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 focus on a subgroup of the CES sample, the “reluctant respondents,” students who report being at least somewhat reluctant to discuss at least one of the 10 topics on campus asked about in the survey (79% of our total sample, N = 3,760), in order to better understand (a) why they are reluctant to discuss controversial topics and (b) whether any of them have suffered sanctions for doing so.

Key results:

• 96.2% of reluctant respondents reported that they feared suffering at least one sanction (informal or formal) if they were to discuss a controversial topic.
• 52.4% of reluctant respondents feared that “[o]ther students would voice disagreement or want to debate” were they to discuss controversial topics on campus.
• 13.3% of reluctant student respondents report being actually sanctioned for discussing a controversial topic.

Universities and colleges should strive to provide environments where open discussion of controversial issues doesn’t result in sanctions for students, but is rather encouraged. 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.