Liberal Students Are Struggling with Anxiety
Over the past few years, I have spent a considerable amount of time on college and university campuses of all sorts- from small liberal arts colleges to huge state schools - trying to understand the politics of Gen Z students.
I have met countless open-minded, curious, and pluralistic students, but I have also encountered “liberal” students who refuse to engage or listen to ideas that run counter to their own. These liberal students often hold the misguided and dangerous perspective that particular traits or identity characteristics immediately disqualify a person’s ideas, experiences, and views from being discussed and debated.
As a conservative academic and professor, I have witnessed this behavior firsthand; I have been accused of practically everything imaginable and dismissed outright. However, I have noticed something a bit unusual in my detractors and liberal students in particular – they always seemed flustered and deeply anxious.
It turns out that my impression of these liberal students is correct – not only are liberal students far more prone to try to stop or disrupt speech, but they are appreciably more likely to be stressed and anxious than their conservative counterparts on campus today.
New data from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), capturing over fifty thousand undergraduate students nationwide, underscores the magnitude of the mental health crisis on campus. Over 50 percent of very liberal students find it “sometimes” or “always acceptable” to shout down a speaker to prevent them from speaking on campus. Only a quarter of moderates (25 percent) and 17 percent of very conservative students agree with these sentiments. In recent years, we have seen that liberal students are far more likely to promote shutting down ideas and try to silence views that they don’t like and the recent protests nationwide against Israel are hard to ignore.
These liberal students happen to concurrently report significantly greater levels mental health issues compared to men and perhaps leading the charge to cancel those that they find objectionable is a symptom. When asked about how often one felt stressed, frustrated, or overwhelmed, 82 percent of very liberal students reported feeling stressed “about half of the time” or more often. Roughly two-thirds (66 percent) of very conservative students felt the same way. Nearly 77 percent of very liberal students report feeling anxious more than half of the time while 52 percent of very conservative students report the same. Nearly twice the number of very liberal students (49 percent) reported feeling depressed more than half of the time compared to 26 percent of very conservative students.
It turns out that very liberal students also felt lonelier and more isolated (52 percent) than their conservative counterparts (37 percent) and regularly believed they had no time for themselves (68 percent compared to 56 percent). Gender almost certainly plays a role here as well for collegiate women are far more liberal than men on campus today and women often report significantly higher rates of anxiety and depression compared to men.
Putting everything together, the numbers all make sense considering the current collegiate experience of undergraduates. Both liberal and conservative students are reporting mental health issues at an alarming rate. Not only can the mental health crisis be attributed to social media, but also to the fact that from the minute that they set foot on campus, students are thrown into a political mess.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) offices segregate students based on politics, gender, and race. Disturbingly, these DEI offices regularly force politically dangerous and inaccurate narratives upon students, making students believe that they are oppressed and victims of society. There are constant protests on campus that have now turned violent, as the nation has seen, since the eruption of the Israel- Hamas War. For students, nearly every aspect of daily life has become politicized.
Those on the left are far more susceptible to the divisive DEI messages and narratives given their outlook on power, social order, and institutions. Studies have shown that liberals embrace the logic of oppression and harm and tend to be more politically radical, insular, vocal, and politically active than their conservative counterparts. As such, when liberal students walk around campus and come into contact with different ideas or views about the world, rather than embrace the challenge and thrill of diversity, they recoil and get upset because they’ve been trained to see the world through a lens of unending harm, power differentials, and narratives of victimization. This is a narrow, unenlightened, anti-intellectual, and self-defeating way to view the world.
Since our liberal students walk around campus inundated with the political messages propagated by DEI offices and promoted on social media, while tensions understandably are running high in classrooms, dining rooms, and residence halls, it makes sense that their mental health levels are so low.
Students are living in a time where the ideological fringes are dictating campus discourse and the standards of what is politically correct keep shifting. Growing up with a diet of constant social media, Gen Z students haven’t known a world where they can healthily navigate differences face-to-face. Students going off to college should be having fun and exploring their interests. Instead, they find themselves in tense academic and social environments filled with toxic discourse, hate, and fear of being canceled, ostracized, or physically hurt. All facets of campus have become politicized, making students far more anxious, stressed, and depressed. Those who are the most susceptible to the binary oppressor/oppressed worldview – liberal students – are consequently the most worried and mentally unhealthy on campus today.
