To succeed socially or academically, students “have pretended to hold more progressive views than [they] truly endorse,” according to a first-of-its-kind study of Northwestern University and University of Michigan students by researchers Forest Romm and Kevin Waldman.
An astounding 88 percent of 1,452 undergraduate students privately interviewed at these institutions admitted to pretending to be more liberal than they actually are to make life easier.
“In a campus environment where grades, leadership, and peer belonging often hinge on fluency in performative morality, young adults quickly learn to rehearse what is safe,” Romm and Waldman explain. “Publicly, they conform; privately, they question — often in isolation. This split between outer presentation and inner conviction not only fragments identity but arrests its development.”
Romm and Waldman also discovered in their interviews that 78 percent of students self-censor on their beliefs surrounding gender identity and more than 80 percent had “submitted classwork that misrepresented their views in order to align with professors.” Nearly half of students said they “routinely conceal beliefs in intimate relationships for fear of ideological fallout.”
“In public, students echoed expected progressive narratives. In private, however, their views were more complex,” continue Romm and Waldman. They further tested the gap between expression and belief on the topic of gender — 77 percent disagreed with gender identity overriding biological sex in sports, health care, or public data but would not voice that disagreement out loud.
“When given permission to speak freely, many [students] described the experience of participating in our survey not as liberating, but as clarifying. … For students trained to perform, the act of telling the truth felt radical,” write Romm and Waldman. “This is not simply peer pressure — it is identity regulation at scale, and it is being institutionalized.”
Identity regulation has found its way through the K-12 classroom doors, as well.
Coming to a public K-12 classroom near you beginning fall 2026, Minnesota’s new social studies standards now require schools to teach a form of critical social justice ideology known as “liberated” ethnic studies. This version of ethnic studies deems that power, privilege, and oppression shape society on the basis of reductive “identity” categories. Students will be pressured to embrace an identity rooted in either guilt and shame or grievance and resentment and give special weight to the perspectives of certain racial groups.
Here is an ethnic studies standard:
Identity: Analyze the ways power and language construct the social identities of race, religion, geography, ethnicity, and gender. Apply these understandings to one’s own social identities and other groups living in Minnesota, centering those whose stories and histories have been marginalized, erased, or ignored. [Standard 23]
High school students must:
- “Examine the construction of racialized hierarchies based on colorism and dominant European beauty standards and values.” [9.5.23.2]
- “Explain the social construction of race and how it was used to oppress people of color. Assess how social policies and economic forces offer privilege or systematic oppressions for racial/ethnic groups related to accessing social, political, economic and spatial opportunities.” [9.3.17.3]
- “Identify patterns, intersections and causes of stratification (including racial, class, gender…) that lead to social inequalities.” [9.4.19.12]
- “Investigate the connection between language and power and how it has been used for and against various racialized and ethnic groups.” [9.5.23.3]
This oppressed v. oppressor hierarchy is consistent with Minnesota Statutes Section 120B.25, which defines ethnic studies as the “interdisciplinary study of race, ethnicity, and indigeneity with a focus on the experiences and perspectives of people of color…” and “the connection of race to the stratification of other groups, including stratification based on the protected classes under section 363A.13.” Protected classes include race, color, creed, and similar classifications.
Supporters claim Minnesota needs this version of ethnic studies because it allows students to “see themselves in the curriculum” and discover “their identity.”
Indeed, liberated ethnic studies leaves no doubt that one of its key goals is developing in students a strong sense of “identity” — one that is shaped by broad, reductive racial categories. Teaching students to view themselves and the world, though, through the narrow lens of critical identitarian politics promotes ideological conformity, not education, preventing students from true critical analysis, independent thinking, and open inquiry.
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Minnesota school boards are in charge of selecting the textbooks and instructional materials that will be used to teach these new K-12 social studies standards. Ask your school board about serving on the District Advisory Committee, which helps plan and improve the instruction and curriculum affecting state academic standards.
