It’s no secret that most colleges lean significantly liberal, but it’s easy to forget just how liberal. Describing many colleges as “liberal” doesn’t really do it justice when over 80% of colleges are more liberal than California. It’s therefore become a common refrain that such hyper-liberal colleges make students intolerant of conservatives and unwilling to engage them in productive conversation. But is that true?
We already know students on the extremes of both ends of the political spectrum tend to be less tolerant than moderates, suggesting that politically extreme schools would be less tolerant than moderate ones. We can check this by plotting minimum tolerance, or the student body’s overall willingness to let disfavored speakers speak, against the school’s ideology:
Being a conservative at Smith College must be fun.
As expected, more extreme schools (measured by the average student ideology) tend to be less tolerant. This suggests hyper-liberal schools (since hyper-conservative schools don’t really exist) are rough environments for dissenters. That’s hardly shocking. But the more interesting question is, do hyper-liberal schools make students less tolerant? Are liberal students at liberal schools less tolerant than liberals at moderate schools? The first question is tough to confidently answer from our data, but the answer to the second question is basically no. We can see this when separating students by ideology, which lets us ignore the of-course-it-happens-at-liberal-schools effect seen above. Let’s look at tolerance for right- and left-wing speakers separately:
For the most part, within each ideological camp, right-wing tolerance remains similar regardless of the leaning of the school. But left-wing tolerance is a different story:
Wait, what?
Both liberal and conservative students at liberal schools are more tolerant of left-wing speakers (making those schools rank as more tolerant overall). The effect is so massive that conservative students at the most liberal schools are even more tolerant of left-wing speakers than liberal students at the most conservative schools. Why on earth is this happening?
One explanation might be the contact hypothesis, famously articulated by the psychologist Gordon Allport, which is the idea that bringing people into contact reduces prejudice. According to this idea, conservatives, surrounded by liberals, would become more tolerant of liberals. But the effect doesn’t seem to work in reverse because tolerance for conservative speakers isn’t higher at the few conservative schools that exist. It’s hard to be confident without data from deep-red schools, but liberal schools do seem to have a unique effect.
What else could cause this? Well, more liberal colleges are more likely to have liberal arts majors, which tend to have higher (especially left-wing) tolerance. But that’s only part of what’s happening here. And beyond that, I don’t know yet.
This doesn’t mean that hyper-liberal colleges are tolerant or pleasant places for dissenters whose opinions cut against the grain, or that they’re bastions of good political discourse. Indeed, there’s evidence to the contrary. But something seems to be going bizarrely right there.
The code, data, and codebook used to generate these plots are available here.
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Alternative theory: the further left a school is, the more everyone but the true believers has been so cowed and demoralized by the Maoists in charge that they just don't care any more and want to leave.
The concept of tolerance is predicated on a lot of different variables; sometimes I find myself tolerant of things that may be bothersome, but really hurt no one in the long term. However, when it comes to subjects like politics, the environment, health care, immigration, education, gunsense, civil rights, law and order (judicial system) and other flammable subjects, I find I have little tolerance for the perpetrators of hate and control over others. The primary reasons are that the powers-that-be -- the pols, bureaucrats and the wealthy elite -- have usurped the system and now are above the law. Secondly, I'm not tolerant of Democrats who have not only withered away, but have enabled the MAGAts and their ilk. Thirdly, nothing has really changed since the late 1960s with respect to reform. The Conservaturds have played the long game to confiscate the wealth, the rights that were adjudicated decades ago, and to establish a White Christian society.