MOST BELIEVE COLLEGES HAVE A LIBERAL BIAS

Percentage of New England adults who say the following about whether colleges display a political bias:

According to our survey, 55 percent of adults say college presidents do not have a responsibility to comment on current events. “Faculty or students expecting a university president to just come out and make statements about every passing news event, even if it’s one that’s pretty important — I ultimately think that that’s counterproductive, and it’s just going to lead to brouhahas because someone’s going to end up unhappy no matter what,” says survey respondent Heather Kilmartin, a 40-year-old writer from Rhode Island.

“This is part of the bigger divide in our country — to what extent do people who have achieved high intellectual and cultural status deserve deference from the rest of us? And increasingly, people on the left and in the Democratic Party say they do,” Hopkins says. “And the populist conservative right rejects all of those premises.”

As colleges become more cost-prohibitive and Democratic leaders’ historical ties to the working class decrease, according to Hopkins, unattainability translates into distrust and suspicion of insular biases. As Donald Trump Jr. put it in 2017, “We’ll take $200,000 of your money; in exchange we’ll train your children to hate our country.”

Our survey shows that 47 percent of all New Englanders believe colleges have a liberal bias. Republican respondents tend to say colleges show a liberal bias, whereas both Democrats and Independents are mostly split between seeing no bias and a liberal one.

“I’m politically liberal,” says survey respondent David Liskov, a 38-year-old programmer from Connecticut, “but in terms of freedom of speech on campuses, things have gotten a little more controlled, which is almost illiberal to me.” Liskov says that when he attended college in Pennsylvania in the early 2000s, there was space for everyone’s viewpoint, and Democrats and Republicans held civil debates with one another.

Survey respondents express stark disagreement on freedom of speech, particularly in the wake of student protests around both antisemitism and the war in Gaza. When our survey asked respondents to choose which was the bigger problem for colleges, 52 percent reported it’s people being allowed to say harmful or misleading things, while the rest believe it’s people being prevented from saying what they want. Democrats tend to think harmful speech is a concern and Republicans tend to worry about the lack of free speech. (Independents are split on the issue.)

While Republican parents still appear to be sending their kids to college, Hopkins says, “Maybe in the future, we will see people make decisions about whether to pursue higher education in part based on their own political predispositions.” ■