Heterodox Academy Publishes First Report from the 2023 Campus Expression Survey
APRIL 24, 2024, NEW YORK CITY, NY – Heterodox Academy (HxA) released its first report and data from the annual Campus Expression Survey (CES). The 2023 CES asks 4,730 undergraduate students at four-year colleges and universities in the US about different facets of their experience relevant to open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement.
The key findings of this report are that (1) just over 79% of the 4,730 full-time undergraduate student respondents reported being at least somewhat reluctant to discuss, ask questions about, or share their ideas on at least one of the 10 controversial topics asked about on the CES; and (2) the number of students who reported at least some reluctance to discuss a topic was up to 200% higher in the case of the most controversial topics, relative to a typical course topic.
The CES, which Heterodox Academy has been administering since 2019, underwent substantial changes in the latest iteration, which holds implications for comparing results from this year’s data to previous years.
First, the core questions’ wording – the focus of the first report – this year shifts from asking about students’ level of comfort or reluctance in “speaking up and giving your views” to asking about students’ level of comfort or reluctance to “discuss [their] honest thoughts, ideas, and questions.” This aims to more specifically elicit respondents’ comfort engaging in behaviors that partly constitute inquiry.
Second, the 2023 CES carried over from previous versions all of the controversial topics respondents were surveyed about, with two changes: (1) “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” was added as a new topic, given its salience after the October 7, 2023 attacks by Palestinian militants on communities in southern Israel; and (2) whereas previous CES’s had “gender” as a topic, the 2023 CES split this topic into two distinct topics, “gender roles” and “trans identity”.
This is the first report in a series of several reports based on the 2023 CES data that will be released throughout the year.
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