Two Cheers and One Worry about Campus Free Speech

A recent survey highlights the state of free speech and viewpoint diversity on college campuses.

The Sheila and Robert Challey Institute for Global Innovation and Growth at North Dakota State University recently released the results of a survey titled “2023 American College Student Freedom, Progress and Flourishing Survey.” In the survey, they looked at three indicators of student attitudes toward liberal values: free speech and viewpoint diversity, attitudes toward human progress, the future, national pride, and capitalism and socialism. 

The results were somewhat of a mixed bag, but in my opinion, they were more favorable toward liberalism than I would have expected. On the latter two questions—human progress and capitalism vs. socialism—students were generally pessimistic about the future and capitalism, but that’s nothing new coming from college students. What stood out to me were the students’ opinions on speech and viewpoint diversity. They were generally friendly toward the values of open discourse. The results indicate that they feel comfortable expressing their opinions in class (there’s nuance to this, which I’ll discuss later) and feel that faculty foster a classroom conducive to viewpoint diversity. Nevertheless, an overwhelming majority of students, left, right, and center, favor reporting faculty for making “offensive” statements in class. 

What could account for this? Why do students claim to feel comfortable expressing themselves in class while at the same time feeling the desire to report any faculty who they find offensive? Much like anything else, it comes down to incentives. The growing administrative and bureaucratic apparatuses at today’s universities incentivize students to expect their professors to provide safe spaces. And if the students feel “unsafe,” whatever that might mean, they have recourse in the many administrative offices created to ensure they don’t confront uncomfortable ideas in the classroom. 

The Survey

According to the description, “The American College Student Freedom, Progress, and Flourishing Survey is an annual survey” that gauges students’ perceptions about “viewpoint diversity and campus freedom; human progress and beliefs about the future” as well as their attitudes toward capitalism and socialism. All the data collected is meant to shed light on how college influences their views on these issues. 

Instead of doing a deep dive into the survey here, I’ll provide a general overview of the results for context. Later, I’ll discuss what might be behind some of the more surprising or depressing results in the survey and what it might mean about the state of free speech and academic freedom in higher education.

Counter to the prevailing culture war narrative, most students—left, right, and independent—feel comfortable expressing their opinions on a controversial or sensitive topic in class. There are differences within the three groups surveyed, with liberal students feeling far more comfortable expressing themselves than conservative or independent students. It is also worth noting that almost half of the students who feel comfortable expressing themselves in class feel that way because they believe other students and professors agree. Nevertheless, the results suggest that faculty generally do a good job of fostering a classroom environment where viewpoint diversity is tolerated if not encouraged.

Indeed, the survey captures student perceptions of how well faculty manage viewpoint diversity in their classrooms. An overwhelming majority—84 percent!—of students “say that professors create a classroom climate where people with diverse views would feel comfortable sharing their opinions.” Again, the percentages differ when you look at the specific political leanings of the students. Still, even then, most students agree that professors generally do a good job of fostering viewpoint diversity in their classrooms. This is born out later in the survey, showing that 83 percent of students “believe professors encourage students to explore a wide variety of viewpoints and perspectives.” Such encouraging results run against the prevailing culture war narratives about intolerant professors shutting down classroom debate.

Yet despite these rays of hope, there is still reason to worry. The survey finds that a worrying “74 percent of the students surveyed are in favor of reporting professors (or instructors) to the university if they say something that students find offensive.” Students who identified as liberal on the survey are by far the group most comfortable with reporting professors for statements they find offensive. But fret not, there’s something for everyone here. Most conservative students were also fine with reporting professors for offensive statements depending on the topic. Some statements offered concerned issues like affirmative action, sex and gender, vaccines, and the second amendment. Check out page 19 of the survey for the full list. For now, see if you can guess which ones riled up which students. 

Students are also in the crosshairs of their classmates. A majority of liberals and independents surveyed said that fellow students should be reported for making offensive statements. A significant minority of conservatives agreed. 

So what’s with the deviation? Why do some responses suggest students value open discourse while others show them arguing that their peers and professors should be reported for offensive statements? The two positions are in direct contradiction with each other. Nurturing a culture of openness is impossible if everyone fears being reported. We know logically and empirically that this only sows distrust and the general breakdown of social cohesion. We also know that incentives matter--so what incentivizes students to think it’s appropriate to report offensive speech, and to whom are they reporting?

