According to The Fix, the survey asked students: “Have you ever withheld your political views in class for fear that your grades would suffer?”
Seventy-three percent of students who considered themselves to have “strong Republican” views said yes, as well as 71 percent with “weak Republican” views and 70 percent of Republican-leaning independents.
The huge percentage of conservative students responding in this way is disheartening — but it’s not shocking. In my years working for National Review, I’ve covered numerous examples of professors and faculty on college campuses who have chosen to make their hatred for conservatives known. For example, earlier this year, administrators at Middlebury College apologized to students who were upset that a conservative speaker had been invited to campus and pledged to do more to prevent conservative speakers in the future. In 2017, a Clemson University professor declared in a Facebook post that “all Republicans” are “racist” and “scum.” In 2015, a journalism instructor at Mississippi State University compared a conservative student group to the KKK. Back in 2014, a University of Michigan department chairwoman published an article titled “It’s Okay To Hate Republicans.”
First of all, let me be clear about the fact that I completely, totally support the First Amendment — and I absolutely understand that colleges’ professors and other employees do, and should, have the right to express their views. The thing is, though, they should really take more care to keep their comments to be more along the lines of policy discussions and avoid demonizing entire groups of people based solely on the fact that they’re on the opposite side of the political spectrum. Truly, I believe that our country would be a better place if everyone tried to maintain this kind of civility — but educators should especially want to adhere to it, for the sake of the students that they are tasked with teaching.
Now, it’s obvious how the Republican students would be helped by this kind of approach. If such huge numbers of them are really too uncomfortable to share their honest views in the classroom for fear of getting lower grades because of it, then they are not getting the kind of educational experience that they deserve. No student should feel uncomfortable in the classroom simply because he or she is a Republican. After all, college should be a place where people with all different kinds of views can feel free to express them — and have them challenged — so that they can learn and grow, and Republicans are missing out on that sort of valuable expression.
Which brings me to my second point: The status quo doesn’t just hurt Republican students, it hurts liberal students as well. Think about it: If Republicans are missing out on the valuable learning experience of having their views challenged because they do not feel that they can express them honestly, then liberal students are missing out on the same experience because they don’t have anyone challenging theirs. It’s true: Many college campuses are liberal echo-chambers, where liberal students and liberal professors are constantly reassuring each other of the correctness of the liberal position, without anyone ever exposing them to other points of view. This sort of environment will inevitably result in the liberal students who graduate from these colleges never having had the experience of defending their views or considering any others — which leaves them ill-prepared to engage politically in a real world that very much does include people who feel differently. In order to allow students to have the most educational college experience possible, these institutions should be encouraging its faculty and professors to demonstrate respect for people with different ideas.
A recent survey of 1,000 Republican and Republican-leaning college students has found that 73 percent of them have hidden their political views in the classroom — because they’re worried that exposing them could negatively impact their grades.
Something need to be done about American higher education. Is seems overpriced and all they do is indoctrinate our kids.
The business world is no different. Policies state no political discussion in the office but from what I have experienced, Democrats can discuss and opine without fear of being judged negatively or passed over for promotions, projects, etc.
However, should one express opinions that align with a Republican view/policy regardless of political affiliation or lack of, the treatment is much different.
Politics has destroyed this country.
I pity the younger generations and the dog eat dog world they will have to live in.
I had a professor give me a C on one paper where I wrote in favor of a flat tax. The only C that I received in the course of a four year degree. It became apparent very quickly that he had a liberal perspective. And I learned to write what the professors wanted to hear instead of what I believed to survive and succeed in that environment. Graduated with a 4.0 and glad to be out of that crap. Trump 2020!
Left Wing Academia has spent generations turning Freedom into Freedumb. Misspellings are just fine if they benefit The Left’s cause.
The Dumbing-Down of America has, ironically, been in the works for generations..literally generations…inside of American academia.
It’s a sad truth that supposedly the “Land of the FREE” has become prisoners to the leftists takeovers in our media and universities.
Bible prophecy warned about this but I though with the end of WW2 it had ended, however its getting worse, no “constitutional conservative” is safe to speak their minds.
Ronald Reagan spoke the ultimate truth: “If we lose our freedoms here in America there is no where else to go”!!!
This is a sad testament to the lefts’ attempts to destroy anyone that disagrees with them.
This kind of classroom experience has produced spoiled liberals whose response to a challenge of their beliefs is to behave like the proverbial brat/bully. They’ve been and remain a protected class (by PC, hate-speech laws with liberal interpretations, and $$ support) who believe it is their right to tell others how to think, live, and behave. What they don’t realize is they themselves have been trained as puppets for the $$ supporters.
Of course, a student smart enough to value Republican principles is also smart enough to conceal them from a liberal professor. Do those biased professors really think they are persuading intelligent college students to support policies that have already failed repeatedly when implemented in the past???
Exactly correct. Most of the young, college-aged people that I have spoken with over the years, are smart enough to understand that in order to get a passing grade in courses taught by ultra-liberal professors (which today is unfortunately most of professors employed in our colleges and universities), requires that they “play the game” (pretend to blindly agree with every piece of leftist nonsense the professor spews) to get a passing grade. None of them like having to do this, which they all view as cheapening the whole higher learning experience that so many of them are paying top dollar for, but they all realize the alternative is being failed in the course and the college administration always backing the leftist professor. Many of these young people view college as a sort of endurance test, that they have to just get through, in order to get the degree that will hopefully lead to a decent paying job and career.
The percentage of young, college-aged people that have survived the K-12 progressive public education indoctrination experience to reach college with both their critical thinking skills intact and an appreciation for what is described as “Republican values”, is about 10 to 12 percent of the overall Millennial or Gen Z population as whole from what I’ve seen over the years. These are the young people we, in our senior age group, should all be reaching out to both support and teach them further what they have never been taught in our corrupted public education system. The future of our country lies in the hands of all of us passing down the knowledge and hopefully wisdom to younger generations, if this nation is to survive as a Constitutionally-based representative republic and not become another failed, socialist democracy.
Unfortunately, making our conservative views known in the classroom would have as much chance of changing the inane, idiotic views of the liberals as their comments have on affecting us. It’s a losing position.
All conservatives should withhold any grants or funding for left leaning colleges and universities. They appear to not likes our views and therefore do not deserve our hard earned dollars!