U. of Nebraska Wondered Whether Conservative Students Were Being Silenced. Here’s What It Found Out.

When a liberal graduate student at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln last fall berated a conservative undergraduate to the point of tears, people in the state began to wonder if conservative students were living in fear on its public-university campuses. Some local politicians painted a grim picture of young Nebraskans’ being indoctrinated by liberal professors, or cowed into silence for fear of being browbeaten or given a failing grade.

Fearing a political backlash, Hank M. Bounds, president of the University of Nebraska system, commissioned Gallup to study the political climate on all four of its campuses.

Gallup’s report, released on Thursday, suggests that most people at the universities, conservatives included, do not feel intimidated or constrained in what they say on campus. However, a substantial minority do worry whether some ideas are welcome, and some people do bite their tongues instead of speaking their minds.

The groups whose speech is most welcome at the University of Nebraska, according to students in the survey, are women and liberals, but students said the university was pretty much just as welcoming to men, whites, Asians, Hispanics, and international students. Conservatives were a bit lower in the hierarchy, with 75 percent of students saying conservatives feel comfortable openly expressing their views on campus — about the same as Muslims.

University of Nebraska students are “somewhat more likely than students nationally to say political conservatives are able to express their views on campus,” according to Gallup.

Twenty-eight percent of students said they did not feel comfortable expressing their political views in conversations with their professors, and 31 percent said they feel uncomfortable sharing unpopular ideas in class. In general, 35 percent said they feared offending people on campus by speaking their minds.

Some professors shared that anxiety; 25 percent of faculty members said they were uncomfortable encouraging discussions of unpopular ideas, and 36 percent said they worried about causing offense by speaking freely.

Discomfort aside, most people in the survey said the First Amendment is held in high esteem at the University of Nebraska. Only about 10 percent of students, faculty, staff, and alumni said university leaders do not value free speech. About two-thirds of those surveyed said that students, faculty, and staff members do indeed respect the free-speech rights of others.

When Gallup asked students, faculty and staff members, and alumni whether some kinds of offensive or biased speech should be curtailed, most said no. Interestingly, it was the Nebraska alumni who were most open to barring certain kinds of offensive speech.

At the same time, there was strong support among students, faculty, and staff members for designating “free-speech zones” — a concept, scorned by free-speech activists, that involves circumscribing specific areas on a campus where people may, and may not, stage protests and recruit for political causes.

But students also indicated that much of the political speech among people at the University of Nebraska does not take the form of confrontations on campus plazas or even in classrooms. Those conversations happen online, on Facebook and Twitter and other social-media platforms that the university neither owns nor controls. Those public squares, like college campuses, are going through a free-speech reckoning of their own.

Steve Kolowich writes about ordinary people in extraordinary times, and extraordinary people in ordinary times. Follow him on Twitter @stevekolowich, or write to him at steve.kolowich@chronicle.com.