College conformists: 88% of students say they fake progressive views to get along

Eighty-eight percent of college students say they fake progressive views to get along, according to interviews with undergraduates at Michigan and Northwestern students, write researchers Forest Romm and Kevin Waldman on The Hill.

They asked: "Have you ever pretended to hold more progressive views than you truly endorse to succeed socially or academically?" Nearly everyone said "yes."

As a result, write the two psychologists, college students aren't growing up and forming their own values. They just faking it.

"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," Romm and Waldman write. More than 80 percent had submitted work that aligned with their professor's views, but not their own.

Most see gender as binary. Only 7 percent says it's a spectrum. Seventy-seven 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."

College leaders have "built a system that rewards moral theater while punishing inquiry," they write.

Forcing young people to pledge allegiance to transgenderism is creating a huge backlash, I believe. People don't like it when they're forced to lie. They resent it.

It starts young. Horrors Greeley tweets about seeing a book on the kids' book table at the local library that seems to confuse rather than clarify. It was a "pride month" display, because . . . Do we think chickens identify as people?

I've been reading Sandra Boynton's brilliant Are You a Cow? to my toddler granddaughter. The answer is "no." Are you a dog? "No." Are you a duck? This is a tough one, because she's been in the "duckling" group in day care, only just promoted to "turtle." Nonetheless, I insisted that the answer is "no." She is a person. Unlike a chicken, who is not a person.

I found a book on pronouns in the toddler section of my local library. It started with a child asking how we know what to call people, and another page saying to ask them. Too short, apparently. The next page had "she" with pictures of various people, one of whom was bearded. "He" had pictures of men and a woman. "They" had people with dyed hair. And the "us" page had lots of people with every invented pronoun you could imagine. This is a board book for kids too young to be trusted with a paper page. It is not helpful.

I learned about pronouns and other parts of speech in fifth grade. I remember our discussion of whether "dream" was a verb which we'd been told had to be an "action word." Pronouns were easy back then.