How Do College Students Really Feel About Free Speech?
(ANALYSIS) I’ve taught a course on a college campus as either a teaching assistant or the instructor of record since the fall of 2006. The places I have worked at are not what most people would consider to be highly prestigious institutions.
Outside of one course I led as an adjunct at the University of Illinois about seven years ago, you probably haven’t heard of many of the places where I have been an instructor. But that’s honestly the norm.
Here’s a great statistic from the Pew Research Center — it looked at 1,364 four-year colleges and universities. How many of them had an admissions rate of less than 10%? The answer was 1.2%.
Just 3% of them had an admissions rate that was below 30%. In other words, the average college looks a lot more like Eastern Illinois University than Stanford. My students are a whole lot of first-generation kids. Many of them grew up within a couple of hours drive of Charleston, Illinois. Very few of them are activists of any kind. They keep their heads down, focus on their studies, drink a few beers and get a pretty affordable degree.
University of Oregon students protest in support of Gaza. (Photo by Ian M.)
That’s why when I see stories about disruptive political protests on college campuses, I realize that I have almost no personal experience with this phenomenon. I was especially struck with this bit of data analysis from the Washington Monthly about where those Gaza protests were happening.
Graph via Washington Monthly
If you plot the percent of the student body receiving Pell Grants on the x-axis (which is a good measure of the affluence of the student body) and tuition and fees on the y-axis (which is a good measure of selectivity), it becomes clear where those protests were occurring — a handful of very elite institutions of higher learning.
I was thinking about that when I was poking around data that was released last year by FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression). The organization is interested in topics related to free speech, especially when it comes to university settings. So it asked about 55,000 college students all kinds of questions last year. The survey included a question about religious affiliation, but some of the scenarios it posed to students are deeply intertwined with religion. Some of these findings were not exactly what I expected.
Let me start by just showing you the results of a question related to whether a student thought it was acceptable for “a student to shout down a speaker to prevent them from speaking on campus.” I am just looking at respondents between the ages of 18 and 25 years old here.
Latter-day Saints were the most likely to say it was ‘never acceptable’ to shout down a speaker on campus. In fact, about three-quarters of them said it was never or rarely acceptable. Basically all the Christian traditions are at the top of this graph — Protestant, “Just Christian,” Orthodox and Catholic, in that order. In each case about three-quarters lean toward not finding it acceptable to shout down a speaker.
The groups at the bottom are the three types of nones and the Jewish sample. Among atheists, just 23% say it is never acceptable to shout down a speaker. That’s about half the rate of the Latter-day Saints.
Among agnostics, 25% chose the “never acceptable” option, compared to 29% of Jews and 32% of nothing in particular. However, I do want to point out that even among the atheists a majority were still on the “never/rarely” side of the equation. There was no group where more than 50% thought it was a good idea to shout down a speaker.
To read the rest of Ryan Burge’s column, click here.
Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on X at @ryanburge.