Summary

• A favourite popular narrative is that students are either politically monolithic or brainwashed, which can put student policy in peril
• Pushing back usually requires more time and preparation than can be done on an as-needed basis
• Creative polling questions can demonstrate and push back on the image of students as a monolith
• The Drummond model for polling is one that needs more exploration

I do hate the use of the old statistics on professors’ political identity in the United States. They so often get deployed, and while I believe the veracity of their claims that a large number of professors are Democratic in the US, it is used as a quick proxy for ideologically homogenous campuses, and professors stuck in an orthodoxy based on that political identity. However, political identity is a composite measure, and when you use it as a stand-in for indoctrination, I think it is either lazy, obfusciatory, or at least ignorant.

Evidence does seem to consider that while a party might have a set of stances, their members and voters will almost inevitably have a few views out of the ordinary.

Occasionally, some in media choose to zero in on the indoctrination or homogeneity angle when it comes to students. In that environment, the quick proxy can sometimes crop up. However, the nature of how quickly most media moves on from a story means that there is little ability for a student association to dig into the false assumptions, and they instead need to make a quick reaction. And because these things can sometimes be anchored by new reports elsewhere, and data can be attractive to media outlets in promoting a narrative, student associations are in a space where they don’t have data to fire back with. Having an alternative and higher-quality dataset to point to would be useful.

Consider the application of issue polling on typical partisan issues or things that could point to greater heterogeneity within the student body, and it will not feel that far fetched.

Before examples in earnest, consider that most student unions usually rely on student-driven polling, setting up call-booths in student union building basements or the like, so going professional should also improve results.

Examples of political polling beyond partisanship

What is political need not be partisan. Consider polling students on the following questions instead of pure partisanship or general “progressiveness”:

• I believe that a capable military is a necessity for the country
• I believe that Canada should be extracting oil and gas
• I believe Canada should allow companies to extract more oil and gas
• I identify more as a communist than a capitalist
• I believe that provinces should retain autonomy over healthcare instead of the federal government
• The Canadian government has a higher duty to residents of Canada than people in foreign countries
• Parties I disagree with should have the power to lawfully enact their goals, if they form government

There might not be uniform embrace of all of these, and there may be some, like the military piece, where even 20% of students saying “no” to that belief is a PR liability, but if you want to show ideological diversity, there are questions that can be asked. So much so that there are question batteries that already exist can be employed. One could adopt or adapt the Pew ideology battery, European Social Survey’s 2-axis structure, or a modernized version of the ANES moral traditionalism, individualism and interventionism sub-batteries. This is to say nothing of the potential of figuring out foreign policy polling. Ideally, you also make sure that you measure the year of the students answering can be sorted by age, to sow how strongly time in school causes people’s opinions to conform or diverge, if at all.

Finally, one could adapt the polling employed by Don Drummond to inform the Drummond report, which measures public openness to economic conservatism, and adapt it for student use.

Effects

These would all be charted against partisan and self-ID’d ideological crosstabs to show that those labels are perhaps not as encompassing as one might think, demonstrating by quick example, whenever the need arises, that reductive surveys that collapse ideology into labels are not substantial enough rhetoric to undergird policy changes.

To implement a media strategy using these findings, one can rely on packaging the polls through trusted partners and distributors, like those polling and poll distribution companies with a high Silver Bulletin rating.

Post-secondary question supplements

To break the idea of ideological uniformity, one can also poll on post-secondary specific issues. Doing so can help dispel the thought that students all just want grade inflation, for example, or that all arts students think that their degree is motivated primarily be employment. This does come at the relative cost of others being able to point to your statistics when trying to deploy narratives, but controlled release of survey findings. Examples of questions here may include:

• I believe that controversial speakers should be allowed on campus, even if I disagree with their views
• It is fair to expect private investment in education, such as through tuition
• Good education necessitates listening to and learning about views and theories you deeply disagree with
• I believe post-secondary admittance should be linked to standardized testing
• The primary role of post-secondary education is preparation for the workforce

The purpose of asking these questions is also to determine if a student association should consider severing from the local university and becoming an independent youth organization in the area, a rare but time honoured tradition best exemplified by the now defunct student union at UBC back when it was a McGill satellite campus.

Distribution and Coda

While I’ll probably admit that I’m mostly just excited about student associations as a mechanism to ask fun polling questions, but conducting these actions is to ensure that student unions, especially those supraunion that already do research like polling, use this resource proactively, and try to seed the narrative in the public environment that students are not monolithic. That seeding could look, like usual, picking topics that will get attention and packaging them into your press release with a bigger set of polling data, or could look like doing something more like a special report, taking care to avoid causing controversy or discussion when it is unwanted.

Of course, you might also benefit from all of these questions as they elucidate the true ideological diversity in the student base, and disabuse you of certain assumptions. I once upon a time found some surprising data of relative conservatism of the student base on an issue of the time, especially international students.

Happy hunting for similar ideological cleavages!

My preferred option however is the holding of a press conference with the incumbent minister of higher education in your province, something that with relatively little work, they’re happy to do in order to discuss students’ political identity.