Therein, Sachs argues that the self-censorship problem on universities seems to be overblown — and is largely a product of (mis)perceptions among conservative students that they will be punished by their professors and fellow students should they contradict the prevailing consensus. Despite clear evidence that conservative students are deeply concerned about being graded more harshly by their professors for their political views (leading them to self-censor), he asserts there isn’t strong evidence that political discrimination in grading actually occurs. I think this latter point is important – and as far as I can tell, it is true. Here, however, I want to focus on a different claim Sachs made in his piece. Citing a recent survey by the Cato Institute he posits:

“Reports of self-censorship on campus are not much more prevalent than reports of self-censorship among the general public. About 58 [sic] percent of Americans admit they stop themselves from saying what they believe to avoid giving offense…”

Yet the Cato data actually suggest students are (5 percentage-points) more likely than the general public to agree that current political climate prevents them from saying things they believe “because others may find them offensive.” In fact, they are significantly less willing to share their views on virtually any issue than the general public. This effect is particularly pronounced with regards to crime, guns, poverty, inequality, policing, immigration, foreign policy — for which the relative comfort gap approaches or exceeds 20 percentage points:

Q: Suppose you were at a restaurant with co-workers after work, or with classmates after school — If any of the following topics came up would you be (somewhat or very) willing to share your views?	% in college affirm	% broader pop. affirm	Difference (percentage points)
Health care	80	85	5
The Environment	79	84	5
Education	79	81	2
Abortion	69	76	7
Women’s issues	66	78	12
Crime	65	86	23
Guns	62	81	19
Poverty	61	80	19
Queer and transgender issues	61	69	8
Immigration	59	79	20
Race relations	57	71	14
Foreign policy	54	72	18
The police	53	79	26
Q: The current political climate prevents me from saying things I believe because others may find them offensive	62	57	5
Q: Do you think the major blowups in the news are isolated incidents or part of a broader pattern regarding how college students respond to controversial ideas?	77	76	1

That is, in the very institutions that are supposed to be places for understanding and formulating responses to social problems, people feel especially uncomfortable discussing pressing social issues. Indeed, they were less comfortable discussing even technocratic and scientific issues like health care and the environment than the general public. Perhaps the most striking, students were less comfortable talking about education than those who are outside the academy. This is a sorry state of affairs — and the Cato data show that most students agree. A majority of students felt that:

• Political correctness has stifled conversations we need to have as a society (62%)
• People call others racist/ sexist to avoid debate with them rather than because they deserve it (53%)
• Colleges are not doing enough to protect free speech (51%) or expose students to a wide variety of viewpoints or perspectives (51%).

Yet the same students who feel more constrained than the general public in their expression, and who feel widespread discontent with the relative lack of freedom on campus, also tend to be far more censorious than the general public:

Q: Would you favor a law that would make it illegal to do the following in public…	% college agree	% broader pop. agree	Difference (percentage points)
Call for violent protests	72	61	11
Disparage Jews	62	38	24
Disparage blacks	53	45	8
Disparage immigrants	51	38	13
Burn the American flag	49	59	10
Disrespect military service members	49	39	10
Disparage Hispanics	48	37	11
Disparage whites	47	30	17
Make sexually explicit statements	47	45	2
Deny the Holocaust	47	33	14
Fail to comply with preferred gender pronouns	46	35	11
Disrespect police	42	36	6
Disparage LGBTQ people	41	36	5
Disparage Christians	39	34	5
Disparage Muslims	37	37	—
Q: People who aren’t respectful don’t deserve free speech	51	43	8
Q: People should be allowed to express unpopular opinions in public, even those that are deeply offensive to other people	49	60	11

What is most striking about this data is how uniform the higher support for censorship is. Students are more supportive of laws against disparaging LGBTQ people, immigrants and racial or ethnic minorities on the one hand (views associated with the left) – but also more supportive of making it illegal to disrespect police or military service members, disparage Christianity, or call for violent protest (impulses associated with conservativism). Literally the only item for which the general public was more supportive of censorship than students related to burning the American flag – but even here, students were slightly more likely to support the draconian measure of stripping citizenship away from flag burners (40% of students supported, as compared 38% of the broader public)! Beyond legal censorship, students were also more supportive of denying campus platforms to speakers across the board. Once again, they are more supportive than the general public of denying campus platforms to those who disparage immigrants, minorities, and LGBTQ Americans — and also whites, Christians or law enforcement. Disturbingly, the only kind of speaker students are relatively more supportive of granting a platform to are people advocating violent protest (indeed, students are also 10 percentage-points more likely than non-students to say that it is morally acceptable to punch a Nazi). Here, a critic might object that of course students would be less likely than most to support providing controversial speakers a platform on campus. After all, students are on campus all the time; many students literally live there. Isn’t it reasonable to want to avoid needless disruption in one’s own community? Perhaps the real test might be to see whether the general public would support hosting these speakers in their own communities, and compare that to students’ willingness to host different speakers on campus. Yet even here, students tend to be more supportive of denying platforms on campus to controversial speakers than non-students are to host these speakers in their local communities:

