What conclusions might we draw from our results? Above all, significant numbers of undergraduates feel reluctant to discuss certain topics in a university setting.
Between 20 per cent and 40 per cent of respondents said they would feel uncomfortable “speaking up and giving their views” in discussions about gender, politics, religion, and sexual orientation.
Sixty-five per cent of our respondents said they would feel uncomfortable discussing at least one of the topics surveyed. The equivalent figure in a previous Heterodox Academy survey of US students was 57 per cent.
New Zealand students are in some ways markedly different to their American counterparts. Only 13 per cent of our sample described themselves as religious, for instance, compared with 56 per cent of their US peers.
Nonetheless, our results generally echoed previous Campus Expression Surveys administered in the US.
In both countries, female students were more reluctant to talk about politics and religion. In both countries, right-leaning students were generally more reluctant to express their views. In both countries, religious students were more reluctant to share their views on sexual orientation and on politics.
Against this backdrop of similarity, one or two differences do emerge. In contrast to the US, where women were more reluctant to talk about sexual orientation, in New Zealand, male students are more hesitant to share their views on this topic. How much this has to do with fear of a progressive backlash, and how much with particularly Kiwi notions of masculinity, is impossible to say.
On the whole, though, our results seem to support the contention that a significant number of students at New Zealand universities don’t feel comfortable discussing certain topics in the classroom. And they suggest that more conservative, straight, and religious students feel particularly inhibited.
Many of the students we surveyed perceived the climate for open discussions on campus differently. Over 40 per cent said they thought that gay, lesbian, and bisexual students would feel less comfortable in class discussions. Very few thought that straight or male students would feel uncomfortable. But straight and male students’ own self-reports suggest that they are in fact among the most inhibited of all students in this regard.
We compared our results mainly with other results from Campus Expression Surveys in the US. But our work also contributes to a growing body of data from across the English-speaking world. Recent surveys in the UK (by King’s College London), Australia (the Institute for Public Affairs), and Canada (Maclean’s magazine) have found a similarly chilled climate for discussion on campus, especially for right-of-centre students.
Regularly taking the temperature of campus free speech through surveys should now become a feature of higher education discourse in this country, as it has in other English-speaking countries. In the meantime, our survey further contributes to a rising tide of evidence that there is a problem with free speech on Anglophone university campuses, including in New Zealand.
- Dr James Kierstead is Senior Lecturer in Classics at Victoria University of Wellington and a Research Fellow at the New Zealand Initiative. Dr Michael Johnston is a Senior Lecturer in Education at Victoria and a Senior Research Fellow at the New Zealand Initiative.
