88% of college students pretend to be progressive to fit in
- Joanne Jacobs
- Jan 24
- 2 min read
College students are self-censoring to please their left-wing professors and classmates, writes Kevin Wallsten, a Long Beach State political science professor, in City Journal. At Northwestern and the University of Michigan, 88 percent of students said they'd “pretended to hold more progressive views” so that they could “succeed socially or academically.”
"The ratio of liberal professors to conservatives rose from two-to-one in 1995 to more than six-to-one in 2019," Wallsten writes. Students have noticed.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s 2023 Campus Free Speech Rankings (CFSR) survey also found students self-censoring if they felt their views were out of step with the majority. "Very liberal" students were much less likely to worry about expressing themselves than students with moderate and conservative views.
"If we want campuses where students test ideas openly, we cannot treat the faculty ideological climate as irrelevant," argues Wallsten. The evidence suggests that students certainly don’t feel that way.
According to the 2025 City Journal College Rankings, the colleges with the most politically diverse faculty are: Claremont McKenna College, Pepperdine University, the University of Tulsa, the University of Notre Dame, and Washington and Lee. The least diverse are: Macalester College, Vassar College, Grinnell College, Haverford College, Wesleyan University, and Amherst College.
Twenty-nine percent of Harvard professors are "very liberal" and 1 percent are "very conservative," according to The Crimson. Overall, 63 percent of professors said they were very or somewhat liberal, 27 percent identified as "moderate" and 10 percent were very or somewhat conservative.
Twenty-three percent of faculty surveyed said Harvard should make an effort to hire conservative professors, while 34 percent disagreed and the rest were neutral.
Yale professors' political donations in 2025 went exclusively to Democrats (97.6 percent) or independents, reports the Yale Daily News. Not a single professor donated to a Republican.
Most of the colleges listed as being the least diverse are tiny compared to the average state flagship university.
The most diverse universities in the U.S. are the large public second tier commuter schools where most of the students have much less interest in left/right political issues.