When Emma Camp, now of Reason but then a senior at the University of Virginia, wrote a New York Times op-ed, about her reluctance to express views that failed to align with progressive orthodoxy, she was excoriated for saying aloud what everybody knew. There is now a study that reaches the same uncontroversial conclusion.

Northwestern University researchers Forest Romm and Kevin Waldman report in an op-ed on the results of a series of interviews they conducted with undergraduates.

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?”

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.

Peer pressure is nothing new, but what is new is that this adaptive “fluency in performative morality” was far more widespread than previously understood. For years, it was believed that we have lost a generation of students to progressive orthodoxy, turning them into true woke believers ready to do whatever was necessary to reimagine their world of unicorns prancing on rainbows and suffer the consequences of their naivete.

Maybe not. Maybe it was mostly about kids wanting to fit in, to be accepted, to not be tainted as bad people by eschewing the prevailing moral purity on campus.

Seventy-eight percent of students told us they self-censor on their beliefs surrounding gender identity; 72 percent on politics; 68 percent on family values. More than 80 percent said they had submitted classwork that misrepresented their views in order to align with professors. For many, this has become second nature — an instinct for academic and professional self-preservation.

Before breathing a sigh of relief, it should be noted that falling short of progressive purity does not mean they were unwoke, or tolerant of others who held less than woke views. Indeed, censoring views about gender identity didn’t mean they doubted that students who fell shy of gender conformity were nonbinary, but rather that they didn’t necessarily swallow all the rigid rules that followed, whether it was using “ze, zir” as pronouns or that gender could flip on a dime.

But the point is that any variance they might have with the rules of correct woke behavior and beliefs was best kept to oneself if one wanted to get along. On campus, there was no prize for being honest or principled when it varied from the orthodoxy. Heresy was frowned upon, and to avoid being canceled and hated, engaging in performative morality along with the rest of the woke kids elevated a student’s status and profile. It was like wearing progressive bubble wrap against the slings and arrows of authenticity.

Authenticity, once considered a psychological good, has become a social liability. And this fragmentation doesn’t end at the classroom door. Seventy-three percent of students reported mistrust in conversations about these values with close friends. Nearly half said they routinely conceal beliefs in intimate relationships for fear of ideological fallout. This is not simply peer pressure — it is identity regulation at scale, and it is being institutionalized.

Has the “death of woke,” as South Park proclaimed, relieved students from the burden of performative morality, from concealing from their friends and lovers that they hold heretical views? Can they be their authentic selves, accepting that with which they agree while openly questioning, even challenging, that with which they do not?

We do not fault students for perpetuating a climate that is hostile to intellectual integrity. We fault the faculty, administrators, and institutional leaders who built a system that rewards moral theater while punishing inquiry. In shielding students from discomfort, they have also shielded them from discovery. The result is a generation confident in self-righteousness, but uncertain in self.

It’s kind of academics to not blame students, but to blame themselves, but if there never comes a point when students are expected, if not required, to take responsibility for not only their own beliefs, but their own actions, it’s hard to see adaptive morality being replaced by authenticity. You don’t need permission to be authentic. You just need the guts to break from the herd. Whether that’s happening, or has any potential to happen, has yet to be seen.