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 since 2019. 

The 2023 CES surveyed a nationally representative convenience sample of full-time college undergraduates at four-year colleges and universities within the US from November 14, 2023 through December 30, 2023. Survey respondents were recruited online using stratified sampling via CloudResearch.

At the close of the survey period, we received responses from 5,009 survey takers. After removing incomplete or potentially suspicious responses, we restricted our analyses to data from 4,730 respondents. This more than triples the responses of past CES administrations, which may improve the statistical power of our analysis’s inferences, especially in examining subgroups in our sample. Research reports derived from the CES are exploratory and descriptive in nature.

This research brief describes what the 2023 CES data tell us about the number of college students in the US who might be reluctant to discuss controversial topics in the classroom.