The Big Chill

The left has responded to President Trump’s efforts to combat campus anti-Semitism and DEI by warning that these efforts are a threat to academic freedom, the lifeblood of genuine education. But a recent study confirms that true academic freedom on college campuses is largely a myth.

The study was conducted by two researchers in clinical and applied psychology at Northwestern University, Forest Romm and Kevin Waldman. Between 2023 and 2025, they conducted 1,452 confidential interviews with undergraduates at Northwestern and the University of Michigan. They asked: “Have you ever pretended to hold more progressive views than you truly endorse to succeed socially or academically?”

88 percent of the students said yes, they have.

Liberals like to complain that this or that Trump edict will have a “chilling effect.” In some cases they are probably right. But the two researchers have confirmed that on college campuses it’s non-progressive views that are “chilled,” and to a considerable degree.

As Romm and Waldman put it:

In a campus environment where grades, leadership, and peer belonging often hinge on fluency in performative morality, young adults quickly learn to rehearse what is safe. The result is not conviction but compliance.

Compliance with views that are safe represents the antithesis of what college should be about.

The specifics of the compliance with woke views are disturbing:

Seventy-eight percent of students told us they self-censor on their beliefs surrounding gender identity; 72 percent on politics; 68 percent on family values. More than 80 percent said they had submitted classwork that misrepresented their views in order to align with professors. For many, this has become second nature — an instinct for academic and professional self-preservation.

(Emphasis added)

The highlighted portion of this quotation suggests that students comply with left-liberal orthodoxy more when engaged with their professors than when engaged with fellow students. Peer pressure to conform is bad enough. When students feel the need to conform to the views of their teachers in order to optimize academic success, it’s tragic.

Moreover, it’s likely that the peer pressure students feel to conform to wokeism stems from the oppressive atmosphere that professors and administrators impose, probably as early as freshmen orientation. Thus, Romm and Waldman undoubtedly are correct when they say:

We do not fault students for perpetuating a climate that is hostile to intellectual integrity. We fault the faculty, administrators, and institutional leaders who built a system that rewards moral theater while punishing inquiry. In shielding students from discomfort, they have also shielded them from discovery. The result is a generation confident in self-righteousness, but uncertain in self.

As that last sentence shows, the authors aren’t just concerned about compliance with ideological orthodoxy as an evil in itself. As psychological researchers, their primary concern is with the effect of imposed conformity on the personal development of young adults:

Late adolescence and early adulthood represent a narrow and non-replicable developmental window. It is during this stage that individuals begin the lifelong work of integrating personal experience with inherited values, forming the foundations of moral reasoning, internal coherence, and emotional resilience.

But when belief is prescriptive, and ideological divergence is treated as social risk, the integrative process stalls. Rather than forging a durable sense of self through trial, error, and reflection, students learn to compartmentalize. Publicly, they conform; privately, they question — often in isolation. This split between outer presentation and inner conviction not only fragments identity but arrests its development.

In sum, the imposition of woke norms on campus injures our republic and our students.

Romm and Waldman conclude:

If higher education is to fulfill its promise as a site of intellectual and moral development, it must relearn the difference between support and supervision. It must re-center truth — not consensus — as its animating value. And it must give back to students what it has taken from them: the right to believe, and the space to become.

Right. But “higher education” will not willingly give anything back to students. It has created an incentive-structure that breeds conformity and compliance with leftist values and narratives. Accordingly, if there is to be a remedy it must consist of external forces creating an incentive-structure that counteracts the one higher education has developed.

My hope is that this can be done with a light touch, not a heavy hand. But how heavy the hand needs to be depends on our colleges and universities.