Over the past two and a half years, combatting perceived out-of-control leftism in higher education has become not only a salient conservative talking point but a legislative priority in some states. Since 2021, Republican state lawmakers have advanced bills that aim to restrict how “divisive concepts” and other ideas can be discussed on campus.
But according to a new national poll from The Chronicle, Americans from both major political parties tend to oppose substantial government influence over what’s taught in college classrooms. Only 37 percent of respondents say that state governments should have a great deal or a good amount of sway. For the federal government, that figure was 32 percent. Many more respondents support this level of influence from internal actors — professors, students, and college administrators — and also from business and industry leaders.
This bipartisan finding “could be interpreted as a knowing rejection by people across the ideological spectrum” of the type of law that Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican of Florida, and the state’s Republican-majority legislature, along with several other states, have passed, Amy J. Binder, an author of books about student political activism and higher ed, wrote in comments to a reporter about the results. (Many similar bills have not passed.)
Still, the results of the representative, random-sample survey of 1,025 adults, which was produced by Langer Research Associates, indicate that Republicans and Democrats are not in alignment on many other issues, with Democrats frequently seeing higher education more favorably than Republicans. A majority of Democrats — 56 percent — rated colleges as excellent or very good at educating students, compared with just over a third of Republicans. That divide holds true regarding what kind of influence people think four-year colleges have on students’ political views, and on students’ personal values and their thinking over all. Sixty-one percent of Democrats say that colleges influence students’ political views positively, for example, compared with 26 percent of Republicans.
The partisan split in people’s opinions of higher education is not new, said Neil Gross, a professor of sociology at Colby College, in Maine, who wrote the book Why Are Professors Liberal and Why Do Conservatives Care? But the degree of the split found in the survey is “remarkable,” Gross said, and presents “a very challenging situation for higher-education institutions to navigate, and for the future of the country.”
When it comes to the state’s role in determining college curriculum, Democrats and Republicans answered similarly. Minorities of survey respondents — 38 percent and 37 percent, respectively — said it should have a good amount or great deal of influence. Binder, a sociologist at The Johns Hopkins University, was “kind of surprised,” and unsure of why, there wasn’t much difference between the two parties. “It is kind of a remarkable finding, given our polarized context,” she said.
April C. Kelly, dean of the School of Public Service at Elizabethtown College, in Pennsylvania, who has researched politics in higher education, pointed out that America is experiencing an overall decline of confidence in its institutions, including in the government. So it makes sense, she said, that most poll respondents would not want greater oversight from either the state or the federal government when it comes to college curriculum. Trust in the government to fix things “is extremely low.”
Gross wondered if asking respondents about specific pieces of legislation would have yielded more support from Republicans and conservative-leaning independents. While it’s “potentially heartening” that relatively few Americans think the government should play a major role in determining curriculum, he said, “I’m not sure that it’s as strong an argument as one might think for the idea that these bills have no traction among the Republican base.”
Binder sees it as a positive sign for academic freedom that the share of people — 68 percent — who said college professors should have a great deal or a good amount of influence over the curriculum was the highest percentage — students were slightly behind, and every other answer was lower. But that figure, she noted, is just barely more than two-thirds of respondents and is presumably far lower than how college professors themselves, or professional scholarly associations, would answer.
Though Democrats and Republicans agreed on the state government’s role, Democrats were more likely to favor influence by professors and by students on the college curriculum, and Republicans to favor influence by business and industry leaders. Fewer conservatives than moderates or liberals said that the federal government should have considerable influence on what’s taught: at 26 percent compared with 36 and 34 percent.
That Democrats are more apt to trust professors to substantially affect college curricula makes sense, Binder wrote in comments to a reporter, given other survey research that shows Democrats have greater trust than Republicans do in institutional expertise and elite professional knowledge. Similarly, the finding that conservatives are warier of the federal government’s influence on curricula tracks with the relatively high level of mistrust Republicans report in the federal government, over all, Binder wrote. As of 2022, 9 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents said they trust the government to do what is right all or most of the time, compared with 29 percent of their Democrat counterparts, according to the Pew Research Center. (The center noted that trust in government has been “consistently higher among members of the party that controls the White House than among the opposition party.”)
Misgivings about the federal government appear in the survey response of J.P. Peters, a 57-year-old self-described conservative who agreed to be contacted by a reporter. Peters, who lives in southwestern Florida, said that he thinks the state government should have “some” influence on what’s taught in college but that the federal government should have “none.” (He also said that students and college administrators should have “a good amount,” whereas professors and business and industry leaders should have “some.”)
Peters, who did not attend college after high school, said in a phone interview that he thinks many colleges are pushing radical ideas of Marxism and socialism that seem to be “in direct conflict … to the values our Founding Fathers put out.” In an open-ended response to a question on the survey asking if he would advise a friend or a relative to pursue a bachelor’s degree, Peters answered that he wouldn’t, because higher education today is mostly “a cesspool of liberal garbage.”
Yet Peters said on the phone that he also thinks college is a great way to prepare people for the future, in part because it teaches life lessons about responsibility. He also said he’s no fan of censorship. Asked about the Stop WOKE Act, a 2022 law championed by DeSantis that, in part, aims to restrict certain discussions related to race and racism on college campuses, Peters tried to sort through his competing values. He said he understands what the governor was trying to accomplish with the law but that it presents “a really slippery slope.”
“Should that stuff be taught at colleges? I don’t know. I have my doubts,” Peters said. “On the other hand, should it be banned so it’s never even accessible? No, I don’t believe that’s right either, even though I don’t agree with the teaching.” A solution might be to keep objectionable courses as electives, he said. (The portion of the law that applies to Florida’s state universities remains under injunction.)
