BUZZ
This is ‘tear it down and start over’- level bad, Temple professor responds
There’s a “quiet psychological crisis, driven by the demands of ideological conformity” on college campuses today, two Northwestern University scholars wrote this week at The Hill.
Psychology researchers Forest Romm and Kevin Waldman said they recently conducted research on University of Michigan and Northwestern students, and found that 88 percent pretend to be more politically progressive than they actually are.
Even in conversations with close friends, nearly half of the students said they hid their beliefs or doubts due to “fear of ideological fallout,” according to the researchers.
You’re not wrong—everyone has been lying about what they really think. pic.twitter.com/w0nz9YvzCP
— Forest Romm (@Forest_Romm) August 12, 2025
Their research focused on identity formation in young adults, not politics or free speech, they wrote:
Between 2023 and 2025, we conducted 1,452 confidential interviews with undergraduates at Northwestern University and the University of Michigan. We were not studying politics — we were studying development. Our question was clinical, not political: “What happens to identity formation when belief is replaced by adherence to orthodoxy?”
We asked: Have you ever pretended to hold more progressive views than you truly endorse to succeed socially or academically? An astounding 88 percent said yes.
Romm and Waldman also asked the students about the hot-button topic of “gender.” They found that students voiced more progressive views in public and more doubts about that position in private:
In public, students echoed expected progressive narratives. In private, however, their views were more complex. Eighty-seven percent identified as exclusively heterosexual and supported a binary model of gender. Nine percent expressed partial openness to gender fluidity. Just seven percent embraced the idea of gender as a broad spectrum, and most of these belonged to activist circles.
Perhaps most telling: 77 percent said they disagreed with the idea that gender identity should override biological sex in such domains as sports, healthcare, or public data — but would never voice that disagreement aloud. Thirty-eight percent described themselves as “morally confused,” uncertain whether honesty was still ethical if it meant exclusion.
“This is not simply peer pressure — it is identity regulation at scale, and it is being institutionalized,” they wrote at The Hill. “Universities often justify these dynamics in the name of inclusion. But inclusion that demands dishonesty is not ensuring psychological safety — it is sanctioning self-abandonment.”
Romm said the full results of their research will be published in the fall.
Reacting online, other professors agreed the results are worrying.
Temple University geography Professor Jacob Shell said the findings suggest higher education is irrevocably broken.
“If the number’s actually right, this is the most damning thing I’ve ever read about higher ed. I don’t usually say this but this level of coerced mendacity is ‘tear it down and start over’-level bad,” Shell wrote on X.
Nancy Pearcy, a conservative Christian author and professor at Houston Christian University, also commented on X, “Being pressured or coerced to affirm views you do not really hold creates an internal crisis of integrity–what psychologists call a ‘moral injury.’”
Other researchers have found similarly high reports of self-censorship — including among young adults after college graduation. Some professors admit they self-censor to avoid controversy, too.
While these conversations typically center around constitutional rights and politics, the Northwestern researchers said their concerns have to do more with how self-censorship and conformity impact young adults’ mental development.
“If higher education is to fulfill its promise as a site of intellectual and moral development, it must relearn the difference between support and supervision. It must re-center truth — not consensus — as its animating value. And it must give back to students what it has taken from them: the right to believe, and the space to become,” they wrote.
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IMAGE CAPTION AND CREDIT: A young woman covers her mouth; WAYHOME studio/Shutterstock
