“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.”
Researchers Forest Romm and Kevin Waldman just published a devastating portrait of undergraduate life at Northwestern University and the University of Michigan, “Performative virtue-signaling has become a threat to higher ed.” After conducting 1,452 confidential interviews, they found that 88 percent of students admitted to pretending to hold “progressive views,” that is, presenting themselves as more liberal than they actually are. But here’s what should alarm us most: they weren’t studying politics. They were studying psychological development. Their clinical question cuts to the heart of what we’ve broken in higher education: “What happens to identity formation when belief is replaced by adherence to orthodoxy?” The answer, it turns out, is that students stop maturing and start managing.
As colleges and universities prepare to welcome students back this fall, this new research demands immediate action. We are facing nothing less than a developmental crisis that threatens an entire generation’s capacity for authentic thought and genuine identity formation. The dangers documented in this study—psychological fragmentation, arrested development, and institutionalized dishonesty—cannot wait another semester to be addressed.
For anyone who teaches, these findings confirm what we see every day. Students pull me aside after class to whisper truths they would never speak in seminar. They submit papers that misrepresent their actual views; 80 percent admitted doing so to align with professors’ expectations. They perform one identity on social media while confessing another in my office hours. At Sarah Lawrence College (SLC)—my deeply progressive campus that has become shorthand for dangerous ideological conformity—students have learned that survival means splitting themselves in two: a public progressive persona that peddles virtue-signaling, and a private, questioning self.
This isn’t peer pressure. It’s identity regulation at scale, and we’ve institutionalized it.
The great economist Timur Kuran calls this “preference falsification”—when people misrepresent their beliefs under social pressure, creating an illusion of consensus that’s far more brittle than it appears. What Kuran observed in authoritarian regimes abroad now thrives on American campuses, but with a twist: we’ve wrapped it in the language of inclusion and care.
Universities justify this performative, virtue-signaling culture as necessary for creating safe spaces. But as Romm and Waldman point out, “inclusion that demands dishonesty is not ensuring psychological safety — it is sanctioning self-abandonment.” When 73 percent of students report mistrust in conversations with close friends, and nearly half conceal beliefs in intimate relationships for fear of ideological fallout, we haven’t created community; we’ve created theater.
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The Northwestern-Michigan data reveals the script students must memorize. While 87 percent privately identified as exclusively heterosexual and endorsed binary gender, the majority would never voice discomfort with policies prioritizing gender identity over biological sex in athletics or healthcare—78 percent self-censor on gender identity; 72 percent on politics; 68 percent on family values. Most tellingly, 38 percent described themselves as “morally confused”—uncertain whether honesty was still ethical if it meant social exclusion.
At SLC, we have our own term for those who break from the script: being “Sarah Lawrenced.” It’s shorthand for the cancellation that follows any ideological deviation. To be “Sarah Lawrenced” is more than social ostracism—it means being branded morally suspect, professionally radioactive, and digitally documented for life. Students aren’t paranoid when they self-censor—they’re realistic.
The real tragedy isn’t political; it’s developmental. Late adolescence and early adulthood represent what psychologists call a “narrow and non-replicable window” for identity formation. This is when young adults should be integrating personal experience with inherited values, forging moral reasoning through trial and error, and developing the resilience that comes from testing ideas and sometimes being wrong.
Instead, they’re learning to compartmentalize. To perform virtue rather than develop it. To manage impressions rather than mature into authentic selves. When belief becomes prescriptive and divergence is treated as social risk, the integrative process of identity formation simply stalls. Students graduate confident in their ability to signal righteousness but uncertain in themselves. They’ve mastered the performance but lost the plot of their own development.
I’ve written before about how this culture enables darker currents. In a recent AEI piece, I described how performative progressivism at SLC provides cover for anti-Semitism. Jewish students who challenge aggressive anti-Israel activism face intimidation disguised as social justice. The mechanism is always the same: perform the approved ideology or face consequences that extend far beyond campus.