Majorities of survey respondents think four-year colleges positively influence students’ ways of thinking over all and their personal values — 65 percent and 58 percent, respectively. Far fewer — 40 percent — answered the same when asked about students’ political views. And 33 percent said they see a negative influence on students’ politics.
There are big gaps between Democrats and liberals’ and Republicans and conservatives’ answers to these questions. The vast majority — 87 percent — of Democrats say colleges positively influence students’ thinking. That figure is far lower, but still a majority, at 52 percent, for Republicans. Seventy-nine percent of Democrats say colleges positively influence students’ personal values, compared with 43 percent of Republicans. And for political views, that figure is 61 percent for Democrats and 26 percent of Republicans.
Higher education has long been criticized by the right as being too liberal, and other public-opinion polls on higher education have revealed significant partisan gaps. So it’s not shocking that conservatives have a much-sourer perspective on how students change while enrolled. “Political indoctrination,” “wokeism,” and “cancel culture” are familiar symbols, memes, and talking points put forward by Republican politicians and pundits, Binder wrote to a reporter. To believe that colleges negatively influence students’ politics, values, and thinking over all “is now a hallmark of what it means to identify as, and think like, a conservative Republican,” she wrote.
What intrigued Binder was the disparity among Democrats and liberals in how they view colleges’ influence on political views, compared with influence on students’ thinking and personal values. Though large majorities of Democrats and liberals said that college positively influences the latter two outcomes, that figure dips to under two-thirds, or 61 percent, for the former. In other words, more than a third of Democrats and liberals think the influence on students’ politics is negative or none. To Binder, that’s a finding worth puzzling over. One possibility is that the mainstream media, in addition to conservative media, also reports on campus speech wars, student protests, and de-platforming efforts. As an example, Binder mentioned a wave-making 2022 New York Times opinion essay in which a senior at the University of Virginia wrote that her peers continuously held back from saying what they thought, in the classroom and in conversation with each other.
Perhaps Democrats and liberals “increasingly share the concern that colleges and universities have become too politically polarizing and/or politically homogeneous,” Binder wrote, though she said it’s difficult to know without an earlier survey for comparison. Another possibility Binder speculated in a follow-up email, is that Democrats and liberals are anxious about college students moving further to the left than they are.
Matthew Woessner, a scholar of politics in academe and associate provost for research and assessment at the United States Army War College, floated yet another possibility. People generally think that the “very purpose” of college is to improve students’ intellectual abilities, he said. “When you ask about something not related to that, and it could be, ‘Does it improve their political views? Does it improve their car-washing ability? Does it improve their ability to sing a song?’ the answer to those would inherently be lower,” he said, “because it simply is not in sync with what we think of as the very purpose of higher education.” (Woessner noted that his views are his own and do not represent those of his institution or the Department of Defense.)
How people think colleges affect students’ political views is one question. What those effects actually are is another. “It’s just not the case that young people are coming to college and becoming completely indoctrinated into a different way of thinking than they came with,” said Kelly, of Elizabethtown College. “There’s some minor movement … But the fear of that has always been greater than the reality.”
Woessner, who wrote The Still Divided Academy: How Competing Visions of Power, Politics, and Diversity Complicate the Mission of Higher Education with Kelly and another author, said there’s evidence that college-going moves students, on the whole, to the right on some economic issues but to the left on social issues. “In both cases, this is not a dramatic shift,” Woessner said, and it shows that “if there is movement, the movement may not always be in one direction.”
Woessner has also studied if faculty members affect students’ political views. Though students drift “somewhat leftward,” he said, that drift is not consistent with whether their professor was a Republican or Democrat. While Woessner said some professors certainly try to influence their students’ politics, it seems that by the time someone is 18 years old, that person is “not as susceptible to persuasion simply because they’ve lived long enough that they’ve already started to form views of their own.”
A new book publishing later this year — A Liberal Education: The Social and Political Impact of the Modern University — employs a natural experiment in Romania and data from around the world to argue that a college education has all sorts of effects that the book’s authors define as classically liberal. Among other things, it promotes citizenship, enhances political participation, and favors “a more inclusive perspective toward outgroups,” according to the book’s page proofs, which were provided to The Chronicle by one of the authors. Though a college education usually “encourages support for leftist parties and movements,” it “does not enhance support for taxation, redistribution, or the welfare state, and may, in fact, stimulate opposition to these policies.”
The Chronicle in the coming months will share more results from its survey. In the meantime, college leaders and faculty members can perhaps be encouraged by the finding that many Americans do not want considerable government influence on the college curriculum, and also reflect on the sharp political divisions that continue to plague the public’s views of college-going.
“It’s very hard for large public-serving institutions to thrive if a large share of the population doesn’t trust them, doesn’t support what they’re doing, and thinks that they are working in the interest of the other side,” Gross said. “It’s a question of legitimacy.”
Perhaps there was a time, years ago, when “the train of higher education was just sort of rolling forward,” he said, “when it seemed like we were going to be fully a knowledge society and people who were cranky about what higher education was up to could be brushed aside.”
If there ever was such a period, it has passed.
Findings are from a representative, random-sample national survey of 1,025 adults produced for The Chronicle by Langer Research Associates. Field work was conducted in July 2023 in English and Spanish via the probability-based SSRS Opinion Panel, in which participants are randomly recruited via address-based sampling to take surveys online or by telephone. Results have an overall margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.3 percentage points; error margins are larger for subgroups.
