This week, I am traveling to Yale’s historic campus to speak with undergraduates about leadership and history. While I look forward to meeting with a subset of students who cherish viewpoint diversity and are hungry for real debates and discourse, Yale as an institution has been the focus of national attention for its many attempts to silence dissent. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) recently ranked Yale 198th out of 203 schools for free speech. Yale’s many problems with expression from students threatening faculty to Yale Law School misunderstanding the First Amendment are well known.
It is time to contextualize Yale and other elite schools in the higher education space when it comes to questions of speech and expression.
According to the Digest of Education Statistics, in the fall of 2020, there were a little over 19 million students enrolled in post-secondary institutions in the United States. Fourteen million students were enrolled in four-year institutions and another five million were attending two-year institutions.
The total enrollment at the top 25 universities according to US News in 2021 was 320,695. While that is a large number of students, the top 25 schools account for barely 2 percent of the total undergraduate enrollment nationwide. In Florida, by comparison, the public state university system comprises 12 unique schools and enrolls over 430,000 students, or a little over 2 percent of the total student population.
Yale and other elite schools have regularly been failing to live up to their promise of real academic balance and free speech. Regrettably, they also continue to dominate the public discourse when it comes to speech. These institutions, including Yale, have created real misconceptions about the political and ideological nature of higher education as a result.
Data from UT-Austin’s Future of Politics Survey of over 1,500 students from all sorts of schools from liberal arts colleges to big state universities, for instance, provides some insight into the differences between schools that collectively enroll millions and their noisy and problematic elite counterparts.
The survey finds that community colleges are far more ideologically and socioeconomically diverse and less extreme than are elite schools. At community colleges, 30 percent of students are very or somewhat liberal and 17 percent are conservative, but the bulk of students are somewhere in the middle. Fifty percent of students are either moderate, leaning to the left or right, or haven’t thought much about their ideological preferences. In contrast, 48 percent of students at the top 25 schools are liberal, 19 percent are conservative, and fewer than a third (30 percent) of students are in the middle. Even more notable, no student from the top 25 schools stated that they have not thought much about their ideological lean, compared to 17 percent of students in community colleges. Politics is more intense and ideologically lopsided in elite schools compared to community colleges today.
On the question of speech, FIRE’s 2022 speech rankings show that nationally, two-thirds of students believe there are cases where shouting down a speaker can be justified. This number is even higher at the nation’s elite schools. Looking at the top 25 colleges and universities ranked according to US News, which includes schools like Yale and Middlebury, 70 percent of students at such schools say there are cases in which trying to disrupt a speaker is justifiable. At schools ranked below 100, such as Texas Tech and the University of Central Florida, the number drops to 59 percent. About 70 percent of students at top 25 schools are worried about their reputation when speaking up in class, compared to 58 percent of students at schools ranked above 100. While these numbers are too high as a general phenomenon, the pressure to speak at elite schools highlights the issue of free speech on campus and the fact that conditions there are more hostile and different from elsewhere.
Elite schools make up barely 2 percent of the student higher education population but generate an awful lot of attention and are simply quite different from everyone else. I am looking forward to speaking with Yale undergraduates this week, but it should be remembered that Yale students and the school’s many problems with speech are not fully representative of college and university life today. Many schools with far more students are far less extreme and more balanced. Politicos and politicians should move away from their fixation on the elite and focus on helping students and schools move forward on questions of expression and diversity. The graduates outside of the elite schools will also end up being business and community leaders, politicians, parents, and active members of civil society. Real impact can be made in these spaces as well.
Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
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