December 17 2024, NEW YORK, NEW YORK — Heterodox Academy (HxA), a non-partisan, non-profit organization committed to improving institutions of higher education by advocating principles of open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement released a research report showing that the majority of students are fearful of formal or informal sanctions for their speech in the classroom.

The report finds that of the students who are reluctant to speak up on controversial issues in the classroom, 96.2% of them reported that they feared suffering at least one sanction (informal or formal) if they were to discuss a controversial topic. When students were asked if they had ever been sanctioned, in any manner, for their speech in class, 13.3% of respondents said ‘yes’. This is equivalent to at least 10.2% of the total CES sample reporting actually being sanctioned for discussion of a contentious issue on campus. If we extrapolate this figure to the population of US college students (researchers estimate that about 8.5 million students were enrolled at four-year colleges or universities in fall 2023), then somewhere around 867,000 college students have potentially suffered some sanction for discussing a controversial topic on campus.

Ideally, no student would ever suffer sanctions for doing what is expected of them in college: to freely discuss controversial topics in an environment that protects open inquiry. Read the report to learn more.

About the survey: The 2023 Campus Expression Survey (CES) asks 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. Heterodox Academy has been surveying students on topics of free expression and open inquiry since 2019.