Faking Wokeness to Fit In
88% of students report pretending to hold more progressive views than they really do
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Faking Wokeness to Fit In
A new study finds that nearly nine in ten students fake more progressive views than they really hold, often to appease professors or stay in their peers’ good graces. The habit doesn’t stop at the classroom door; even close friends and romantic partners are kept in the dark. From lecture halls to late-night conversations, students are learning that conformity pays and candor costs. If universities still see themselves as incubators of independent thought, these numbers should be a wake-up call. Can students truly develop as thinkers when honesty feels unsafe?
Below is an excerpt from an article in The Hill by the study’s authors, Forest Romm and Kevin Waldman. You can read the full piece here.
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…
Seventy-eight percent of students told us they self-censor on their beliefs surrounding gender identity; 72 percent on politics; 68 percent on family values. More than 80 percent said they had submitted classwork that misrepresented their views in order to align with professors…
To test the gap between expression and belief, we used gender discourse — a contentious topic both highly visible and ideologically loaded. In public, students echoed expected progressive narratives. In private, however, their views were more complex…
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…
And this fragmentation doesn’t end at the classroom door.
Seventy-three percent of students reported mistrust in conversations about these values with close friends. Nearly half said they routinely conceal beliefs in intimate relationships for fear of ideological fallout…
This is not sustainable.
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.
You can read Romm and Waldman’s article here.
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Thanks for posting this jaw dropping research. If they are right, and it looks as though they are, it should be a fairly quick clean up by pointing out the emperor has no clothes thus allowing people the space to believe as they wish. Wouldn't it be great to have the universities back to be hubs of debate and wonderful disagreement? In some ways this is very good news!
Has this been published in an academic journal anywhere? Would be interesting to have a closer look at the data.
In particular, whether female students are more likely than male to conform to the prevailing ideology