A new poll created by three professors at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, revealed that students want more conservative guest speakers on campus. According to the results, only a minority of campus leftists want to shut down conservative guest speakers. They found that 80 percent of self-identified liberals on campus feel it is wrong to “de-platform” speakers for their political views. Despite the positives, the survey also found a high percentage of conservatives remain worried about expressing their views on campus.
According to a report by the College Fix, students across the political spectrum at UNC are calling for more conservative guest speakers on campus.
The study had some encouraging results. In the report that detailed the results of the study, the professors claim that the results indicate that only a minority of campus leftists are interested in shutting down conservative speech. Additionally, a substantial portion of liberal students actually said that they want more conservative speakers on campus.
Moreover, although we document ways in which political hostility emerges disproportionately from the political left at UNC, this hostility often comes from a minority of campus liberals. Students who identify as liberal and who say they would be friends or roommates with a conservative student, and/or who think conservatives are important to the campus community, substantially outnumber those who do not (Table 15). Over 80% of students who identify as liberal say it is not appropriate to de-platform speakers proffering objectionable views (Table 17). And the students who identify as liberal and who want more conservative speakers far outnumber those who want fewer (Table 18). Some may be tempted to use our findings as yet another volley for one side or the other in the campus free expression debate. This would be disappointing because it would ignore the substantial cross-ideological agreement about what our campus should strive to be.
However, the results were not entirely positive. The professors found that 31 percent of conservative students say they have been worried “several” or “most weeks” about expressing their views on campus. 50 percent of conservative students said they were concerned that expressing themselves in the classroom would hurt their grades. By contrast, only 12.5 percent of liberal students shared this concern.
Breitbart News reported last week that officials at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, had promised students that a controversial Confederate statue would not return to campus after a local judge struck down a contract between the university and a local activist group that was set to receive the statue as a gift.
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