Most classes blur together, until the rare moment when a professor stops lecturing and starts professing. Maybe they critique a policy that’s on the slide behind them or question a trend that you hadn’t thought twice about. These are the parts of class I love — when professors lower their guard and share the viewpoint that lets you see the heart of why they teach.
But these moments appear unevenly across the University. Humanities students tend to encounter them more than anyone else. A government or history professor can integrate their views naturally into a discussion; a chemistry professor, however, cannot exactly explain a “socialist theory of bond structure.”
The difference matters because these classes where professors bring their opinion are limited. When even those spaces of expression are pressured, honest expression begins to feel impossible. Today, that pressure is growing.
According to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, 64 percent of faculty say they occasionally feel they can’t express their opinions fully. Compared to 2019, there has been a 20 percentage-point drop in how strongly professors believe they have academic freedom in teaching. In clearer terms: faculty across the board are significantly less confident that speaking openly is safe. But why?
Conservative faculty teach within overwhelmingly liberal institutions with about 60 percent of professors nationally identifying as liberal. About 55 percent say they hide their political views for fear of backlash from colleagues. At elite universities, the imbalance is even sharper with conservative faculty making up 9 percent of Harvard faculty and 14 percent at Duke. As the ideological minority, conservative self-censorship is rampant. But liberal faculty don’t have it easy either.
Roughly, 1 in 3 liberal faculty worry about damaging their reputations because someone misunderstands them. Turning Point USA’s “Professor Watchlist” is fueling their fear. By targeting professors for supporting Democratic positions on topics like DEI, socialism, and feminism, the watchlist has pushed liberal professors to self-censor. At Cornell, professors withdrew from collaborations with colleagues who were listed on the watchlist out of fear of association.
Though pressures come from different avenues, professors across the political spectrum are self-censoring leading to a single outcome: fewer real opinions shared in class. As students, this should alarm us deeply. We miss out on the ideologies that make the humanities interesting. Professors directly attach their expertise and work to a viewpoint when they share their opinion in class and that is exactly what makes the material we learn shift from mechanical to humane.
To understand what we really lose when professors stay silent, I decided to ask a professor who does attach their expertise to a viewpoint. Professor Sarosh Kuruvilla in the school of Industrial and Labor Relations openly disagrees with Trump's trade strategy to bring manufacturing back to the US. I asked him what value he sees in bringing his viewpoint in at all: “Giving my opinion in class adds a third data point. It forces students to use their brain, because now they must think about both sides and now their professor. There is a layer of humanity added to a topic.” In other words, the professor's opinion turns passive learning into critical thinking. You are forced to confront an informed perspective, not just write it down.
That “third data point” is the entire point of higher education. It’s what pushes all of us to go beyond memorizing concepts to internalizing them. When a professor shares their view, it gives you something to react to: What shaped that belief? Do I agree? Why? And together these questions shape our own ideology, it’s how we grow into critical thinkers.
In a world flooded with rage bait and AI news clips designed to provoke us, students need a grounded sense of self to resist being pulled into manufactured outrage. That sense can only be built through exposure to informed arguments grounded in expertise. And in a world where a single post, like or comment can be twisted into a judgement of character, leaving university without a defensible sense of what we believe in is a risk we cannot afford.
But as more professors hesitate to share their opinions, we lose the moments in the classroom where we can develop the armor that protects us from such manipulation.
So the next time you’re in class online shopping or scrolling Handshake and your professor takes the risk to profess a real opinion, I urge you to look up. Listen. Engage.
If they’re willing to put themselves on the line for us, the least we can do is meet that risk with engagement and let their courage push us to develop some of our own.
Mihir Steingard '28 is an Opinion Columnist studying Industrial and Labor Relations. The name of his column, Common Matters, is a play on words and aims to show why common matters in politics, on campus and in society should matter to us, the common people. He argues against being apolitical or apathetic and instead advocates vehemently for empathy and understanding. He can be reached at msteingard@cornellsun.com.
