Neil Gross
Subject: How Your Politics Effects Your College Experience
Bio: Professor of Sociology at Colby College and Author of What Happened to College, How Politics Broke Higher Education and What We Can Do to Fix It
Transcript:
Larry Bernstein:
Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast that covers economics, politics, and culture. This episode is How Your Politics Effects Your College Experience.
Our speaker is Neil Gross, a Professor of Sociology at Colby who will discuss his book What Happened to College, How Politics Broke Higher Education and What We Can Do to Fix It.
I want to learn from Neil how college students’ political affiliations impact their friendships and dating, their classroom interactions with the faculty and other students, and their choice of major and career decisions.
Neil, can you please begin with six minutes of opening remarks.
Neil Gross:
My name is Neil Gross. I’m a sociologist and professor at Colby College, and I’m the author of a new book called What Happened to College, How Politics Broke Higher Education and What We Can Do to Fix It.
I started working on it in 2023 after that year of protests and encampments on campus. It was clear that something big was happening, at least at the highly selective colleges where those protests were concentrated. I gathered data, ran a bunch of surveys, did in-depth interviews with about a hundred students at 18 colleges and universities nationwide.
I learned that not every college student is invested in politics, but among those who are, especially at the more selective schools, it’s shaping aspects of undergraduate life -- where students decide to go to school, who they become friends with, what they major in, what they’re willing to say in class, even who they’ll date.
Dating apps turn out to be an excellent source of information on how college students are thinking about intimacy. Every year, Marriage Pact, a matchmaking site for college students, selects dozens of schools across the country from Stanford and the University of Nebraska to Notre Dame, Princeton, and the University of Florida, and invites their students to fill out a questionnaire. Would they consider a partner who drinks, does hard drugs? Do they believe in soulmates? Are they into activism?
The site then matches them with another student at their college. The ruse being that if in the future they can’t find anyone to marry, they can connect with their match and see if the two of them could make it work. Most students see the site as more of a game than anything else, though people do get together through it. At the end of every match cycle, the company releases a report for each school, summing up the student body’s overall dating preferences. Consider the report released in 2024 for Georgetown University. One of the findings was that 45% of liberals and Democrats said they wouldn’t date a Republican, and 30% said they wouldn’t date a conservative. By contrast, only 8% of conservatives said they wouldn’t date a liberal or a Democrat, while about 20% of Republicans said the same. Students who described themselves as apolitical, not a huge share of the Georgetown student body, had no political preferences when it came to dating. At UNC Chapel Hill, 53% of Democrats said they wouldn’t date a Republican, while 32% of Republicans felt the same way about Democrats.
Other surveys echo these findings. An Axios poll found that nearly three-quarters of college students nationally who describe themselves as Democrats wouldn’t want to date someone with opposing views. Women were much more likely to say no thanks to cross-party dating. In a poll of more than 2,000 Americans aged 18 to 29 conducted in the spring of 25 by Harvard’s Institute of Politics, 58% of college students said that political agreement was important in romantic relationships, while only 13% said it was unimportant.
Most of the students I spoke to told me that dating someone with similar politics was essential. If you were looking for evidence that polarization has now made its way into every nook and cranny of the undergraduate experience, this is it. “Romantically, it’s a big deal if someone politically disagrees with you,” a liberal econ major told me. “It’s almost hard to see them as trustworthy if they don’t see eye to eye with you on those kinds of things.” A business student whom I interviewed not long after the 2024 election told me there was plenty of disagreement over politics in her sorority, where she was on the more liberal side. That hadn’t caused huge rifts between her and her sorority sisters because she wasn’t, quote, super confrontational. But “I would say that for romantic relationships, that’s a huge consideration. You know, me personally, I don’t really think you can be romantically involved with someone at this political stage, because I think the two views are so different. I feel like if
If you’re not aligned on a lot of issues, it just causes problems.” A political science major at a state school in the South told me. It’s definitely a big thing on campus within friendships, groups, and especially romantic relationships. She said, “a lot of people are using dating apps where you put your what your political views, are or your religious views or whatever, and you might automatically swipe one way or another without getting to know a person just because they have that label there.” Just under 40% of straight college men and women are on these apps. The number drops to 60% for gay women and 70% for gay men.
