Welcome Back, Students! Please Feel Free to Disagree

As college and university students return to campus this fall, they will once again face a disturbing reality: an academic and social climate which discourages and even punishes intellectual curiosity while pressuring students to pledge allegiance to a far-left partisan agenda. Increasingly, students are forced to learn not how to formulate arguments and respectfully disagree, but rather how to hide their views and conform to liberal groupthink.

New research from Northwestern University psychology researchers Forest Romm and Kevin Waldman indicates that, despite some progress toward creating an ideologically inclusive higher education culture in recent years, conservatives still face a daunting regime of velvet-gloved authoritarianism on campus. While the Trump administration’s efforts on this front are helpful and long overdue, there is still a lot of ground left to be reclaimed.

This might be somewhat surprising to those who went to college more than two decades ago. They more often associate their university years with freedom, questioning, and inquiry—whether they went to a religious or a secular institution. The age-old task of higher education, the cultivation of the mind, was to read, to study, to debate the big questions. Not just the who, what, when, and where of science, history, and literature, but also the why, the wherefore, and the what it all means.  

Today, however, too many students experience college not as a cultivation of intellect but as an inculcation of obedient conformity to progressive nostrums. At the very least, they learn that they must be silent when their own views contradict the approved views in liberal circles – which are predominantly the views of the professors assigning their grades.

Romm and Waldman reported on their research in The Hill last week in an essay titled, “Performative virtue-signaling has become a threat to higher ed.” Between 2023 and 2025, the pair conducted 1,452 confidential interviews with students at Northwestern and the University of Michigan. Their goal was to study “what happens to identity formation when belief is replaced by adherence to orthodoxy?”

The main question asked of the students was, “Have you ever pretended to hold more progressive views than you truly endorse to succeed socially or academically?”

What they found is that most students “were not cynical but adaptive” to the situation in which they found themselves. 88 percent (a statistic the authors label “astounding”) said they had in fact pretended to be more left-wing than they actually were.

Given that there is no way 88 percent of Northwestern and Michigan students are conservative on all issues, this means a good percentage of even the liberal students are likely pretending to be “More Progressive Than Thou” for perceived perks in class, in clubs, and in the job and internship market.

Romm and Waldman further found that strong majorities of students self-censored on political topics (72 percent) and family values (68 percent). “More than 80 percent said they had submitted classwork that misrepresented their views in order to align with professors,” a practice the authors say has become “second nature” for most students.

In one way, Romm and Waldman’s research is cheering. Even if students are not all conservative, a much higher percentage of them than might be expected still embrace sanity on the hot-button issues of “gender.” 87 percent of students believe that there are only two genders (though one weeps for the other 13 percent). 77 percent also believe that biology and not gender identity should be the deciding factor on issues like participation in sports, public data collection, and healthcare.

It’s not surprising, then, that the moral value on which students are most unclear is honesty. 38 percent say they are “morally confused” about the requirement of honesty when it would mean “exclusion” in so many areas. Within the context of this study, this finding implies that more than a third of students feel they would be excluded for stating that there are only two genders – despite the fact that 87 percent of their peers agree with them. At the very least, we can safely say that students who are actually in the majority on certain positions are afraid to voice their beliefs because they fear that they are in the minority.

It’s hard not to feel sympathy for the students in such a Sovietized atmosphere. “Seventy-three percent of students reported mistrust in conversations about these values with close friends,” Romm and Waldman report. “Nearly half said they routinely conceal beliefs in intimate relationships for fear of ideological fallout.”

Romm and Waldman correctly identify this as a problem that was created in the name of “inclusion” by “faculty, administrators, and institutional leaders who built a system that rewards moral theater while punishing inquiry.”

So, what are those young people who choose college to do? There are a number of steps to take. First, students need to realize that they have options. There are plenty of schools out there, not all of which are going to have the same stultifying atmosphere present on big, “prestigious” campuses such as Northwestern, Michigan, and the Ivies.

If a smaller, less prestigious school doesn’t work out, students should be looking out for the bigger schools with a better reputation for intellectual openness. To adapt Horace Greeley’s famous line, “Go south, young man!”

Zachary Marschall, an adjunct professor at the University of Kentucky, wrote in The New York Post on Friday about how southern universities have been the best at pushing back DEI, antisemitism, and general craziness—leading to a doubling of the number of northeastern high school students leaving the region that was once the touchstone for higher education.

If students do end up in a university that is suffocating intellectually, they need to be aware of the possibility of fighting back. Drexel University’s Stanley Ridgley has written a couple of books on how to fight back, the first of which I reviewed here. He advises recording and reporting any instances of indoctrination or pressure exerted by campus authorities—and using the power of publicity and money, two weapons that universities fear.

Students should also be busy finding out which professors at their universities are really interested in learning and not browbeating their students. In many cases, such a list will also find you the professors who are more traditionally religious and conservative.

They will often prescribe for their class some version of the Chatham House Rules, whereby students and teachers may refer to ideas expressed in a classroom discussion but not identify who said them. They do that so that students have the freedom to do the questioning, the debating, and the trying out of arguments and ideas that are essential to true intellectual and moral development.

Many of them will say to the students what I do to my students: I don’t mind if you disagree with me either in class discussion or in written work. I will argue with you in class for sure—and I will encourage your fellow students to do so. I will also grade you on whether you have accurately represented what you criticize and whether your arguments are solid or not. But I will not grade you on whether you take my theological, political, or social views. It’s not that I’m a relativist or unsure of what I believe. It’s that I want you to wrestle with and come to truth—not just parrot my or anybody else’s views for approval.

Welcome back, students! Please feel free to disagree with me and anyone else in the room.

David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. A past Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, he is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. Follow him on X (Twitter) @davidpdeavel.