Free Speech on Campus Is Not a Lost Cause

From the enormous debt relief recently enacted by the Biden administration to dangerous changes with respect to transparency and due process in Title IX cases, partisan differences surrounding higher education are significant as the nation heads into the 2022 midterms. But even before the Biden White House began making sweeping changes to how college students and alumni engage with their respective schools, party differences were already potent, with Republicans having far less trust than Democrats in America’s colleges and universities, not to mention the K–12 education system and its teachers. The Pew Research Center found that from 2015 through 2019 the percentage of Republicans who believe that colleges have a negative effect on the country went from 37 percent to 59 percent while the views of Democrats and independents who lean Democratic have remained stable and overwhelmingly positive.

Given the well-known progressive impulses and woke ideas that continuously seem to emerge from our colleges and universities, the Republican mistrust of higher education is certainly reasonable. However, given the impending growth of Gen Z college students as a proportion of the electorate, it would be a mistake for the GOP to write them off and think of higher education as a lost cause.

SJ

About the Author

Samuel J. Abrams

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Abrams is currently on the Board of Directors of FIRE.

Featured Tags

From the enormous debt relief recently enacted by the Biden administration to dangerous changes with respect to transparency and due process in Title IX cases, partisan differences surrounding higher education are significant as the nation heads into the 2022 midterms. But even before the Biden White House began making sweeping changes to how college students and alumni engage with their respective schools, party differences were already potent, with Republicans having far less trust than Democrats in America’s colleges and universities, not to mention the K–12 education system and its teachers. The Pew Research Center found that from 2015 through 2019 the percentage of Republicans who believe that colleges have a negative effect on the country went from 37 percent to 59 percent while the views of Democrats and independents who lean Democratic have remained stable and overwhelmingly positive.

Given the well-known progressive impulses and woke ideas that continuously seem to emerge from our colleges and universities, the Republican mistrust of higher education is certainly reasonable. However, given the impending growth of Gen Z college students as a proportion of the electorate, it would be a mistake for the GOP to write them off and think of higher education as a lost cause.

SJ

About the Author

Samuel J. Abrams

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Abrams is currently on the Board of Directors of FIRE.