Higher education should be where young adults test their ideas, risk being wrong, and develop the resilience to engage in civil disagreement. Instead, they are learning to calculate, to posture, to say one thing in public and another in private.
This performative culture doesn’t end at graduation. Students know that social media ensures any poorly worded sentence or unpopular opinion can follow them into internships, jobs, and careers. Integrity becomes a luxury, authenticity a liability, and the safest path is splitting themselves between public compliance and private doubt. And these aren’t isolated fears. FIRE reported in 2023 that over one million students were investigated or punished for speech, and surveys show college-educated individuals—particularly liberal women—are more likely to sever friendships over ideological differences. Students aren’t paranoid when they self-censor—they’re realistic. They’re not learning civil disagreement or resilience; they’re learning sophisticated strategies for preference falsification that they carry into workplaces, relationships, and civic life.
Let’s be clear: this is not a problem of fragile students. As I argued in a 2018 New York Times op-ed, the burden lies squarely with faculty and administrators who have built a system that rewards moral theater while punishing genuine inquiry. We model ideological rigidity. We create policies that elevate activism over analysis. We teach students that success means knowing which beliefs to perform, not which beliefs to hold.
Students told researchers that simply participating in the confidential survey felt radical—not liberating, but clarifying. For young adults trained to perform, the act of telling the truth has become revolutionary. One student described the relief of finally admitting what they actually thought, even if only to a researcher sworn to secrecy. When authenticity itself becomes an act of courage, we have fundamentally failed our educational mission.
The long-term costs are devastating. Higher education should be where young adults test their ideas, risk being wrong, and develop the resilience to engage in civil disagreement. Instead, they are learning to calculate, to posture, to say one thing in public and another in private. That hollows out trust, corrodes discourse, and leaves students weaker, not stronger, when they graduate into civic life.
With the fall semester approaching and this damning new research in hand, the responsibility falls on those of us with the security of tenure to model what we claim to value. We must act now—not with more committee meetings or diversity statements, but with concrete changes.
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Stop treating dissent as harm. Disagreement is not violence. Questions are not attacks. And viewpoint diversity is what should thrive and be embraced on every campus. Make this visible in every classroom interaction from the start.
Protect genuine pluralism. Don’t just tolerate diverse views—actively cultivate them. Show students it’s possible to hold strong convictions while engaging others respectfully.
Create spaces for intellectual risk. Establish forums where students know they can experiment with ideas without digital documentation or social punishment.
Model intellectual humility. Admit when you’re uncertain. Change your mind publicly when presented with better evidence. Show students that growth requires the freedom to be wrong.
Refuse to enable the theater. When students submit work that clearly performs rather than engages, call it out. Not punitively, but honestly. They need at least one adult who won’t play along.
The Northwestern-Michigan study isn’t just another dataset. It’s a clinical diagnosis of institutional failure at a moment when we still have time to course-correct. When nearly 90 percent of students admit to faking their views, when moral confusion becomes the norm, when young adults must choose between authenticity and belonging, we’ve broken the fundamental promise of liberal education. As Romm and Waldman conclude, higher education “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.”
Professors and administrators face a choice this fall. We can either step in now, reclaim higher education as a space for truth-seeking, and give students the courage to think out loud—or we can continue down the path of silence and pretense. But if we fail to do our job, we should not be surprised when lawmakers and regulators step in to do it for us.
But if we choose the latter and if we continue prioritizing performance over development, consensus over growth, compliance over character, we shouldn’t be surprised when our students graduate knowing how to signal virtue but not how to live it. The time for denial is over. The evidence is overwhelming. And as campuses reopen, we have a narrow window to decide: Will we continue this charade of performative progressivism, or will we have the courage to let our students be honest: with us, with each other, and most importantly, with themselves?
Image by Александр Ланевский on Adobe Stock; Asset ID#: 634772990
