The front line of combating self-censorship is the classroom

Caroline Cunningham is a rising junior at the University of Alabama, where she is majoring in legal history on the pre-law track.

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A formidable enemy of free speech on college campuses is self-censorship. Much has been said about how to make students more willing to voice their opinions, but proposed solutions often overlook the people best positioned to change the culture where self-censorship frequently occurs: professors.

Professors shape many of the environments where students decide whether speaking candidly is worth the risk. In a FIRE student survey conducted in 2025, 72% of students said they self-censor at least occasionally either when speaking in class or with a professor. Yet despite their direct influence over students’ willingness to speak, professors — and the classroom techniques they employ — remain underused in efforts to address the problem.

Self-censorship at the classroom level is especially troubling. More than half of respondents said they would feel uncomfortable expressing their views on a controversial topic during an in-class discussion. Students also feared that revealing their opinions could hurt their grades. About one-third said they had hidden their political beliefs from professors at least occasionally in hopes of getting a better grade.

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Whether those fears are well-founded in every case, they are powerful incentives to remain silent. Students may worry that a professor will penalize an unpopular viewpoint, or that classmates will judge them for expressing it. Either concern can be enough to make silence seem safer than candor.

Professors, however, can meaningfully reduce those fears by creating classrooms in which disagreement is expected and handled fairly.

What does such a classroom look like? The basic practices are pretty straightforward: present competing positions accurately, assign serious readings from multiple perspectives, ask students to articulate arguments they may not share, and emphasize that disagreement is an essential part of intellectual inquiry.

Professor neutrality can help, but a viewpoint-open classroom does not require professors to conceal their own beliefs. It requires them to remain conscious of the authority their views carry and of the chilling effect that authority can have on students who disagree. A professor who claims to welcome discussion while treating one position as obviously enlightened and its alternatives as morally or intellectually suspect is not truly inviting debate.

The best college class I have taken demonstrated what this can look like in practice. The class addressed abortion, gun control, and numerous other contentious issues. After our discussion of abortion, I left the room amazed. Students had exchanged opposing views respectfully and productively. There was no echo chamber, no reluctance to challenge another person’s reasoning, and no palpable tension. That atmosphere was not accidental. It was the result of how the professor conducted the class.

Before coming into class that day, our reading assignments had included compelling sources from both sides of the debate. When we entered class, we explained each source’s argument—not belittling either, but seeking to understand them. Then, we interrogated each argument. At one point, my professor assigned a “side” to each half of the room and had representatives respectfully debate. During general discussion, my professor aided the less represented side, which tended to shift depending on which element of the issue we were discussing. Throughout the class, he never revealed his personal opinion on the issue and commented only on the academic merits of each argument.

In that class, there certainly seemed to be little discomfort with voicing a controversial opinion, as many students expressed them. In fact, controversial opinions were encouraged and welcomed because they gave us the chance to consider another side of the issue. When we wrote our essays, there was no doubt in my mind that they would be graded entirely on their academic merit, not influenced by any personal feelings my professor might harbor.

In my experience, that classroom was exceptional.

I have seen many classrooms quickly become echo chambers, with discussion mostly reiterating the prevailing view the professor had endorsed. I have been in classes where I, like many students, hesitated to raise my hand because the professor was less than encouraging of opinions contrary to their own. I have softened or even completely shied away from expressing my true point of view in written assignments out of fear that my professor might find some arbitrary excuse to dock me points because they didn’t agree with me.

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Whether or not those fears would have been realized, professors hold an often underestimated amount of power over the culture of self-censorship at the classroom level. The professors I self-censored around likely would not have let their own opinions cloud their objective evaluation of my assignments, and perhaps they would have been more tolerant of contrary opinions during classroom discussions than I had supposed. But I had self-censored because the classroom environment did not come across as viewpoint-open enough to outweigh my fears in a cost-benefit analysis of whether I should speak up. This is likely the case for countless other students who self-censor in the classroom.

Peer culture is an important reason students self-censor, and classroom environments have the potential to influence this too. Conversations are carried over from the classroom to the broader campus. If students are meeting each other’s ideas in classrooms where they feel unafraid to raise their hand and express a controversial opinion, this will likely spill over into their interactions with their peers outside of the structured classroom setting. This could produce greater tolerance among students of opposing viewpoints, and could lead to a higher number of productive discussions as well as a decrease in self-censorship, as students will have learned from the example set in their classes.

It is especially important for professors to create viewpoint-open classroom environments today, when academia’s faculty is largely left-leaning. This likely makes students in the political minority less confident that their views will be received fairly. Indeed, the 2025 FIRE survey revealed that frequent self-censorship in the classroom and in conversations with professors is highest among conservative or Republican students. Self-censorship of students in the ideological minority only heightens the threat of universities becoming increasingly ideologically homogeneous and makes it imperative that professors work to ensure such students do not feel the need to self-censor.

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The classroom is the heart of a university. The work students do there is their primary reason for attending college. If in their classes students feel that they should hide their opinions to get a better grade, or feel uncomfortable engaging in a controversial classroom discussion, the culture of the school becomes one of fear.

Professors can instead foster a culture of openness by recognizing their role in combating student self-censorship and employing teaching methods that create viewpoint-open classrooms and, ultimately, a more viewpoint-open university.