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Students are pushing back on ‘massive censorship,’ ‘woke ideology,’ law student says 

Freshmen at Yale University voiced strong support for free speech compared to their older peers in a new poll, giving rise to hopes for the future of the Ivy League campus.

The Yale Undergraduate Student Survey by the Buckley Institute found a “significant turn in favor of free speech, driven largely” by freshmen.

“It is very encouraging that the newest class at Yale is dramatically more supportive of free speech and open discussion than its predecessors,” Lauren Noble, founder and executive director of the Buckley Institute, said in an email to The College Fix.

“The freshman class came to campus in the middle of serious debate, on campus and nationally, about free speech and resoundingly decided that free speech was the right way forward.”

Noble said she believes the results echo “a broader cultural vibe shift [that] will have an impact on Yale long into the future.”

“While it is too soon to eulogize censorship and DEI on campus, this indicates that the momentum is on the side of open expression,” she said.

The survey found 69 percent of the freshman class “strongly agreed that Yale should respect First Amendment rights.” Only 52 percent of seniors and 47 percent of juniors said the same.

Freshmen also were the most likely to strongly oppose shouting down speakers and support disciplining those who disrupt speeches. What’s more, 94 percent of freshmen said the campus should allow controversial speakers.

Notably, the percentage of students overall who report having “heard Yale discuss the value of free speech often almost doubled” since 2023, from 28 percent to 50 percent.

Additionally, the percentage of students who said they often self-censor dropped from 44 percent to 39 percent.

However, 75 percent of Republican students and 47 percent of independents still report self censoring, compared to 26 percent of Democrats.

Jake McDonald, a law student and president of the Yale Federalist Society, said he has noticed a view shift among students within the past year that matches the survey results.

Back in 2022, Yale students shouted down conservative attorney Kristen Waggoner on a panel hosted by McDonald’s organization, The Fix reported.

“I think that the massive censorship efforts and the push of woke ideology on college campuses these last couple decades is starting to create a countercultural groundswell,” he told The Fix in a recent email.

“While I can’t say that I’ve seen the student population swing massively away from those ideologies/pressures, I can say that it is clear that speech and open discourse are making a comeback …” McDonald said.

He believes student organizations should lead the way, “both for reasons of practicality (e.g., free and open discourse is by necessity organic; institutions can’t really manufacture it) and reasons of avoidance (e.g., the university doesn’t want to face the backlash from progressives if that free and open discourse results in speech with which the university doesn’t want to be associated).”

Free speech reforms

McDonald said administrators have been taking steps to improve the campus environment.

For example, one “big move” was the recent hiring of several professors “whose ideological backgrounds will provide some ideological diversity. It is a good first step, but there is much work left to do,” he said.

However, the university administration is still “far left of the country’s ideological median (and higher education’s ideological median),” he said.

Noble at the Buckley Institute said one of the changes she would like to see Yale make is a clear commitment to state and follow through with consequences for students who shout down speakers.

“By failing to punish students who engage in shout downs, Yale tacitly endorses it, creating a culture where the heckler’s veto rules and intellectual diversity is impossible,” she told The Fix.

The Buckley Institute also wants Yale to adopt a position of institutional neutrality.

While the university did create new guidelines recommending its leaders “avoid making statements on public political issues,” Noble said it “emphatically stopped short of institutional neutrality” and left open “loopholes that can easily be exploited.”

Further, she said, “Yale must take steps to address the appalling political imbalance among its faculty. Our research found that Democrat faculty at Yale and its law school outnumber Republicans 28 to 1. This reinforces a culture where extremely progressive ideas aren’t challenged and mainstream views on either side of the aisle are suppressed.”

The Fix reached out to the university’s media relations office, Yale College Republicans, Yale College Democrats, and a number of professors twice in the past two weeks by email, asking about the survey results and the free speech atmosphere on campus, but none responded.

Beyond Yale

Others outside Yale also have noticed a shift in students’ attitudes.

Alex Morey, vice president of campus advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, told The Fix college students are “opening up more” about divisive topics.

“The political and social upheaval of the post-October 7 climate exposed just how untenable many colleges’ free expression policies and practices have been for more than a decade,” she said in a recent email.

“[T]hat students suddenly want to make free speech a priority is a great turn of events on iconic campuses like Yale,” Morey said. “We’ve seen similar administrative pushes from admins at Harvard, where admissions is asking applicants how they engage with people they disagree with.”

Similarly, a college admissions advisor recently told The New York Post conservative students are becoming more open about their political views in applications, including to Ivy League schools.

Until recently, students “who had volunteered to help elect a Republican would often opt not to put it on their application. Or, if they volunteered for a conservative organization, they might not have named it on their list of extracurriculars,” according to the report.

Now, however, students are opting to include these things in their applications and they are getting accepted to Ivy League institutions, the report states.

MORE: Viewpoint diversity concerns continue after 98% of Yale faculty donations went to Democrats

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