Performative virtue-signaling has become a threat to higher ed

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Performative virtue-signaling has become a threat to higher ed
by Forest Romm and Kevin Waldman
08/12/25

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.

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.

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.
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Late adolescence and early adulthood represent a narrow and non-replicable developmental window. It is during this stage that individuals begin the lifelong work of integrating personal experience with inherited values, forming the foundations of moral reasoning, internal coherence, and emotional resilience.

But when belief is prescriptive, and ideological divergence is treated as social risk, the integrative process stalls. Rather than forging a durable sense of self through trial, error, and reflection, students learn to compartmentalize. Publicly, they conform; privately, they question — often in isolation. This split between outer presentation and inner conviction not only fragments identity but arrests its development.
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Perhaps most telling: 77 percent said they disagreed with the idea that gender identity should override biological sex in such domains as sports, healthcare, or public data — but would never voice that disagreement aloud. Thirty-eight percent described themselves as “morally confused,” uncertain whether honesty was still ethical if it meant exclusion.

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.

Students know something is wrong.
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This is not sustainable.

If higher education is to fulfill its promise as a site of intellectual and moral development, it 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.

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