College men tend to be more conservative than college women. I heard a lot of stories about college women trying to suss out the politics of the guys they were considering dating, and I heard stories about college men doing things to disguise their politics to connect with a girl on campus.
Larry Bernstein:
Is this new, or have dating decisions always been shaped by politics?
Neil Gross:
There’s always been an element of it. If you look back at college dating in the 1960s or early 1970s, people might not have wanted to date someone with opposing views of the Vietnam War. But it’s more central now than it has been in a long time. This rises to the surface during moments of intense political conflict, and we’re in one of those moments right now.
At times when polarization is intense, people don’t want to be friends with anyone on the other side, much less be involved with them romantically. This for me is symptomatic of a society that’s tearing itself apart.
Larry Bernstein:
When I toured colleges with my children, I heard all about dining halls and sports and nothing about choice of majors, faculty quality, or job placement. Students choose colleges without the appropriate relevant information. I would expect that a campus’s political leanings would be a minor factor in how students pick a university.
Neil Gross:
Politics was not the most important factor for any of the students I talked to. Most of them put at the top of the list how prestigious the school was or what kind of job they thought they could get from going to that school.
But when they had a choice between different institutions that were similar, politics could matter for at the margins. There’s more information available to them. There are websites like niche.com that list information about the schools and the political leanings of the student body. Colleges are selling themselves to potential consumers.
It’s a consumer mentality — I want to choose the school that’s going to be the best fit for me. For some students, that’s about politics. It’s part of the school menu.
Larry Bernstein:
When my son and I listened to the admissions presentation at George Washington University, the speaker boasted that GW had the most politically active student body in the country. My son turned to me and whispered, “Let’s get out of here.” He is not interested in politics. How common is that reaction?
Neil Gross:
There are a growing number of young people who find politics toxic, don’t want anything to do with it, and certainly don’t want it to color their college experience. This micro-generation that entered college right after 2023 saw what happened. A lot of them are like your son. They want what they imagine college used to be decades ago. On the other hand, I talked to a bunch of students who said, “This college I looked at had this huge history for activism, and that’s why I wanted to go there.”
Larry Bernstein:
Is political sorting in dating different with college kids than elsewhere?
Neil Gross:
It’s not specific to universities. It’s happening more generally. If you’re a conservative student on a quite progressive campus, it can be hard to find someone willing to date you romantically, and vice versa. But colleges have historically been places where lots of social connections are made and social networks are built. If we’re setting colleges up as places where people are going to sort themselves into different corners based on their politics, then those same people, when they enter important jobs in our society, are going to continue with that sorting.
Larry Bernstein:
Why are Democrats so much less willing to date Republicans than vice versa?
Neil Gross:
This is at least partially a Trump effect. College men are somewhat more conservative than college women. That gap has been growing. If you were a college who was a strong backer of President Trump, then that would push you over the edge.
The other argument that’s been advanced is maybe there’s something about people on the left who are more intolerant than people on the right for speech, but also who they’re willing to date. I don’t know if the evidence for that is very strong.
Larry Bernstein:
In my experience, men and women weigh these things differently. For young men, I suspect looks outweigh politics about 50:1.
Neil Gross:
Especially at very selective colleges, there is more hesitancy now than there was when we went to school for people to be involved in intense long-term partnerships. Students at these top schools are incredibly professionally minded. They are scheduled to the nines. They spend far more time in clubs. We’re seeing this growing divide between men and women in their political affiliations. If you’re a woman and you believe firmly in reproductive rights, the idea that you might date someone who thinks those rights should be restricted might be a huge turnoff.
One of my interviewees who attended a school in the West gave me an example. After Trump’s re-election in 2024, there were fireworks going off from the fraternity. She said, “I’m never going to go anywhere near that fraternity again.” On average, fraternity members and sorority members do tend to be more conservative than the rest of the population.
Larry Bernstein:
Let’s turn to self-censorship. Students have always been somewhat guarded in class, since the professor grades them. How have classroom discussions been affected?
Neil Gross:
Students are holding back. If you’re taking a linear algebra class, no one’s expecting you to talk about politics, and if you did, people should shut you down. But in classes in the social sciences and humanities where there’s real political content, students with more moderate or conservative positions very often felt uncomfortable expressing their views in class. Even if professors said, “You can say whatever you want, but I’m not going to grade you down because of it,” the students wouldn’t believe them.
