Universities and the Culture of Woke Conformity
Universities still sell themselves as places where young people learn to think. A large interview study at two elite American campuses suggests many of them are learning something else: how to perform the approved opinions, then keep the real ones for later.
Between 2023 and 2025, psychologists Forest Romm and Kevin Waldman conducted 1,452 confidential interviews with undergraduates at Northwestern and the University of Michigan. They asked a simple question: had the student ever pretended to hold more progressive views than they actually endorsed, in order to succeed socially or academically? Eighty-eight percent said yes. More than 80 percent said they had submitted coursework that misrepresented their own views to match what they thought professors wanted. Self-censorship was common on gender identity (78 percent), politics (72 percent), and family values (68 percent). Nearly three-quarters said they did not fully trust close friends with those topics. Almost half hid beliefs from intimate partners.
The gap between public performance and private belief was especially sharp on sex and gender. In private, 87 percent identified as exclusively heterosexual and supported a binary model of sex. Only 7 percent embraced gender as a broad spectrum, and most of those were already in activist circles. Seventy-seven percent disagreed that gender identity should override biological sex in sports, healthcare, or official data, and said they would not say so aloud. Some described themselves as "morally confused": unsure whether honesty was still ethical if it risked exclusion.
That is preference falsification, the term economist Timur Kuran used for people who misrepresent their views under social pressure. The result is a fake consensus. Each student who nods along makes the orthodoxy look more popular than it is. The next student reads the room and stays quiet. Lecturers hear agreement and conclude their ideas are obvious. The balloon inflates.
Campus incentives are not mysterious. Grades, recommendations, internships, club leadership, and dating all run through a relatively small set of institutions and peer groups. Faculty in many humanities and social-science departments lean heavily one way; students notice. When 80 percent of people in a seminar will write what they think the instructor wants, the instructor never has to defend a weak claim. Dissenters learn that the cost of a true sentence is higher than the cost of a false one.
The damage is not only political. Identity formation is supposed to happen in early adulthood: you try ideas, you get challenged, you keep some and drop others. If the safest strategy is to split yourself: public script, private doubts, you delay that work. Authenticity becomes a liability. The researchers framed their project as developmental psychology, not a culture-war pamphlet: what happens to a person when belief is replaced by adherence to orthodoxy?
Jo Nova's write-up of the same interviews (link below) is blunt about the feedback loop. Surround teachers with people who will not puncture bad ideas and the ideas get grander. The students who refuse to play along are less likely to stay in academia. Over time the faculty becomes more uniform, not because the arguments got better, but because selection favoured compliance. Science then does not even advance one funeral at a time. It advances by whoever is willing to recite the liturgy.
This is not unique to two Midwestern campuses. FIRE's repeated surveys show large shares of students who will not discuss controversial topics, who support punishing speech they dislike, and who treat certain political slogans as fireable offences. Other work finds students applying stricter standards to conservative viewpoints than to progressive ones. The Northwestern–Michigan interviews are unusually direct because they asked about faking, not just silence.
It is not proof that "almost everyone is secretly conservative." Many students are genuine progressives. Many others are unformed, socially anxious, or simply grade-maximisers. Two selective universities are not the whole of higher education; community colleges and STEM programmes look different. Interview studies have their own biases. The interesting finding is not a secret Right-wing majority. It is that a large majority, across the spectrum of private belief, treat progressive language as the price of admission.
A university that trains people to lie about what they think, is a poor training ground for medicine, engineering, journalism, law, or public administration. Those fields require people who can say "this policy does not work" when the room wants the opposite. Preference falsification also makes reform harder: administrators look at surveys of expressed opinion and conclude the campus is unified. The private majority never appears in the official numbers.
The healthier fix is a conservative takeover of the same machinery. Until that happy day, it is to lower the social and academic cost of disagreement: anonymous grading where possible, viewpoint-neutral rules actually enforced, hiring that treats intellectual diversity as a feature rather than a threat, and an end to treating contested moral claims as settled science. Minor miracles indeed for a corrupt organisation.
https://www.joannenova.com.au/2026/08/nearly-90-of-students-at-two-us-universities-fake-progressive-views-for-professors-and-friends/
