The hidden dissenters
Performative virtue-signaling has become a threat to higher ed
On today’s college campuses, students are not maturing — they’re managing. Beneath a facade of progressive slogans and institutional virtue-signaling lies a quiet psychological crisis, driven by the demands of ideological conformity.
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?”
Now that is an interesting question. My bet is that nothing good happens.
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.
These students were not cynical, but adaptive. 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.
The result is not conviction but compliance. And beneath that compliance, something vital is lost.
Knowing how to think for yourself, for one thing.
To be fair, I don’t think I think social pressure–>conformity is always a bad thing. Social pressure to give up the little hatreds it’s so easy to pick up from being around other people can be a not-bad thing. Racism used to be entirely taken for granted in the US, and social pressure was necessary to break through [some of] that.
Of course the trans ideologues think that’s what they’re doing – breaking through a bad stupid destructive prejudice that has no foundation in reality. But they’re wrong.
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. Eighty-seven percent identified as exclusively heterosexual and supported a binary model of gender. Nine percent expressed partial openness to gender fluidity. Just seven percent embraced the idea of gender as a broad spectrum, and most of these belonged to activist circles.
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. Thirty-eight percent described themselves as “morally confused,” uncertain whether honesty was still ethical if it meant exclusion.
Fascinating. 77 percent are gender sane but would never say so aloud.
Worth keeping in mind when the shouting starts.
I’m not really sure what the authors mean by “progressive”; being more specific might have been nice. For instance, I believe that gender identity is a damaging social construct rooted in sexism, something I have never dared to state publicly. But I wouldn’t say that I’ve ever “pretended to hold more progressive views than I truly endorse,” because I don’t regard the view that humans have magical gender souls as being very progressive at all.
Yeah there’s progressive and then there’s “progressive.”
*Sigh*. I wish everyone who accepts biological reality would stop saying “gender” when what they really mean is “sex”. In Genderspeak the above quote means that eighty-seven percent support the idea that there are just two ways of thinking / feeling / identifying / “presenting” etc. I’m pretty sure that’s not what they meant to say. As others have put it, there are two sexes, zero genders and eight-billion personalities.
Mosnae, I think it is “progressive” in the Sir Humphrey sense. “We must do something. This is something. We must do this”. See also: reform, the desperate fear of being on the wrong side of history, of being left behind, growing old and irrelevant, FOMO.
It’s not so much performative as procedural. Authenticity now longer counts or even is no longer possible. We’ve all seen too many movies/TV shows and we’ve become terminally genre savvy. (I was discussing dreams with my sister. It seems both of us are dreaming movies. She had a horrible dream about zombies but the worst part about it was the dramatically unsatisfying ending.)
I think I’ve said before that each new media technology has horrible consequences. Printing gave us The Thirty years War. Radio gave us fascism. And the internet has given us what ever this is. I hope the study is right. At least the fact that a large majority can recognise what’s going on, even if as yet they can only admit it privately, is a good sign.
At the same time, you’ve got the Trump administration interfering and threatening colleges, and I can’t blame any student for wanting to performatively distance themselves from that. This blog really does seem to be about the only place where people believe that climate change and women are both real.
The Revolution will not be televised. But it will be Instagrammed. And you will Like it.
I went to college before the internet. That means that I did stupid things, and said stupid things, that are now lost and forgotten. Kids today don’t have that luxury. Their every error could end up in a viral video. There’s no censorship quite like self-censorship.
College was a great place to find freedom, but freedom, these days, only comes after cancellation. Will there be a revolt against this woke totalitarianism?
“uncertain whether honesty was still ethical”
That’s it. I’m moving to a cabin in the Yukon, 300 miles removed from any other human.
Piglet, I just had a vision of a Venn diagram with two circles labelled believes climate change is real and believes biology defines sex, with the lines just barely kissing. Yup, that does feel like B&W some days.
It must be so comforting to believe climate change isn’t real.