City Journal reports a study which finds that college students with moderate or conservative views feel the need to self-censor to fit in and avoid controversy on campus. Having the data is good, but I think we already knew it to be true.
During my 35 years as a professor with mostly conservative views, I know I self-censored in interactions with colleagues and to some minor extent in the classroom. “Minor” because politics was not central to what I was teaching.
If my students noticed anything, it was probably that I didn’t harp on political issues peripheral to my subject matter as liberal faculty did. If they inferred from that I wasn’t liberal, I was okay with the inference. Nobody complained.
More to the point, business students aren’t often among campus radicals. My self-censorship was more in hearing faculty colleagues say flaming liberal things and not telling them how f-ing ignorant I found their comments.
Decades ago we had a colleague whose assigned subject matter was quant analysis in business, but who spent most of his class time harping on nuclear disarmament. He was even too off-topic for my liberal colleagues, and we let him go for ignoring his subject matter.