Depriving students of the tools to resolve conflicts

Over the past several decades, administrative hiring at universities has increased significantly. So much so that administrators now outnumber faculty on most college campuses. The emergence of the university managerial class has ushered in a cultural shift in campus life. Justification for much of the growth in administration is student services -- things like mental health services, campus life, entertainment, and much more.  

Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff discussed this in their 2018 book The Coddling of the American Mind. In the book, they investigate the causes of the growing illiberalism they observed on college campuses going back to 2010-2011. The overarching concept under which their compelling explanations lie is the idea of “The Bureaucracy of Safetyism.” In fact, an entire chapter is dedicated to the idea in their book. Their final summary point for the chapter illuminates their argument well:

More generally, efforts to protect students by creating bureaucratic means of resolving problems and conflicts can have the unintended consequence of fostering moral dependence, which may reduce students’ ability to resolve conflicts independently both during and after college.

In response to several factors, including federal regulations, skittish university legal departments, viewing students as  “customers,” and more, universities continue to grow an administrative apparatus to, well, administer all of these things. In turn, these offices are incentivized to make work for themselves by addressing their particular problems—or inventing new ones—for as long as possible. After all, if they didn’t, they wouldn’t exist.

The important idea of moral dependency that Haidt and Lukianoff point out says that “people come to rely on external authorities to resolve their problems, and, over time, ‘their willingness or ability to use other forms of conflict management may atrophy.’” This seems plausible to explain why students are so eager to report offensive speech instead of engaging with it or tolerating it. If there is an authority they can run to, then they will. And if that administrator has a vested interest in involving themselves in the problem as they see it, it is unlikely that the student will be guided toward learning healthy conflict resolution skills. This is not to say that students shouldn’t expect to be protected from genuinely harmful events on campus or have somewhere to go in the event they need to report something; they should. But manipulating the language of safety to the degree that speech is considered harmful does more to victimize the student than anything else. They should be given a good pair of boots, not the expectation that someone will pave the jungle.

Once it becomes too entrenched in university culture, adjusting away from the Bureaucracy of Safetyism can be difficult. Through what is known as “concept creep,” administrative offices can grow their mandate to mean what they need it to mean to expand their influence. Concept creep is the idea that “Many concepts are ‘creeping’—they are being ‘defined down’ so that they are applied promiscuously to milder and less objectionable events.” So ideas like bullying, harassment, harm, and hate speech have slowly been reduced to milder and milder events until it is difficult to distinguish what is actually harmful and what is just having a bad opinion or being socially clumsy. I don’t point this out to argue that people in favor of this are snowflakes. Instead, I’m highlighting it because movements to reduce the bar for defining harm actually harm real victims. It cheapens the language around actual, violent acts. It drains resources away from helping actual victims and to individuals who just don’t have the tools to manage interpersonal conflict.

Moral dependency and concept creep contribute to the overall victimization of students on campus. Instead of being given tools to navigate real-world scenarios in a low-stakes environment, they continue the preschool practice of running to the teacher any time they bump up against another human being. Despite potentially genuine attempts by administrators to prevent harm, they are doing tremendously actual harm to the people they purport to protect.

Mostly good results—with a catch

So while students report that they feel mostly comfortable expressing themselves in class, it does come with the caveat that they feel that way because they expect that others already agree with them. And while they claim that professors provide a safe and inclusive environment where they can express themselves, they are only comfortable doing so if they believe they are in the majority. Still, these are promising results. Universities should be places where students feel free to explore different ideas—good or bad. 

The troubling—and somewhat inconsistent from the rest of the report--results indicating that students think their peers and professors should be reported for offensive speech is the logical outcome of a university culture that fosters a sense of victimhood over a sense of dignity and strips students of the tools needed to deal with nonviolent, interpersonal conflicts. Administrative offices dedicated to addressing campus harms must continuously justify their existence. As a result, the definition of “harm” is slowly reduced to include many of the normal clumsy behaviors we all engage in. 

Nevertheless, the influence of these offices on campus culture results in a space where students feel more comfortable reporting subjective harms instead of developing the character traits they will need to navigate social interactions for the rest of their lives. Indeed, the true harm in this whole arrangement is the empowerment of administrators who should know better and the victimization of the students they claim to protect.