If the epitaph of higher education is ever written, it may include a reference to the rise of self-censorship that led directly to the death of freedom of thought.
Self-censorship is the act of intentionally withholding your own expression out of fear or deference to the perceived preferences of the majority. In the ideologically homogeneous atmosphere of American higher education, that means that conservatives feel it necessary to bite their lip, their tongue, and any other body part they can reach in order to survive academically and socially.
This is due almost entirely to the fact that the overwhelming majority of faculty at U.S. colleges and universities are not only liberal, but they're radical leftists who are using their positions as arbiters of the future for millions of students to indoctrinate them and train them to keep their mouths shut rather than express opposing views.
"The ratio of liberal professors to conservatives rose from two-to-one in 1995 to more than six-to-one in 2019," writes Kevin Wallsten in City Journal."Today, faculty are more likely to describe themselves as 'far left' or 'very liberal' than as being on the right," he adds.
How can a university fulfill its primary responsibility of expanding knowledge when professors are dictating how students should think? Any unorthodox views get squashed, and students who hold them get penalized.
"On today’s college campuses, students are not maturing — they’re managing. Beneath a facade of progressive slogans and institutional virtue-signaling lies a quiet psychological crisis, driven by the demands of ideological conformity," write clinical psychology researchers Kevin Waldman and Forest Romm. The researchers conducted more than 1,400 interviews with students at Northwestern University and the University of Michigan. They weren't studying politics. They were looking for the answer to a clinical question.
“What happens to identity formation when belief is replaced by adherence to orthodoxy?” They asked the students, "Have you ever pretended to hold more progressive views than you truly endorse to succeed socially or academically?" An astounding 88% said yes.
"These students were not cynical, but adaptive," the authors note. "In a campus environment where grades, leadership, and peer belonging often hinge on fluency in performative morality, young adults quickly learn to rehearse what is safe."
This evidence should be a wake-up call for those who think improving ideological diversity amounts to “DEI for conservatives.” If we want campuses where students test ideas openly, we cannot treat the faculty ideological climate as irrelevant. The evidence suggests that students certainly don’t feel that way.
This is also why prospective students should weigh faculty ideological pluralism heavily when choosing a college. In the 2025 City Journal College Rankings, we included a measure of faculty political diversity. Our rankings—which combined FIRE’s 2023 CFSR survey, campaign-contribution data, and participation in Heterodox Academy and the Academic Freedom Alliance—measured the political balance of the faculty.
Using that standard, Claremont McKenna College, Pepperdine University, the University of Tulsa, the University of Notre Dame, and Washington and Lee ranked highest. Macalester College, Vassar College, Grinnell College, Haverford College, Wesleyan University, and Amherst College ranked lowest. Conservative and moderate students are more likely to experience a healthier climate for expression, disagreement, and overall learning at our highly ranked schools than at our lower ranked schools.
Self-censorship is the inevitable outgrowth of authoritarian impulses of the left that are given free rein when the overwhelming percentage of the faculty and administration skew hard left.
The silencing of opposing viewpoints is turning (have turned?) colleges and universities into ideologically homogeneous, white-bread intellectual deserts. Donald Trump has the right idea in forcing schools that want federal money to ideologically diversify, but given the history of non-compliance with affirmative action bans that the Supreme Court mandated, it's going to be a long, hard road back to sanity.
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