Students would try to ferret out what the views were of their faculty. They’d look on social media accounts or what they’d written in op-eds. The bigger pressure on students is from their peers. They said, “I’m worried about my faculty member, but I’m really worried about what my peers are going to say.” Friendship is more precious now in this smartphone post COVID generation. They don’t want to tick off someone who could end up being a potential friend and could invite them to a party or not.
Larry Bernstein:
My kids felt real pressure in high school to conform their papers and comments in class discussion to be consistent with their teacher’s ideological preferences.
Neil Gross:
Some of these pressures are more intense in high school than in college. There certainly are very progressive faculty in colleges, not least in departments of English and comparative literature. There is a general inclination among faculty that they shouldn’t impose their vision quite so intensely on their students.
The other piece that I find sad is that students should be less concerned with grades in college than they are in high school. I always encourage my students to pay a lot less attention to grades in college because it’s more about what you learn than about what your grades are.
Larry Bernstein:
A central theme of your book is that students now choose their friends based on politics. I did not behave like that in college. What changed?
Neil Gross:
A big part of what happened is what happened in the country, which is that people on the left and people on the right drifted further apart on a whole range of issues.
Across the country, people started sorting themselves along political lines. You want to be friends with people who share your values, who are part of the same team. It’s very hard for a country to come together if people don’t know anyone who has political views that differ from them. It’s easy to imagine that everyone on the other side is a horrible, awful person.
Larry Bernstein:
In 1986, my Penn history professor Walter Licht lamented that my generation, unlike his, didn’t protest, and he called it a tragedy. Today’s students run encampments and disrupt classes. Is this just a pendulum swinging back to be like the 1960s?
Neil Gross:
Pendulum swings theories of history are interesting. I don’t think we have strong evidence that that’s necessarily true. Students today are both political and pre-professionally minded. They’re choosing a relatively small number of majors that they think are going to help get them the jobs they want. They are singularly focused on grades and the next step in their lives, but they’re also quite political. If you have very progressive economic views and plan to go into investment banking, it’s hard for those to square.
Larry Bernstein:
I was a high school debater, attended summer debate camps at Northwestern and Georgetown, and my old debate partners are still close friends. A coin flip decided which side you argued in the tournament, and I’ve kept that habit of being prepared to argue either side. Defending both positions of an argument gave me a much better appreciation of the issue.
Neil Gross:
There’s concern that students today are losing those skills. When I first started doing this research, I had a conversation with a debate coach at a big Midwestern program. He told me that after the October 7th Hamas terrorist attacks, many of his team members told him that they would not debate on the pro-Israel side.
Students are unwilling to take sides in law school debates that they don’t agree with, which is the opposite of what you need a lawyer to do.
Larry Bernstein:
Tell us about your previous book on why professors lean left.
Neil Gross:
That one is called Why Are Professors Liberal and Why Do Conservatives Care? Is it bias against conservative applicants for jobs? That does sometimes happen, but usually there’s not enough conservatives applying for jobs that it could make a huge difference.
Academia has been seen, at least since the 1930s that is more appropriate for people on the left. If you’re a young person, you’re smart, you might think to yourself, if you’re on the left, “I could see myself becoming a professor.” If you’re on the right, you might think, “I’m academically talented. That’s not for me. These are not my people.” In the same way that occupations can be sex-typed, jobs can also be politically typed. That’s what happened to higher education.
Larry Bernstein:
Jon Shields analyzed course syllabi and found that progressive professors who say they can teach conservative ideas even-handedly predominantly assign left-leaning readings.
Neil Gross:
Jon Shields is great. We’re friends and collaborating on a project now. I think that analysis is quite interesting. It’s one of the challenges in thinking about the politics of higher education is that there’s often a gap between what people say they do and what they actually do.
Some professors say, “I don’t bring my politics to the classroom,” but they actually do. One of the things that’s neat about the syllabus is that it’s more of a behavioral measure.
It can be harder for exclusively progressive faculty to channel a conservative argument as forcefully as someone on the right. You don’t want to hire professors based on their politics. That’s a terrible idea. Because of the political typing I’ve just described the number of students who are on the right and who go into PhD programs in sociology, political science, history is very, very small. There’s a joint effort between Hopkins and the American Enterprise Institute to begin cultivating students who have non-standardly progressive views, moderates and folks on the right. It’s not a progressive monoculture. If you look at faculty views on substantive issues, there’s a fair bit of disagreement that doesn’t extend to include any people on the right.
