Universities Are Turning Students Against America. Here’s the Proof.

Students relaxing on a campus quad in front of a brick academic building — Photo: Leigh Trail / Shutterstock

One in five college students in a new national survey say the United States deserved the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Quick Take

A Buckley Institute survey of 803 undergraduates found 22% agreed America deserved the 9/11 attacks, while 72% disagreed.
42% said they would rather live under socialism than capitalism, compared with 28% who preferred capitalism.
Four in ten students backed criminal prosecution for offensive speech, and nearly half supported campus speech codes.
The same survey found 87% called the First Amendment important, showing a far more mixed picture than headlines suggest.

A Snapshot of 803 Student Opinions

The Buckley Institute released its 2026 National Undergraduate Student Survey on October 8, polling 803 students at four-year public and private colleges. The questions covered economic systems, free speech, and historical judgments about America. The headline numbers landed hard: nearly half preferred socialism to capitalism, and a sizable minority wanted offensive speech treated as a crime.

Students who preferred socialism were far more likely to back criminal penalties for offensive speech, 51% versus 34% among capitalism-preferring peers. Roughly 49% favored speech codes, and about 46% said shouting down a campus speaker can be appropriate. Those numbers describe a campus culture far less tolerant of open debate than most Americans grew up expecting from higher education.

A Fox News Clips segment on Dartmouth College added color to the numbers, with a claim that 99% of faculty there donated to Democrats. Students gave mixed answers about whether professors pushed an agenda, and some offered socialist-leaning takes on American history. The donation figure itself has no public dataset attached, so it should be read as an anecdote, not proof of a campus-wide pattern.

The Most Alarming Number, In Context

The 9/11 finding drew the loudest reaction, and understandably so. Twenty-two percent of students agreeing the country deserved a terrorist attack that killed nearly 3,000 Americans is a genuinely disturbing result worth taking seriously. But the same poll found 72% rejected that statement outright, meaning a strong majority still holds the view most Americans share about that day.

The survey also found 73% still consider the Constitution important and 87% said the First Amendment matters and should be followed, even though two-thirds acknowledged hate speech is technically protected. A separate report on the same data warned that nearly half of students justified some form of political violence, a figure that should worry university leaders regardless of party. Those numbers complicate any claim that campuses are uniformly turning students against the country.

What Causes These Views, Campus Life or Who Shows Up

Academic research offers a more complicated story than a simple indoctrination narrative. A longitudinal study tracking students through higher education found only small leftward shifts, accounting for roughly 20 to 33 percent of the overall gap between college-goers and non-college-goers. Other research found students already lean liberal before they arrive and drift further left regardless of major, with no measurable link between faculty partisanship and student ideology shifts.

Students also tend to choose colleges filled with people who already think like them, meaning schools may simply attract like-minded students rather than manufacture new ones. That distinction matters. If selection, not classroom instruction, drives much of the pattern, the fix isn’t just policing professors, it’s being honest about what the data can and cannot prove before building policy on top of it.

None of this excuses what the Buckley survey found. Support for criminalizing speech and shouting down speakers should alarm anyone who values the First Amendment, regardless of what caused those beliefs. Parents paying tuition and lawmakers funding public universities have every right to demand transparency, full survey methodology, course-level data, and real answers about whether campus life is shaping these attitudes or simply reflecting who enrolls.