"It's fine if they know I'm gay. I just don't want them to think I'm conservative."

What one student's experience with self-censorship can tell us about sociology specifically and campus culture more generally.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

The student’s email was brief and to the point. She was writing to ask whether I had a few minutes to talk about something she’d been too nervous to bring up in class. The class she was referring to is the Sociology of Political Polarization: Bigots and Snowflakes. [I am sharing her story with her permission.]

When we spoke in the hallway the following day, she told me she is both politically liberal and gay. She then proceeded to recount a conversation with her girlfriend from a few days earlier. They had been talking about political parody. The conversation turned to the satirical liberal publication, the Onion, and the two young women laughed together about some of its funnier stories. As they continued talking, my student mentioned to her girlfriend that she also followed the Babylon Bee, a somewhat analogously satirical conservative account. With the cheeky tagline, “Fake news you can trust,” the Babylon Bee website has headlines like, “Elmo Radicalized After Migrants Bused to Sesame Street” and “Joe Biden Sees Shadow, Attempts to Shake Its Hand.”

Her girlfriend didn’t miss a beat in responding. The fact that my student followed the account, let alone sometimes found the contents amusing, was a “red flag” in the relationship.  

As reactionary as the girlfriend’s response may sound, in some ways it’s not that surprising. After all, our collective tendency to prefer political siloes and echo chambers isn’t exactly new. But I didn’t expect what came next.

By way of context, at the start of each class, I tell students “The floor is open.” They know that’s an open invitation to bring up goings on in the world that are related to the topic of political polarization. It could be something they’ve read or seen or a conversation they’ve had.

Standing in the hallway that day, the student told me she had wanted to share the story about the Babylon Bee with the class but didn’t feel comfortable doing so. What bothered her most, and what prompted her to bring this up with me separately, was the reason she didn’t feel comfortable. She was self-conscious about her classmates judging her. But she wasn’t worried about being judged for being gay—“I have a pride flag on my laptop,” she said proudly. She was worried about being judged for following a satirical conservative social media account. That’s when she wondered out loud: When did it become more controversial to be conservative than it is to be gay? 

***

There’s good reason to believe my student is not misreading the situation. After all, the politically one-sided culture in much of American higher education has created a well-documented trail of wreckage (see here for a discussion of select examples). While many factors have brought campuses to this point, my home discipline of sociology bears some responsibility. Enough so that, in December 2023, when the Florida Commissioner of Education posted on X, with no small amount of snark, “Sociology has been hijacked by left-wing activists…” perhaps the only thing he was missing is that the discipline’s liberal bent isn’t especially new. 

Sociology’s role in campus culture is likely part of why, on January 24, the State University System of Florida approved an amendment to the General Education options that removed a course called “Principles of Sociology” from the list of those that could count for general education credit. It’s a decision that brought the indignation of both the American Sociological Association (ASA) and the mainstream media.

I feel obligated to note here that acknowledging sociology’s liberal slant doesn’t necessarily mean that I agree with Florida’s top-down attempt at a solution. But it does mean that I understand how they got there. By contrast, the ASA seems mystified. They wrote in public comment to the Florida Board of Governors, “…no such compelling reason was provided” for the decision to drop the course. And yet, for anyone paying attention, the reasons have been there for years. The fact that the ASA doesn’t seem to see this remains part of the problem.

If you’re unsure how this culture emerges, consider a single example. A syllabus for the Florida Principles in Sociology course refers on its first page to something called the “sociological imagination,” a core concept in intro level sociology courses on campuses nationwide, including my own.

The “sociological imagination” challenges the learner to look at social problems with an eye to understanding the broader societal and structural context in which they unfold. At its best, it can be a reminder that an individual isn’t necessarily, for instance, unemployed solely because of their own life choices and that local and national economic conditions (e.g., the unemployment rate) also likely play a role.

At its worst, seeing the world through the “sociological imagination” can lead to the unwarranted conclusion that any consideration of individual level determinants (e.g., work ethic, grit, resilience, preferences, etc…) is itself morally reprehensible. After all, the thinking goes, it amounts to blaming victims for their lot in life if and when they don’t succeed. (Let’s call victim blaming Point A.)

How does this all tie back to my student’s fear of judgment? To wildly oversimplify our political landscape, conservatives tend to prioritize the role of individual choice and behavior in determining outcomes, while liberals tend to prioritize the role of structural causes, including those of the “sociological imagination.” (Let’s call this oversimplification Point B.)

Point A + Point B = Point C, where Point C is a culture where to be conservative is to be morally reprehensible.

The upshot is this: Unless someone is prepared to argue that my student’s perception was wildly off or that she was responding to a political climate that is unique either to my class or to the U of I campus, there are both first and second order problems here. After all, it’s one thing to have a particular political bias. It’s quite another to pretend, as the ASA seems to, that bias doesn’t exist or that its effects aren’t real.

In the end, any discipline (or institution) serious about its role in our national political discourse—as sociology hopes to be—should be equally committed to a culture where a gay woman who finds conservative parody funny shouldn’t be ashamed of being seen as either.