Research: Free Speech and Inclusion
How do college students think about free speech, cancel culture, and ideological expression? This study, conducted in partnership with the Constructive Dialogue Institute, set out to answer those questions with a national survey of 2,618 college students.
As a research fellow at More in Common, I contributed to the design and analysis of this study. The survey measured attitudes toward free speech and social inclusion, experiences of being offended or called out, and students’ political self-identification.
Three takeaways
Most students support open discourse in principle: 94% said it’s important to listen to others with an open mind. But, nearly half (45%) have held back their own opinions in class, fearing they’d offend someone.
Fear of speaking up crosses political lines. Conservatives feel it most sharply, but students on the left report it too, suggesting this isn’t simply a story about one side silencing the other.
Social Justice Orientation predicts a lot. Liberal and conservative students diverge sharply on social justice beliefs, and those beliefs connect to a wide range of other attitudes and behaviors.
Beyond the public-facing report, I ran deeper exploratory analyses examining how Social Justice Orientation relates to other student attitudes. The visualizations below are from that work.
Tools
R · Qualtrics Panels · Qualtrics Survey Design · Asana · Slack