SURVEY: Students are looking to report professors for wrongthink

The ‘Conformity Gauntlet’ as seen in 2024 NDSU Survey

As ERI readers will likely recall, “the Conformity Gauntlet” is the name Greg and his “Canceling” co-author Rikki Schlott gave to the layer after layer of social pressures, ideological litmus tests, and punishments both formal and informal that a would-be academic must endure from high school on up to become a tenured professor. Plenty of research and data was used to back up these claims, and thanks to the 2024 American College Student Freedom, Progress and Flourishing Survey, we now have even more.

The survey shows that the (already stunning) 71% of students who believe professors should be reported for their speech aren't just focused on disagreeable words or rude behavior; many are openly policing professors’ viewpoints.

The survey’s creator, North Dakota State University’s Sheila and Robert Challey Institute for Global Innovation and Growth, describes it as follows:

The survey assesses student perceptions about viewpoint diversity and campus freedom; human progress and beliefs about the future; and student attitudes toward entrepreneurship, capitalism and socialism, and how college is influencing their views.

This year, the survey added sections asking about the war in Gaza and student attitudes on artificial intelligence. Some of the questions also overlap with surveys FIRE has done recently. But today, we want to highlight one aspect of the survey results: How students ideologically police professors.

The NDSU survey asked, “If a professor says something that students find offensive, should that professor (or class instructor) be reported to the university?” Seventy-one percent of respondents said yes. That alone is frightening, because offense is subjective and sometimes the pursuit of knowledge requires communicating offensive ideas or about offensive topics. 

Almost a decade ago, Jeanne Suk Gerson wrote about criminal law professors who avoided teaching sexual assault and rape law because they feared being reported for a Title IX violation. Now imagine that same fear, except it’s about every topic, all the time. In the NDSU survey, one-third of students want professors to drop uncomfortable readings, and a quarter want professors to drop uncomfortable discussion topics.

But the survey went further, asking about whether professors should be reported to the institution for a number of topics. We can already think of instances of professors targeted — by students, peers, administrators, or the public — for expression aligned with the examples the survey gave: 

• A third of students said a professor should be reported for saying there was no evidence of anti-black bias in police shootings — which reminded us of Roland Fryer, the Harvard economist canceled for publishing a study of police violence that said, in officer-involved shootings, there were “no racial differences in either the raw data or when contextual factors are taken into account.” It should be noted that this was not the outcome Fryer himself expected when he started researching the topic.

• A quarter of students said a professor should be reported for saying that requiring a COVID vaccination is an assault on individual freedom. Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya was someone who was targeted for his position on mask mandates, but he would go on to question the efficacy of the vaccine mandates as well. 

• More than one in five students said a professor should be reported for saying that biological sex is a scientific fact. Carole Hooven’s experience at Harvard shows that very intention in action.

• Just under one in five students said a professor should be reported for saying that affirmative action is doing more harm than good. Associate professor of Cardiology Norman Wang from the University of Pittsburgh had his teaching privileges revoked for publishing a research paper studying that question, and University of Chicago Associate Professor of Geophysics Dorian Abbot was disinvited from an MIT lecture for having expressed that view in an op-ed.

There might be fewer right-leaning students on campus, but there are still enough to engage in similar thought-policing activity.

• Fourteen percent said professors should be reported for saying not getting a COVID vaccination is irresponsible and inconsiderate. This reminds us of a Utica College professor who was targeted for criticizing people who didn’t wear masks.

• The same percentage would report a professor who said people who want to eliminate Affirmative Action are perpetuating white privilege. This was the case for a University of California, Santa Barbara professor, who was targeted (in part) for saying that white students devalue inclusivity because they fear losing their privilege.
  
  

• Eight percent said they would report a professor who said that a civilized society doesn’t need guns. Emory University professor Carole Anderson was added to a “watchlist” for arguing that the purpose of the Second Amendment was to empower militias to keep black Americans “under the boot” of white supremacy.