Q: Universities should not provide a platform to those who…	% college agree re: universities	% broader pop. agree re: universities	Difference (percentage points)	% broader pop. agree re: their local community
Advocates violent protest	78	82	4	76
Reveal students’ immigration status	68	65	3	56
Deny the Holocaust	61	57	4	59
Supports banning Muslims	59	48	11	47
Advocates conversion therapy for LGBTQ people	57	49	8	47
Defines transgenderism as a mental disorder	55	49	6	52
Claims all whites are racist	55	50	5	58
Claims Christians are backwards	55	47	8	56
Justifies police stopping blacks at higher rates	53	47	6	53
Claims whites and Asians have higher IQ than blacks, Hispanics	53	47	6	54
Criticizes the police	51	49	2	60
Claims men are better at math on average	48	39	9	45
Calls for deporting immigrants	44	41	3	42

Students are also significantly more likely than the general population to define speech as hateful, and to assume that bad motives underly speech they find offensive:

Q: Which of the following would you label hate speech?	% college agree	% broader pop. agree	Difference (percentage points)
Saying one race is genetically superior to another race	69	56	13
Calling a racial minority a racial slur	65	60	5
Calling gays and lesbians vulgar names	57	56	1
Calling a woman a vulgar name	47	42	5
Saying transgender people have a mental disorder	47	33	14
Saying homosexuality is a sin	41	26	15
Saying all white people are racist	40	40	—
Saying illegal immigrants should be deported	34	23	11
Saying Islam is taking over Europe	32	16	16
Saying America is an evil country	31	34	3
Saying police are racist	28	27	1
Saying women should not fight in combat roles	25	14	11
Q: People usually have bad intentions when they express offensive ideas	65	57	8

Although, in the abstract, a slight majority (52%) of college students recognize a distinction between allowing a controversial speaker a platform v. tacitly endorsing their views – this distinction quickly collapses when applied to more specific cases. A plurality (49%) of college students believe that supporting someone’s right to say racist things is as bad as being racist oneself – a difference of 7 percentage points as compared to the general public. 44% of college students believe that allowing a racist to speak would be tantamount to that university endorsing racism (14 percentage points higher than non-students). But as with the other examples, it’s not just racism or left-aligned views that generate this effect. For instance, students were also slightly more likely than the general public to believe that providing a platform to an anti-American speaker would be the same as the college endorsing those views. In the same paragraph where Sachs cited the CATO report, he highlighted that private-sector employers also restrict speech. He is right to point that out, and it is another important point that could use more attention in the media than it gets (especially relative to campus blowups). But disturbingly, students are also significantly more supportive than most of employers punishing workers for speech, even for speech that occurs outside the workplace (and of course, policing speech entails surveilling it). For instance, 64% of students support employers sanctioning employees for things they say on social media, as compared to 44% of the general public.

What Gives?

We can see, from the very data Sachs cited, that students seem to feel substantially less free to express themselves than general public. Yet while they chafe under these perceived constraints and express frustration about them, students are also tend to be significantly more censorious than the general public. How can we square these findings with the datapoint Sachs cites from FIRE that the vast majority (87%) of students feel generally comfortable expressing themselves on campus? Simple: just as people are more likely to support free speech in abstract than with regards to specific controversial issues, or specific groups they dislike – students are also more likely to declare comfort expressing themselves in general than with respect to particular issues. As we saw in the Cato data, this holds with virtually any specific issue. Indeed, issue by issue, across the board, students felt substantially less comfortable expressing themselves than the general public. They were also far more likely to support censorship on a range of issues – irrespective of the political valence of those issues. This suggests that while there does seem to be an element of political bias to censorship (margins tended to be much larger for issues with a left valence) — it seems like students are far less comfortable with controversy of any kind than the general public, and more likely than the general public to try to suppress controversy of virtually any kind through censorship of self and others. It is unclear whether these dynamics are a product of selection effects (i.e. more censorious people just happen to be more likely to go to college), cohort effects (i.e. contemporary students are more censorious than previous generations – my take on this question here, here), or whether they are a product of the education process itself (i.e. education renders people more likely to support censorship than they otherwise would have been – some data on that question here). Regardless, rather than serving as bastions for free exchange of ideas and the exploration of controversial topics, the state of discourse on campus seems substantially less free than that of the broader society. At least, that’s what the Cato data suggest.