Under a progressive facade, most students 'concealed their actual true values and beliefs'

"Students are tailoring or modifying their views to sort of appease what they think professors are looking for," says Forest Romm, the researcher behind a study that found that 88% of consulted college students once faked more progressive stances to succeed academically and socially.

More "shocking," more "saddening" she found to discover that "that people feel the same amount of pressure even in their most intimate, most trusting relationships." Some 73% of the more than 1,400 respondents reported feeling distrustful in intimate conversations with friends, and nearly half said they routinely hide their beliefs in intimate relationships for fear of ideological reproach.

"It turns out that many of the faculty are expressing the same thing behind those doors," adds Kevin Waldman, co-author of the study. Waldman began surveying students at the University of Michigan in 2023 after noticing, he says, "a very big disconnect " born of students' performance in the classroom-for better grades-and the supposedly prevailing ideology on campus in the eyes of the media and the universities themselves.

"73% of the students we asked concealed their actual true values and beliefs even in their closest friendships."Forest Romm, psychFORM researcher.

Three years and thousands of respondents later-first only at Michigan, then at Northwestern-Romm and Waldman published their findings in an opinion piece in The Hill, titled "Moral Posturing Has Become a Threat to Higher Education." "On today’s college campuses, students are not maturing — they’re managing," they wrote. "Beneath a facade of progressive slogans and institutional virtue-signaling lies a quiet psychological crisis, driven by the demands of ideological conformity."

The reactions began to come in, with some pushback (from students, says Waldman, that have been "radicalized"). "A lot of people have reached out thanking us for what we're doing," he counters. These positive responses have been received especially from faculty, who sometimes find it "difficult" to express their support publicly. They show it, says Waldman, behind closed doors.

From the fear of losing friends to the lack of critical thinking

Both agree that the consequences are manifold. On the one hand, there are the personal repercussions: "They're very afraid of losing friendships over being cancelled, and this is something we think is alarming and should be brought to the attention of the people that are creating the system which is very one-sided politically and ideologically."

"In my opinion young people aren't really developing critical thinking skills because they're sort of being trained to internalize and then regurgitate progressive talking points," Romm adds. "They're not actually gaining experience sifting through evidence, weighing, competing viewpoints, figuring out what they think for themselves."

By not developing critical thinking, she says, they become "extremely susceptible" to radical ideologies. At the group level, too, this behavior "is atrophying social cohesion and making people really distrustful of one another and making people very paranoid and increasingly isolated."

Honing in on the problem: Forced opinions

Did they ask if the students also sometimes feigned conservative positions? They say no, because "in our experience we didn't see any conservative talking points at all in any class at any of the universities."

"We would ask that except for the fact that in our experience as students, we haven't met one single professor or student on campus who espouses anything remotely resembling a conservative view, so it kind of just didn't even seem relevant," Romm assures us. Not one? "Not one."

Waldman says the problem is that there is an ideology "that is forced upon in the classroom, which we would have the same issue with if it was a right-sided argument or ideology. ... The fact that it's any sort of forced is the problem, not which side on the political spectrum."

87% of respondents believe in a binary gender model

One of the consequences of imposed thinking, they assert, is the gap between what is thought and what is said to be thought. "The discrepancy between private and public beliefs is really, really shocking in general," the researcher asserts.

"I think another really surprising data point for me was that 87% of respondents believed privately in a binary model of gender," she says. "Because gender ideology discourse has become extremely rampant and axiomatic on campuses and in politics in the U.S. … and in all of our institutions, basically."

According to her findings, that 87% cited by the researcher also identify as heterosexual. Only 9% expressed some openness to the idea of gender fluidity. Seven percent accepted the idea of gender as a broad spectrum.

"You get the idea looking around the Democratic Party that everybody believes in gender fluidity and thinks that gender is a spectrum, but privately nine out of 10 of them are expressing the opposite," Romm says.