Hoover Institution Gathering Explores Campus Culture, Bias, and Declining Trust in Higher Education

Hoover Institution (Stanford, CA) - A cross-disciplinary group of scholars from Hoover and around the country gathered at the Hoover Institution on March 6 to discuss the culture on university campuses in the United States, particularly with respect to how this culture shapes open inquiry, the welcoming of students from different backgrounds and viewpoints, and public trust in higher education.

"Our universities continue to be critical national assets for research and scientific innovation, for developing a well-informed citizenry, for leveling the playing field for success, for social mobility," Brandice Canes-Wrone, director of the Center for Revitalizing American Institutions (RAI), said. "And yet at the same time, we're at a time of historically lower public trust. And as we'll talk about more today, a lot of that lower trust relates to cultural critiques."

The gathering was organized by Canes-Wrone and Senior Fellow Eugene Volokh as a collaboration between RAI's initiative on higher education and the Hoover Institution Program on Free Expression, which Volokh leads.

Canes-Wrone said if American universities are unable to regain their position as a trusted institution in the nation, there will be long-term consequences. "For a university to really exist as a truth-seeking institution, we have to get this right," she said.

Morning sessions involved presenting recent research dealing with these subjects, with one session devoted to internal forces at universities and another on external pressures.

In one presentation, a scholar used examples of class syllabi to demonstrate that when dealing with contentious topics such as abortion or the origins of the US correctional system, professors often assign books and journal articles that skew to one side of the topic, but only a very small minority of them expose students to a broad range of perspectives pertaining to a contentious issue.

This trend extended to professors continuing to assign books or journal articles even after a more highly recommended, better-reviewed item with an opposing view became available.

In another presentation, Senior Fellow Daniel P. Kessler showcased research he and his team, including Senior Fellows Amit Seru and Stephen Haber, have compiled about the political affiliations and donations made by US university administrators and board members over recent years, showing a small but noticeable slide to the political left.

Using data from nearly six hundred public and private US universities, spanning from 1980 to 2022, including the confirmed political contribution histories of more than 30,000 university board members, they found that the relative ideological orientation of private university boards has, on average, shifted left over time, particularly among the boards of elite private universities.

Focusing on the students at universities, Senior Fellow Paola Sapienza addressed a question central to the whole debate: Are universities creating more liberal students?

Her research analyzed five decades of survey data (1970-2019) from the Higher Education Research Institute, covering approximately 14 million students across roughly 1,400 colleges, surveyed before they began college. She found that incoming freshmen have grown measurably more liberal since 2010, though the relative majority still identify as moderate.

Crucially, this shift closely mirrors trends in the broader young population, suggesting it is not unique to higher education. Yet colleges do appear to move students further left. Results from a subset of students reinterviewed in their senior year show that while 55-60 percent do not change their views, those who do shift move, on average, toward more liberal positions-a trend that has grown more pronounced in recent years.

The afternoon turned toward potential solutions to the challenges universities face, with roundtables on an array of measures now underway around the country to improve the culture and expose students to a wider array of viewpoints that hold academic merit on American university campuses.

For example, some universities are launching new all-of-campus efforts to encourage civil discourse on campus, teach civics to incoming first-year students, and link with other universities on efforts to encourage civic discourse and learning.

Examples of this work supported by Hoover include the Stanford Civics Initiative, through which a rotation of Stanford professors, including a number of Hoover fellows, offer instruction on a variety of topics concerning democratic citizenship to first-year Stanford students.

Also in operation is RAI's Alliance for Civics in the Academy, a nonpartisan network of instructors dedicated to strengthening postsecondary civic education by drawing together faculty from across disciplines, institutions, regions, and viewpoints.

The final session of the day featured a discussion of other potential challenges and solutions, including about defending free speech rights, allowing free professional association, and encouraging academic journal policies that do not discriminate against controversial research topics.

One speaker expressed intrigue at the fact that many modern American universities expend enormous effort to police speech and enforce rules on how language is used in official texts or in classrooms, only to see activities that most Americans would find unacceptable-like encampments and violent protests-carry on for months.

But several speakers expressed relief that across US higher education, a wide range of efforts are now underway to foster a new culture on campuses, characterized by free expression, open dialogue, and civil disagreement.

The day concluded with participants noting a broad consensus about the challenges facing US universities today, which will require an ongoing concerted effort to restore Americans' trust in them.