Students surveyed about politics
Questionnaire asks whether it’s hard to be friends with people who have voted for Trump, Biden
GAINESVILLE — The latest round of a controversial state survey of Florida college and university students includes a slew of new questions probing how their political views have affected relationships on campus, including whether it’s hard to be friends with people who have voted for Joe Biden or Donald Trump.
The anonymous and voluntary annual survey, loaded with ideological and free-speech questions, was distributed by email and text to students and was to be completed by Friday. Some students said they viewed participation in the survey as a responsibility. Others, along with faculty members, expressed skepticism about the survey’s content, methodology and security.
Florida temporarily suspended the “intellectual freedom and viewpoint diversity” survey last year after distributing it for the first time in 2022, with a response rate of roughly 2% for students. The annual surveys are mandated by a law signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2021 after Republican state lawmakers expressed concerns that conservative views were being suppressed on college campuses.
The law requires that the Board of Governors and the Board of Education “annually assess intellectual freedom and viewpoint diversity at certain institutions.” Faculty have yet to receive a survey this year as the law requires.
This year’s student survey has 52 questions, more than double the previous version.
The Biden-Trump questions are asked separately. The survey says, Do you agree or disagree with the following statement: “It’s hard to be friends with people who voted for Joe Biden” and then the same question with Trump’s name instead of
Biden’s. Students are given a range of possible answers, from strongly agree to strongly disagree.
“The fact that they actually named the presidents — it really rubbed me the wrong way,” said Noah Barguez-Arias, 23, of Miami, a graduate student at the University of Florida.
“It’s kind of gross, it’s kind of slimy,” she added. “I feel like the universities just shouldn’t really worry about that… It doesn’t really matter what political beliefs or whatever identifying thing students believe in or what their professors or [administration] believe in as long as everyone is safe from harm.”
Some other new politically pointed questions ask whether the student has been socially excluded, harassed or threatened for sharing political views, lost friends because of their political beliefs and witnessed students with either liberal or conservative views receive “uncivil treatment.”
The survey also contains several new questions related to protests and freedom of speech on campus. It asks what actions are appropriate to challenge demonstrators or speakers, including using violence or attempting to block other students from attending an event, and what students think of how their administration has handled such matters or how they should.
And it asks students about their comfort level in disagreeing with a professor on a controversial topic and expressing their opinions because of fear of reprisal.
“We didn’t want our members to be taken advantage of for any political interest at all, so we felt the need to communicate that to our members,” said Cassie Urbenz, communications co-chair of UF’s Graduate Assistants United, which urged members not to take the survey. “The data can very easily be manipulated.”
Deanna Michael, an associate professor of higher education and policy at the University of South Florida, said too many survey questions focus on the dynamic between liberals and conservatives.
“Intellectual freedom and diversity is not really about political thought,” said Michael, a past chair of the Board of Governors’ Advisory Council of Faculty Senates, adding that she isn’t sure whether she will take the survey this year.
Natalie Schiffer, a 22-year-old University of Central Florida senior and president of her university’s chapter of the conservative group Turning Point USA, took the survey using a link sent to her via text. She encourages every student to participate.
Schiffer said she often feels uncomfortable expressing conservative views on campus and added that she has been flipped off by students for being affiliated with Turning Point USA. During lectures, she said, one of her professors frequently expresses his progressive beliefs.
“There are times when I feel that I cannot talk about the clubs I am involved in or I cannot speak on certain things out of fear of getting failed or having someone be mean or nasty to me,” she said.
Stephen Craig, a political science professor at the University of Florida and expert in question writing for survey research, said he was concerned about the lack of answer options on some of the questions about political views and that some could be confusing.
For instance, he cited the question, “Which of the following statements comes closer to your own personal opinion?”
Students could select from only two possible answers: “Speech is violence and should be treated as such by the university” or “It is important for a healthy campus life that the distinctions between speech and violence are maintained.”
“You not only have to write a question that gets at what you’re trying to measure,” he said, “but you need to do it in good conversational language and make it clear as it can be. ‘Speech is violence’ is not clear.”