Are Liberal Students Really Less Tolerant Than Conservatives? Not So Fast!

Like so many colleges and universities this semester, Kansas State University was forced to move its talks and events onto the online video conferencing site Zoom. And it was there, during a four-day conference hosted last October by the Office of Diversity and Inclusion, that the hackers struck. 

The first hacker seized control of the conference’s audio and began asking participants why they “hate white people.” Another hacker shouted homophobic epithets at presenters. One simply wrote the n-word in the comments section over and over again. And at the center of it all was Kansas State student Jaden McNeil, founder of the campus group America First Students and alleged mastermind of the attack.

This episode – a brazen though unsuccessful attempt to shut down a campus event – came to mind when I saw Kansas State’s position in the 2020 College Free Speech Rankings. A collaboration between RealClearEducation, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, and the research firm College Pulse, the Ranking draws on more than 20,000 student surveys from 55 different colleges and universities. Asking about everything from student self-censorship to tolerance for offensive speech, it is the largest and most comprehensive project of its kind to date.

And one thing that comes through clearly is that schools with more conservative-leaning students tend to rank higher than those with more liberal-leaning ones. That’s partly why Kansas State, where 43% of the student body identifies as conservative versus just 32% who call themselves liberal, earns the second highest spot in the Rankings.

A few of the most liberal-leaning schools managed to win top spots in the rankings, such as the University of Chicago (1st) or Brown University (9th). On average, however, liberal-leaning schools fare more poorly, like Harvard University (46th) or Dartmouth College (52nd).

So that’s it, right? Liberals are less tolerant than conservatives, case closed?

Not quite. In fact, the closer you look at the Ranking’s methodology, the less persuasive its findings become.

Take the Tolerance Score. Constituting 40% of a school’s overall score, it plays a significant role in determining where each institution ranks. The Tolerance Score was calculated by asking each student whether various types of speakers should be allowed to speak on campus. The more speakers that students say they would permit, and the more enthusiastically they would do so, the higher their score.

But there’s a problem. Here are the questions as posed to students. See if you can spot where things go wrong.

“Would you support or oppose your school ALLOWING a speaker on campus who promotes the following ideas:

-       “Abortion should be completely illegal?”
-       “Black Lives Matter is a hate group?”
-       “Censoring the news media is necessary?”
-       “Some racial groups are less intelligent than others?”
-       “The US should support Israeli military policy?”
-       “Transgender people have a mental disorder?”

Did you catch the problem? With the exception of the question about news media, every single one of these ideas is, on average, much more offensive to liberals than conservatives.

Of course liberals are less tolerant than conservatives of a speaker who calls Black Lives Matter a hate group. Liberals are much more likely to support Black Lives Matter! But that doesn’t mean that liberals are less tolerant than conservatives. It just means that their tolerance is being subjected to a much more difficult test.

Scholars of political tolerance call this the “objection precondition” – that is, before you can compare two people’s tolerance for offensive speech, you must first determine whether they find the speech equally objectionable. Otherwise, you’re not really comparing tolerance at all. Rather, you’re just proving that people tend to support speech they like and oppose speech they don’t. And that’s not an especially useful fact.

Once the objection precondition is accounted for, as other research has done, conservative students still tend to rank as slightly more tolerant than liberal ones. But the difference is very small – much smaller than the one reported in the 2020 College Free Speech Rankings. It can also be largely explained by factors unrelated to tolerance for offensive speech, like threat perception and the way the survey questions are presented.

Remember, the Tolerance Score makes up 40% of each school’s overall score, so this issue matters. By subjecting liberals to a much more difficult test, it calls into question each school’s placement in the rankings. At the very least, it becomes impossible to know whether conservative-leaning schools are actually that much better than liberal-leaning ones on free speech issues. Is it really the case that students at Kansas State are especially tolerant of offensive speech, as some claim? Or are they just especially conservative? It’s impossible to know.

Future versions of the College Free Speech Rankings should address this problem, perhaps by adopting a “least-liked” survey strategy, in which students first describe their own idea of an offensive speaker, and only then are asked about their levels of tolerance. For liberals, that might well be someone who calls Black Lives Matter a hate group. But for conservatives, it could be a speaker who thinks all police are racist. And when that’s the sort of speaker they are asked to tolerate, conservative-leaning schools like Kansas State may well take a tumble in the rankings.