A new study reveals that roughly nine in ten students fake leftist views to please their professors or their peers.
Between 2023 and 2025, Northwestern University psychology researchers Forest Romm and Kevin Waldman interviewed roughly 1,500 undergraduates at Northwestern University and the University of Michigan, two of the most prestigious universities in the country. They asked themselves this overarching question: “What happens to identity formation when belief is replaced by adherence to orthodoxy?”
In order to test their question, they asked the students if they had ever pretended to hold more progressive views than they truly endorsed to succeed socially or academically.
“An astounding 88 percent said yes,” they wrote in The Hill. They continued:
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. More than 80 percent said they had submitted classwork that misrepresented their views in order to align with professors. Perhaps most telling: 77 percent said they disagreed with the idea that gender identity should override biological sex in such domains as sports, healthcare, or public data — but would never voice that disagreement aloud.
“We do not fault students for perpetuating a climate that is hostile to intellectual integrity,” the researchers opined. “We fault the faculty, administrators, and institutional leaders who built a system that rewards moral theater while punishing inquiry. In shielding students from discomfort, they have also shielded them from discovery. The result is a generation confident in self-righteousness, but uncertain in self.”
As far back as 2018, an article published by the National Association of Scholars found that roughly 40% of colleges across the United States did not have a single professor identifying as a Republican.
This bias toward the Left was illuminated by Mitchell Langbert, an associate professor of business at Brooklyn College, who wrote, “The political registration of full-time, Ph.D.-holding professors in top-tier liberal arts colleges is overwhelmingly Democratic. Indeed, faculty political affiliations at 39 percent of the colleges in my sample are Republican free—having zero Republicans.”
Langbert added that the remaining 61% are “absurdly skewed against Republican affiliation.” He noted that 78.2% of the academic departments that he sampled had either zero Republicans, or “so few as to make no difference.”
Between February 2017 and September 2017, Langbert sampled 8,688 tenure-track professors with PhDs from 51 of the 66 top-ranked liberal arts colleges in the U.S. News 2017 report. Of those 8,688 professors, 5,197 (59.8%) were registered as either Republican or Democrat. He wrote, “The mean Democratic-to-Republican ratio (D:R) across the sample is 10.4:1, but because of an anomaly in the definition of what constitutes a liberal arts college in the U.S. News survey, I include two military colleges, West Point and Annapolis. If these are excluded, the D:R ratio is a whopping 12.7:1.”
Langbert pointed out that in response to the widespread bias displayed at universities, over 1,000 professors and graduate students had started Heterodox Academy, an organization committed to increasing “viewpoint diversity” in higher education.
There were exceptions to the pervasive prejudice against conservatism at colleges and universities, but notably, they were primarily either religious or military colleges. Thomas Aquinas had 33 full-time faculty; all were Republican. West Point and Annapolis were more balanced than most universities; they had D:R ratios of 1.3:1 and 2.3:1. Claremont McKenna and Kenyon colleges also featured more viewpoint diversity.
