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Reactions to research are mixed, with one expert saying, ‘Indoctrination can happen in class even when the curriculum and assignments appear neutral‘
Peer pressure rather than instructors may be what makes college students more politically liberal.
That’s according to a new working paper published by Brown University’s Annenberg Institute. The paper argues that “peers are a much more likely explanation” for students’ shifting political views in college.
“[W]e find that university faculty are disproportionately Democratic, and that this is particularly so in the humanities and social sciences. However, we also show that exposure to liberal faculty does not make students more liberal,” the paper stated.
Some scholars who spoke with The College Fix agreed with the findings, pointing to past studies that reached similar conclusions. However, one conservative scholar expressed skepticism, saying the paper conveniently blames peers without getting to the root of why students turned liberal in the first place.
For the working paper, published in July, researchers at Brown University and the University of Michigan gathered voter registration records and other data of faculty at 33 public universities.
On average, 41% of faculty were registered Democrats and 12% were Republicans, according to the paper. (Notably, analyses by The College Fix and others have found much larger skews toward Democrats among faculty and university leaders.)
Then, the researchers compared students’ course transcripts at one “large state flagship” school to their ideology before and after studying there. It isn’t clear which school the researchers sourced the transcripts from, and none of the researchers responded to The Fix’s requests for comment.
They found that “exposure to liberal topics reflects student demand rather than instructor supply, leaving little room for indoctrination.”
“Students become more liberal during college regardless of major and sort toward ideologically similar instructors,” the researchers wrote.
The paper suggested that this is because “liberal professors assign similar course materials as other instructors teaching the same topics and students sort to fields that align with their pre-existing beliefs.”
In the end, the share of liberal-identifying students rose from 61% to 69% upon graduation. This was across all majors and demographic groups, according to the research.
The researchers linked the shift to peers, noting that people “who go to college are already more liberal than the country as a whole and students are more likely to prefer a college where peers share their political beliefs.”
They also found a small, half percent shift toward the left among students who took classes comprised mostly of liberal peers. “These estimated peer effects are not large,” but “they stand in contrast to the consistently near-zero estimated effects of faculty” on students’ politics, according to the paper.
What’s more, “students spend more time with peers than they do in lectures, and are also more likely to discuss politically controversial topics in social settings rather than in class,” the research states.
The researchers did acknowledge their study has limits. For example, they wrote, “We can also only study effects within the current ecosystem where faculty and students are mostly liberals, meaning we cannot say whether faculty would have more of an effect if students were exposed to a more diverse set of viewpoints.”
New York University psychology Professor Jay Van Bavel told The Fix that he was not surprised by the paper’s findings.
“There is considerably more empirical evidence that peers and the general college social environment shape undergraduate political and social ideology than there is showing direct ideological persuasion or indoctrination by their professors,” he said in recent email.
Instead, “peer-to-peer influence” appears to have a “clear” and “measurable” effect on students’ political orientation, he told The Fix.
Van Bavel pointed to several studies suggesting a similar pattern. His own research focuses on “how collective concerns—ranging from our group identities to our moral values and political ideologies—can shape” how people make decisions.
“This is quite obvious once you think about it — are teenagers more likely to adopt the beliefs of their roommates and friends or their much older professors? You see the same thing with teenagers in high school adopting the beliefs and practices of their peers,” he said.
“This social contagion effect is often robust because college typically involves intense immersion in peer networks, group living, and extracurricular socialization rather than formal classroom lectures,” he said.
Instructors’ influence on their students’ political orientation may be weakened before they’ve even started the course. “When students take classes with left- or right-leaning professors, it is usually because students actively choose majors and courses that already align with their pre-existing worldviews,” Van Bavel told The Fix.
Data in the working paper suggests this as well. According to the research, 6% of courses analyzed discussed at least one of the following topics: queer theory, critical race theory, communism, feminism, slavery, race or ethnicity, gender, and the LGBTQ+ community. Conservative students were 53% less likely to enroll in courses covering such topics, and “moderates” were 28% less likely to, the researchers found.
As Van Bavel commented, “This doesn’t mean that faculty aren’t ideological or (on average) left-leaning, it’s just that they aren’t that influential in changing the ideology of their undergrads.”
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A researcher with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression didn’t find the paper particularly surprising either. FIRE conducts research on campus free speech, including self-censorship among students and faculty.
“The link between courses and student political views is fairly weak … the focus is on the instructor’s political views and whether any shift in student views is the result of this influence, and there is no effect,” Sean Stevens told The Fix.
“Given the ideological makeup of most student bodies on campuses across the country can be characterized as liberal (and in some cases extremely liberal), one can presume the ideological makeup of students within many courses also skews liberal, creating the conditions for group polarization,” Stevens said.
Stevens said the research doesn’t “firmly establish” that indoctrination is happening either: “[I]f the shift is primarily due to 1) students who choose to attend college tending to be more liberal at the outset and then 2) interacting with other students who are just as or even more liberal than they are, I wouldn’t call that indoctrination.”
However, Heritage Foundation research fellow Corey DeAngelis had a very different opinion of the Annenberg paper. He told The Fix that the research “strains its credibility” by “almost entirely” blaming students’ leftward shift on peers while “shielding instructors.”
“University-based scholars produced a complicated working paper that explains away the obvious, and I don’t buy that they can disentangle peer influence from professor influence,” he said.
“Students who shape their peers were almost certainly influenced by their professors first. Students do not randomly sort into different classes – they self-select, and the paper itself notes sorting toward ideologically similar instructors,” DeAngelis said.
Another factor, he said, is that many students “already step foot on campus as Democrats because they were subjected to 13 years of left-wing propaganda in their K-12 government schools.”
“Blaming peers alone is convenient,” DeAngelis said. “Indoctrination can happen in class even when the curriculum and assignments appear neutral – through framing, discussion, what’s emphasized or omitted, and the broader campus climate. Students clearly don’t have many options to escape liberal professors.”
“Even if we accept the paper’s peer-effects story, those peers are the product of the same left-skewed university environment – and of the K-12 system that primed them,” DeAngelis said.
When asked what, if anything, he believes policymakers should do about this trend, he brought up the amount of money American taxpayers are spending to support “left-wing indoctrination” in higher education.
The Department of Education gave U.S. colleges and universities around $60 billion for research and development in fiscal year 2023, according to the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics.
“Factory workers and plumbers who never set foot on a college campus shouldn’t have to bankroll left-wing gender studies degrees or universities that function as one-sided political machines,” DeAngelis told The Fix.
“The federal government should stop funding these institutions, and they should lose their tax-exempt status,” he said. “We also need universal school choice at the K-12 level so parents can choose schools that don’t brainwash kids into a socialist worldview in the first place.”
However, Stevens at FIRE warned against using public policy to make the conservative-liberal faculty divide more balanced.
“Mandating the hiring of more conservative professors will likely be perceived as ideological affirmative action, which could undermine perceptions of such faculty members’ academic capabilities and contributions,” Stevens told The Fix. “Top-down legislation imposed by the state or federal government is also likely to be viewed with suspicion, if not as an outright threat to academic freedom and university autonomy.”
Instead, he suggested that faculty should “expose students to these ideas and guide the discussion in ways that seriously consider these alternative perspectives,” such as by inviting other scholars and public figures for guest lectures and panel discussions.
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