Of the examples given in the survey, the majority of students (62%) said that a professor should be reported for at least one of them.

And so it goes. This is consistent with FIRE’s findings in its Scholars Under Fire database and report. It’s also consistent with FIRE’s 2022 survey of professors, which found that nearly one in six (16%) faculty have been disciplined or threatened with discipline for their teaching, research, academic talks, or non-academic publications. In that same survey, FIRE found that more than half (52%) of faculty were worried about losing their jobs or reputation because of someone misunderstanding them, taking their words out of context, or posting something from their past online.

Professors aren’t the only ones who should be worried, however. In the NDSU survey, 56% of student respondents said a student should be reported to the university if they say something another student finds offensive. That’s consistent with the fear expressed in FIRE’s 2025 College Free Speech Rankings, where 67% of students were “very” (33%)  or “somewhat” (34%) uncomfortable expressing an unpopular political opinion to their fellow students on a social media account tied to their name, and 49% were “very” (17%) or “somewhat” (32%) uncomfortable expressing their views on a controversial political topic to other students during a discussion in a common campus space.

Also in the NDSU survey, 70% of students reported being either “very” or “somewhat” comfortable sharing their opinions in class. Among those in the other 30%, about half (52%) were uncomfortable because they feared their opinion would be unacceptable to other students. Only 14% feared their opinions would be unacceptable to their professors.

In many cases, the proliferation of bias response teams on campus has made reporting a professor or peer for having the wrong opinion almost frictionless. A 2022 study of over 800 schools found that most (56%) have bias response teams of some sort; that study also found that “nearly every” system permitted anonymous reporting. They also encourage it however they can. As Rikki Schlott has pointed out in the past, the number for the Bias Response Line is printed on the back of NYU’s student ID cards.

The anonymity adds a layer of complexity in responding to any allegation; for example, when the University of Central Florida decided to investigate Professor Charles Negy for bias based on his tweets, the university asked him to respond to “examples” of behavior that took place sometime during a 15-year period. He didn’t remember using the phrase “black privilege” in classes, but he used it in an email two years prior to the investigation. (Do you remember what you said in emails two years ago?)

In circles critical of higher education, a common narrative is that professors indoctrinate students. While that no doubt does happen, it is probably less common than most imagine, because the Conformity Gauntlet is well underway by the time a student reaches college. While a student might not subscribe to the prevailing political philosophy in higher education at the moment they matriculate, they are surely aware of it. They also know whether their own beliefs are considered acceptable within that framework. And if dissenting students are already self-censoring (as about 1 in 5 students, and 1 in 3 strong Republicans, do “very” or “fairly” often according to FIRE’s 2025 College Free Speech Rankings survey), there’s little for an activist professor to do. As far as they can tell, everyone else has fallen into line.

But the same Conformity Gauntlet selects for the students who are the most enthusiastic about the predominant campus ideology. And for every professor who seeks to indoctrinate students into a worldview, there are surely dozens of professors who are being watched closely by those same students, waiting for the wrong word at the wrong time, so they can report them to a DEI office or add them to an online watchlist.

Given the numbers in all of these surveys, it’s no surprise that people are unwilling to speak up.

Shot for the Road

In February, Roland Fryer sat down with Bari Weiss to talk about how he came to Harvard and his experience being targeted for his research; the audio is on Weiss’ podcast, “Honestly,” here. 

And the video is available from The Free Press, on YouTube:

Speaking of Roland Fryer, he’ll be the keynote speaker at our sold-out 2024 FIRE Faculty Conference in Boston on Oct. 24-26; and speaking of The Free Press (our co-hosts) and Bari Weiss (our moderator), the next FIRE-sponsored debate is happening on October 9 in New York City. Bret Stephens and James Kirchick will debate Matt Taibbi and Lee Fang: Should the U.S. still police the world? 

(And if you want to support potential future collaborations with The Free Press, expand our College Free Speech Rankings, or just defend free speech wherever it’s threatened in the country, donate to FIRE!)