Are Students Engaged in Performative Virtue Signaling?

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.

Interview respondents noted the effect across a range of issues:

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.

The authors’ research suggests that on some issues, such as the nature of gender and gender identity, students’ actual beliefs are quite different from what appears to be the prevailing orthodoxy on campus.

They write further:

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.

Universities often justify these dynamics in the name of inclusion. But inclusion that demands dishonesty is not ensuring psychological safety — it is sanctioning self-abandonment. In attempting to engineer moral unity, higher education has mistaken consensus for growth and compliance for care.

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