Larry Bernstein:
Why should conservatives care?
Neil Gross:
I don’t know that they care more now, but they have been recently in more of a position to do something than previously. This has been a concern of folks in the right, at least since the nineteen fifties, since Bill Buckley’s day, when he wrote God and Man at Yale.
The Trump administration has been quite eager to take on higher ed, especially focused on the elite institutions. You’re seeing this at the state level as well, with states insisting on ideological diversity as a condition for tenure.
It is also a function of polarization. In “red” states, the right simply has more power than it did 20 years ago, and the administration that’s in office now is far more willing to break norms to bring about the change that it wants.
Larry Bernstein:
Daniel Diermeier, the chancellor of Vanderbilt, was a recent guest on my podcast. He strongly backs the University of Chicago principles on campus speech.
Neil Gross:
The core idea here is institutional neutrality, the idea that the university itself as an organization should remain neutral so that faculty can feel free to share whatever views they want, so that students can share whatever views they want.
I do share that goal. My concern is more in its application than in the core idea of it. In some places this idea of institutional neutrality has been seen as indicating that professors in their roles as professors shouldn’t take political stances. That is the opposite of what the University of Chicago principles were designed to do. It was not calling for political quiet on campus; it was calling for political engagement that would be not overrun by the ideas of the institution. The idea has always been university should remain institutionally neutral, except on questions that bear directly on the operations of the university. But that is a big question mark.
Larry Bernstein:
Diermeier uses as an example that a university shouldn’t take an institutional position on abortion or Israel-Gaza. That said a university could speak out in public debates about issues that were central to its mission like its own funding.
Neil Gross:
Critics of the institutional neutrality idea would say, “Are those lines being drawn arbitrarily?” If you’re a school in a state that has an abortion ban and you’re trying to attract students from out of state, and those students are reluctant to come if they’re female, does that not affect the flow of students to your school? I don’t think you can make a clean demarcation there, but I do think, in line with what Diermeier suggests, that we have got to try.
Larry Bernstein:
That goes to the heart of your book. Do you want political debate in classrooms?
Neil Gross:
The answer is you do. It’s more important right now that universities take seriously that they are places that produce new knowledge, but they are also places to teach people how to debate, how to engage passionately but respectfully with one another.
Yale’s recently issued report on trust in higher education pushed universities in this direction. My book is a call to arms for university administrators to reduce polarization on college campuses.
Larry Bernstein:
You mention in your book that students on the left and the right cluster in very different majors. Why is that?
Neil Gross:
If you look at more selective campuses, there’s not that many students on the right, it’s around 20 percent or so, and those students are concentrating in fields like finance, accounting, and engineering. Students who are progressive have tended to concentrate more on the social sciences and the humanities. The hard sciences are in the middle.
Part of it is a desire to be with people who have similar politics. The problem is that it means that there are fewer spaces on campus where folks on the right and left can get together in an academic sense to debate.
Larry Bernstein:
Are you optimistic about more open debate on college campuses?
Neil Gross:
Colleges and universities went off the rails. Confidence in higher ed is going down, and that does relate to the perception that it is exclusively progressive, not fostering critical thinking and debate. You’re seeing schools start to come around and make efforts at course corrections.
This younger generation of college students saw cancel culture, and they’re not interested in taking part in it. I’m hopeful that things are moving in a better direction for higher education and for our democracy.
Larry Bernstein:
Thanks to Neil for joining us.
If you missed our previous podcast, it was AI and Human Connections.
Our first speaker was Allison Pugh a Professor of Sociology at John Hopkins and the author of a book entitled The Last Human Job: Seeing Each Other in an Age of Automation.
Our second speaker was Eddie Monroe who is working on teaching AI how to love. He is the lead for building artificial intelligence for the Loving AI Research Project.
Our conversation focused on the concern that AI may undermine human relationships and lead to greater loneliness and what we can do about it.
Previous episodes and transcripts are available on our website as well as on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
I am Larry Bernstein with the podcast What Happens Next.
Check out our previous episode, Why All Cities Grown Alike, here.
