The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the country’s first public university, has a partisanship problem. That doesn’t make it unique, though. In fact, UNC fits right in with schools such as the University of California, Berkeley, and Emory University, prestigious universities known for their students rioting against conservative speakers on campus.
At UNC, three professors decided to determine where this type of turmoil was coming from, interviewing more than 1,000 students on their political affiliations via email. Students were asked questions about free speech subjects, including what they believed and whether it was appropriate to censor or curse out those with whom they disagreed. While a majority of liberals did not express the intolerance you frequently hear of at public universities, a substantial minority expressed little tolerance for unpopular opinions.
When faced with a particularly objectionable political view, 19% of liberals said it would be appropriate to respond by creating “an obstruction, such that a campus speaker endorsing this idea could not address an audience,” while just 3% of conservatives said the same. A similar percentage of liberals thought they might form “a picket line to block students from entering an event where a speaker will argue for this idea,” though only 1% of conservatives got behind this idea. A majority of students of each political affiliation, however, supported simply writing an opposing opinion article or asking pointed questions.
It appears that most students truly support ideological diversity on campus. But some 22% of liberals say their campus would be a better place without conservatives, and, not much better, 15% of conservatives felt the same way about liberals. Most striking, however, was that a significant portion of liberals would not even consider being friends with someone on the other side of the aisle.
“Roughly 92 percent of conservatives said they would be friends with a liberal, and just 3 percent said that they would not have a liberal friend,” summarized Conor Friedersdorf in the Atlantic. “Among liberals, however, almost a quarter said they would not have a conservative friend.”
This will come as no surprise to conservatives who have lost friends over politics. And one result of this social ostracism is self-censorship. Students’ “concerns about expressing political views are quite prevalent, and a common coping mechanism is to withdraw and self-censor,” the professors conclude. Silence in the classroom, rather than signifying agreement or indifference, may “actually come from apprehension about the consequences of expressing specific viewpoints.”
Nearly 68% of conservatives have “kept an opinion related to class to themselves,” according to the survey. Just over 24% of liberals and 48% of centrists have done the same. It’s no surprise to see the extent of political polarization on campus. But what is noteworthy is that sometimes we might not notice a difference of opinions at all — because some students are afraid to speak their minds.
