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.

In this research brief, we look at how students’ political ideology relates to their willingness or reluctance to discuss controversial issues in the classroom. 

We find that (1) left-leaning respondents are, on average across all ten controversial topics the CES surveyed respondents on, 6.2% more comfortable engaging in discussions on controversial topics, but (2) the more strongly respondents described themselves as left or right-wing, the more comfortable they seem to be discussing controversial topics.

If only the most ideologically extreme students are willing to discuss controversial topics on campus, then the quality of discussion is likely to suffer. Extreme partisans may be more prone to confirmation bias, less open to considering alternative viewpoints, and more likely to engage in motivated reasoning, leading discussions to degenerate into echo chambers rather than genuine exchanges of ideas. 

To foster a healthy campus climate, it may be necessary to find ways to dampen the negative effects that extreme ideological commitment has on discussion, and encourage the sharing of questions, ideas, and perspectives from more moderate students.

Read more in our full report, below.