Nearly Three-quarters of College Students Say Professors Should Be Reported for Saying Something ‘Offensive’

A mind-boggling majority of college students believes that professors who say something “offensive” in class should be reported to the university’s administration.

The survey, conducted by North Dakota State University’s (NDSU) Sheila and Robert Challey Institute for Global Innovation and Growth, in collaboration with College Pulse, sampled the opinions of 2,250 undergraduate students currently enrolled in four-year U.S. colleges and universities, who were enrolled during the survey period of May 11 – June 2, 2023.

According to the report of the survey’s findings published by NDSU, the participants in the survey were divided into three groups, so as not to have the results “influenced by political ideology.” The three groups were defined by the pollsters as: 

liberal/liberal leaning (students who identify as slightly, somewhat, or very liberal), conservative/conservative leaning (students who identify as slightly, somewhat, or very conservative), and independent/apolitical (students who identify as not liberal or conservative or not having thought much about politics.)

Even without ideological skewing of responses, the results are staggering.

As published in the NDSU report, 65 percent of students overall said that professors who say anything on the following topics should be reported to the university: “affirmative action, police shootings, guns, gender/sex, and vaccines.”

Remarkably, it gets worse: 74 percent of students surveyed are in favor of reporting professors (or instructors) to the university if they say something that students find offensive. When the results are broken down into results reported under the three groups named above, 81 percent of students who are liberal/liberal leaning, 76 percent of independent/apolitical students, and 53 percent of conservative/conservative leaning students wanted offensive comments made by professors reported to the university.

The high number of “liberal/liberal leaning students” saying that a professor should get reported for saying something “offensive” is not surprising. A word whose Latin root literally means “liberty” has been co-opted by those who loathe that concept.

That students who identify as “conservative/conservative leaning” should want to report a professor or teacher for saying something “offensive” is genuinely startling, however.

Conservatives have long claimed to be a group composed of those Americans who rightly regard censorship as incompatible with liberty and contrary to not only the First Amendment, but the concept of freedom generally. It seems the younger generation carrying that banner don’t see eye-to-eye with their elders, at least not once they get to college.

As a part of the questionnaire, students were asked if they were in favor of reporting a professor for making any of the following 10 statements:

1: “It is clear that Affirmative Action is doing more harm than good, and should be eliminated.”

2: “If you look at the data, there is no evidence of anti-black bias in police shootings.” 

3: “Owning a gun is the right of every U.S. citizen.”

4: “Biological sex is a scientific fact. There are two sexes, male and female.”

5: “Requiring vaccination for COVID is an assault on individual freedom.”

6: “Those who want to eliminate Affirmative Action are perpetuating white privilege.”

7: “It is clear that we have a problem with racist police in the U.S. shooting unarmed black men.”

8: “A civilized society doesn’t need guns.”

9: “There are a wide variety of sexes. Sex is not binary.”

10: “Not getting vaccinated for COVID is irresponsible and inconsiderate to others.”

According to the research findings, 75 percent of liberal students and 41 percent of conservative students believe that a professor should be reported for making one of the 10 example statements provided, revealing a stark ideological divide among the surveyed students.

Again, the number of self-described “conservatives” who believe that simply saying one of those 10 phrases should be enough to get a professor reported to the university administration is disheartening to say the least.

There are those, however, who aren’t shocked by the pro-censorship posture of many young conservatives. The fact is that statistically most of those students participating in the study were educated at public schools for at least 12 years, eight hours a day, for an average of 180 days a year. That amounts to 17,280 hours of indoctrination posing as education. If you were to assume, for the sake of comparison, that a college student had attended two hours of religious worship/instruction per week for that same number of years, that would only add up to 1,248 hours of religious training. That is an astonishing difference of 16,032 hours — 668 full 24-hour days — over 12 years.

Now, I’m not saying that going to church would deprogram — or even is designed to deprogram — a child from the information he is taught in school. I’m simply demonstrating the incredible impact that such a deficit is bound to have on a child during his most impressionable years.

Such a statistic could be one explanation for the number of “conservative” students responding in favor of censorship at our country’s universities. They’ve been insensibly inculcated with such an attitude during their time in public school.

Offensive speech, after all, is precisely the type of speech that the First Amendment was intended to protect. Our Founding Fathers suffered imprisonment and other punishment for daring to speak or print words “offensive” to tyrants and their supporters. 

If our culture carries on conducting “education” along the same path as it currently does, what sorts of statements will be deemed “fireable” offenses ten years from now?