Leonard Saxe

A number of high profile events, such as the violent protests that accompanied the visit of Charles Murray to Middlebury College, have intensified the national debate surrounding the issue of free expression at American universities. In recent years there have been increased efforts at American colleges to improve the well-being and comfort of marginalized populations, including racial and ethnic minorities, who are often subject to structural inequalities, discrimination, harassment, and microaggressions. However, there many who argue that these well-intended efforts are stifling the ability of students and faculty, especially those with more conservative political views, to freely discuss controversial political issues. Although an active debate on this issue has taken place in the popular press, it has largely proceeded in the absence of systematic data. We investigate this issue using data from surveys of representative samples of undergraduates at four elite US universities. We find that political moderates and conservatives are less comfortable than liberals discussing race relations in America, and that this lack of comfort is heavily driven by the perceived hostility of the discourse. Conversely, moderates and conservatives do not feel significantly less comfortable discussing other contentious political issues, such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, where lack of comfort was driven by a perceived lack of knowledge around the issue. These results suggest that future discussion of these issues should avoid generalizing about the climate for “free expression” in the abstract, but rather focus on students’ level of comfort discussing specific issue