What Are the Consequences of Left-Wing Campus Culture?

H aving developed a mild-to-moderate case of misanthropy from my own political exploits in college, I was admittedly disinclined to take the Twittersphere’s word for it that a “new study shows” that the higher-education system does not push students to the left. When one of the study’s architects, Professor Logan Strother of Purdue University, even went so far as to suggest that it disproved the assumption of “many conservative pundits and politicians” that “college education ‘indoctrinates’ students into liberal or leftist ideologies,” I felt compelled to at least give it a read. But upon closer examination, my initial suspicions were confirmed: The methodology and findings of Professor Strother’s study should do very little to assuage the fears of conservative critics of higher education.

The study aimed to measure the effect that roommates had on each others’ political development and the effect of the university in general on students’ views. This was done by asking freshmen to classify themselves as “far right,” “conservative,” “middle-of-the-road,” “liberal,” or “far left” once early in the fall semester and then again in the spring semester. Results showed slight shifts away from “liberal” and toward “middle-of-the-road” and “conservative” self-identification. The researchers then performed a two-tailed t-test that found the rightward shift to be statistically significant, leading them to the following conclusion:

Our study shows that the ideology of first-year college students in our sample does not change much over the course of their first year on campus, contrary to the stated fears of many high-profile conservative pundits. Moreover, to the extent that there are aggregate changes, they are generally in the conservative direction. . . .

I wish I could say that the study should alleviate the “fears of many high-profile conservative pundits.” But it shouldn’t, so I can’t.

Its most obvious design flaw is that it only measures, or rather purports to measure, changes in ideology over the course of students’ freshman year. Using the results of such a study to declare that college doesn’t make students more liberal is like using a three-point lead at the end of the first quarter of a football game to declare yourself the victor. And in this context, it betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how students’ ideologies change over the course of their time in college.

By and large, students don’t become radicals because they spend their first or second semester being taught introductory sociology or political science by a far-left professor who inspires them to pretend to have read and agreed with Marx. It’s more often a gradual process that sees them become increasingly progressive as they climb the ranks of student organizations and take on leadership roles. Most freshmen arrive on campus wanting to think of themselves as open to others’ perspectives, even conservatives ones. But as they pursue positions in advocacy, pre-professional, and student-government groups as well as prestigious honor societies, the incentives shift. It becomes unfashionable to remain friendly with the Republican from their freshman-year floor. In fact, it is in some cases demanded by their social circles that they publicly denounce campus conservatives.

Another glaring issue with the study’s methodology is how it measures ideology. By asking students what they consider themselves to be rather than designing a series of basic questions about their political views, the researchers throw into doubt the validity of their data and the conclusions they draw from it. Although they claim to be gauging political views, what they are really gathering is students’ understanding of where they fit on a continuum of ideologies. Not only does this fail as a measure of their actual positioning relative to the population, but it is further skewed by the environment they’re in. After spending eight months taking classes taught by liberal instructors and living among a disproportionately liberal population, it stands to reason that they might think of themselves as a bit more conservative, regardless of their actual beliefs.

Finally, even the researchers admit that since this study took place during the 2009–2010 school year, its present-day usefulness is limited. A decade is a lifetime in American politics. When the study was conducted, President Barack Obama still opposed gay marriage. The emergence of a more radical sexual politics and the rehabilitation of far-left economic views by Bernie Sanders had yet to transform our polity, and nowhere has the impact of those developments been felt more acutely than in the university.

Funnily enough, even granting all those caveats, I would still agree with the study’s authors that college does not “indoctrinate” most students. Most students — like most Americans — take only a passing interest in politics if they take any interest in it at all. I would suspect that while the average student moves leftward as an undergraduate, to describe this change as “indoctrination” is to overstate it. But for those students who seek out positions of relative power on campus and real power in government and journalism afterward, there is no doubt that the leftward shift experienced in college is much more dramatic.

The portrait painted by some genuinely concerned conservatives and some cynical ones of all-encompassing leftist indoctrination on campus is misleading. Professors’ bias is a problem, but it is far from the biggest issue with campus political culture. Peer pressure and the resulting incentives for radicalization are the primary cause of a leftward shift in students’ politics over their college careers, and this shift is largely concentrated among the politically interested and “movers and shakers” in campus politics. The straw man of totalized “indoctrination” thus does conservatives a disservice: It gives liberal researchers an excuse to ignore the very real consequences of left-wing campus culture, an excuse they are all too willing to take advantage of.