Study: College students pretend to be Leftist to succeed
A recent survey found that most college students pretend to hold Leftist views to appease their professors.
Researchers at Northwestern University conducted 1,452 interviews with students at Northwestern and the University of Michigan between 2023 and 2025. Eighty-eight percent said they pretended to hold more Leftist views than they truly endorse to succeed socially or academically.
“Seventy-eight percent of students told us they self-censor on their beliefs surrounding gender identity; 72 percent on politics; 68 percent on family values,” the researchers wrote in The Hill last week. “More than 80 percent said they had submitted classwork that misrepresented their views in order to align with professors. For many, this has become second nature — an instinct for academic and professional self-preservation.”
When it came to gender ideology, 87% of students identified as heterosexual and said they believe there are only two genders. Seventy-seven percent said biological sex, not “gender identity,” should be recognized in areas like sports, healthcare, or data collection. But they would never voice these opinions in public.
Just 7% of respondents—most of them gender activists—said they believe in more than two genders.
But students are not just self-censoring in the classroom. Nearly half said they do so in intimate relationships, and 73% said there is “mistrust in conversations about these values with close friends.”
Free speech in American universities
The totalitarian culture that has taken root in America’s universities has caused alarm even among refugees from dictatorships like North Korea. American colleges have been consistently scoring low in academic freedom, with the country’s Ivy Leagues ranking among the worst places for those seeking free discourse.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) published its annual free speech index which grades 250 American colleges on their commitment to free speech. The University of Virginia topped the list last year, followed by Michigan Technological University, Florida State University, Eastern Kentucky University, and Georgia Tech. Harvard came last with a score of 0.0, followed by Columbia and New York University. All three were found to have “abysmal” free speech climates.
Students at Harvard have described being forced to introduce themselves using pronouns and being ostracized for stating their opinions. Some students reported abstaining from posting to social media under their real names for fear of reprisal from other students.
"I often avoid posting controversial takes on social media tied to my name because I am afraid that they might be misconstrued by my classmates or admin,” said one Harvard student.
Another said: “I felt uncomfortable speaking about the immorality of abortion, because it is the campus-wide view that killing an innocent human being is valid. I was ostracized in my class for saying so.”
“Despite having friends and a strong social support network on campus, I felt very alone,” said another student. “I am a moderate Republican, and even opinions I possess that are moderate or even left leaning on the national scale seem relatively unaccepted among the student body. It is an incredibly difficult and isolating political landscape to navigate for someone who is not left wing.”
Even universities that ranked higher than Harvard are hostile to free speech. Nearly 70% of students at the University of Southern California, for example, said they are “somewhat” or “very” uncomfortable disagreeing with a professor on controversial political topics, or voicing their opinion during a class discussion.
In 2023, FIRE found that 59% of MIT students are afraid their reputations will be destroyed because someone misunderstands something they may have said or done.
"One of my graduate professors gave me a bad grade on my paper because my take on the prompt was against his beliefs, and he took it personally and attempted to critique my abilities rather than the content of the paper,” said a student.
In August, Harvard Environmental Law Professor Jody Freeman was forced to resign after it became known that she sat on the board of oil giant ConocoPhillips.
In 2022, Harvard canceled a lecture by feminist Dr. Devin Buckley after the university learned about her belief that men should not be allowed in women’s sports and prisons if they claim to be women. The school also canceled a course on policing techniques, which it called “tools of oppression” and “supporting violence against marginalized communities.” The professor who was slated to teach the course, Kit Parker, told Fox News in September that service members at Harvard are afraid to admit they served in the military.
After the October 7th massacre of Israelis, over 30 student organizations at Harvard signed a letter blaming Israel. Over 100 faculty members also signed a letter defending the phrase “From the river to the sea,” a chant calling for the genocide of Israelis.
