respond.

“What we do know is that multiple studies have found that faculty overwhelmingly lean in one political direction,” Perrino said, which could explain why some conservative students say they feel less comfortable sharing their views in class. That’s not to say that conservative faculty would be any different in repressing or encouraging other views, he said. “It’s just that there are far fewer of them.”

Conservative Narrative

President Trump has led a conservative narrative that college campuses, and education more generally, are sites of liberal indoctrination and censorship.

“Political correctness — oh, what a terrible term — has transformed our institutions of higher education from ones that fostered spirited debate to a place of extreme censorship,” then-candidate Trump said at an event in October 2016, “where students are silenced for the smallest of things.”

That narrative is “a total caricature,” said Jonathan Z. Friedman, project director of campus free speech at PEN America. “Most professors, if they have political leanings, give some space to alternative views.”

To Friedman, the new Pew analysis shows a “evidence of a bigger problem,” in which sensational news stories have inflated anecdotes into a perceived crisis in higher education.

But that narrative nonetheless gathered steam with some officials in the University of Nebraska system in 2017, after a dispute between a liberal graduate student and a conservative undergraduate exploded into national view.

The university commissioned a climate survey, administered by Gallup across the Nebraska system’s four campuses and released last September, that found much the same as other studies: On the whole, students didn’t feel their views were repressed.

Twenty-eight percent of students in the survey, however, said they did not feel comfortable talking politics with their professors, and 35 percent said they worried they might offend others on campus by speaking freely — numbers that were much the same for professors themselves.

Meanwhile, students in the Nebraska survey said they believed that, compared with other groups on campus, a smaller proportion of conservatives, 75 percent, could freely express their views — about the same share as Muslims, and more than transgender and Indigenous people. Those most able to express themselves, according to students, were women, liberals, men, and white students. (Gallup noted that Nebraska students were somewhat more likely than students nationwide to say conservative students were free to speak their mind.)

More recently, researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill conducted their own survey after concerns about the perceived dominance of liberal views.

Timothy J. Ryan, a political-science professor, described the researchers’ findings at a faculty meeting on Monday, reported The Daily Tar Heel.

“Students broadly agree that instructors encourage participation from across the political spectrum,” Ryan said, according to the newspaper. But many also reported self-censoring at least once, often because of what professors and classmates might think of them. Right-leaning students said they felt the most difficulty in that regard.

Ryan declined an interview request because, he said, the report was unfinished.

Free-speech advocates like Friedman and Perrino say more-systematic campus-climate surveys would help colleges discuss the issue.

In the meantime, campus officials should keep a close eye on where and when students feel unwelcome, and keep classroom discussions lively.

“We should be honoring a lot of the good-faith efforts that are being made in that vein,” Friedman said.

Follow Steven Johnson on Twitter at @stetyjohn, or email him at steve.johnson@chronicle.com.