I read Scott Johnson’s novel “Campusland” in September 2024. It depicts a fictitious “Devon University” in Havenport, New England, known for its pizza, crime rate, fraternities, progressive student activism, and social hierarchies. And to reiterate, it is definitely ‘not’ Yale.
“Campusland” often reads as an explicit and aggressive indictment of many of the hallmarks of modern universities. Title IX and diversity initiatives are made to look like efforts to frame students and faculty for crimes they didn’t commit in the name of believing victims. Liberal activism is painted as hypocritical and comically absurd. The coastal elites act like they live in Regency England, and administrative bloat is so bad that there are school officials with nothing to do except hunt down ideological dissenters. Ultimately, the moral is that the modern Ivy-caliber university has gone crazy with wokeness — it was written in 2019, so his reference to pro-Palestine activism is eerily familiar in 2025 — and ought to either be dismantled or seriously reconsidered in favor of more rural, local, and conservative schools.
I enjoyed this novel because it is a stark reminder of what college campuses like Harvard might look like from the outside. “Campusland,” like much of the external press attention focused on Harvard, centers around what students and faculty feel they are allowed to speak about — in other words, it is a novel about free speech. However, the problem on Devon University’s campus or, as Johnston implies, on Ivy League campuses in general, is that there aren’t enough conservative voices to protest the wrongdoings of the left.
In the context of the rupture over the war in Gaza and the following crackdowns on campus protests, I wanted to understand more about Johnston’s thesis about conservative underrepresentation on campuses. I realized that censorship on campus is certainly a salient issue — in more ways than one as “The Salient” is a conservative student magazine at Harvard — but arguing about whose voices are celebrated, tolerated, and silenced obscures a deeper problem: the fact that there simply aren’t a lot of conservative students on campus to begin with.
The numbers on the political ideology of Harvard students certainly suggest that the problem exists here. According to The Harvard Crimson’s survey of the Class of 2027, 64.7% of the class is “progressive” or “very progressive,” 24.4% identify as “moderate,” and just 8.4% of the class is “conservative” or “very conservative.” Similarly, only 5.5% of the class feels an affinity with the GOP, although that wouldn’t count conservative international students. Axios claims that 21% of Gen Z adults identify with the GOP; Statista says that it’s closer to 14%.
In any case, the meager 5.5% at Harvard at least appears disproportionately low. The same Harvard Crimson survey found that a mere 3.6% of respondents had a favorable opinion of Trump, compared to 34% nationally in an NBC News poll. Additionally, only 9.1% of Harvard students have an unfavorable view of legal protections for abortion, far below the 23% of U.S. adults ages 18-29 who want abortion to be illegal in most or all cases.
While these figures only cover the class of 2027, they can be taken to suggest that Harvard’s student body skews to the left and is unrepresentative of Gen Z as a whole. Harvard students disapprove of Trump at higher rates and express stronger support for abortion rights compared to their generational peers.
This skew has serious implications for campus discourse. Because there are fewer conservative students, the problem may be less about who feels comfortable sharing their opinion and more about who is around to share an opinion at all. When there isn’t anyone in the room capable of voicing a reasonable, well-structured, and compelling counterargument to the prevailing majority, that creates an unhealthy ecosystem for constructive dialogue and a very ripe one for echo chambers.
When nobody can — or is willing to —effectively challenge someone’s perspective, that person loses the opportunity to become better at defending their beliefs and communicating them with others. They also lose out on the chance to gain compassion, empathy, and an understanding of those who have different opinions. It is hard to learn more about the world and grow as a person when nothing challenges one’s preexisting beliefs.
The logical follow-up question of why there are significantly fewer conservative students is challenging for this article to answer. It’s a demographic question that may be more complicated than data can illustrate.
Distrust in higher education is certainly a factor: data from Pew claims 31% of Republicans view colleges as “having a positive impact on the nation, compared with 74% of Democrats.” If conservative Republican students distrust universities as institutions, that might explain their underrepresentation, as their mistrust would discourage them from applying. Those who do may or may not be admitted at the same rate as liberal students — there is no clear evidence either way.
And because of the Supreme Court’s decision in 2023 banning affirmative action, it may be difficult in the future for colleges to intentionally select for intellectual diversity.
Regardless, these are speculative causes. Existing literature on conservatism on campuses focuses mainly on faculty, not students.
The solution to the representation problem at American universities in general — many other schools face this challenge besides Harvard — probably involves a combination of admissions, hiring, training, and pedagogical approaches, like Harvard’s Intellectual Vitality Initiative. Some organizations purport to help schools foster constructive dialogue, like the Constructive Dialogue Institute. No school has found a perfect answer to fears of censorship and retaliation. Fostering a culture of constructive dialogue will necessarily involve strenuous effort on the part of individual students and faculty. In all of this, the centrality of students and their perspectives — being the primary population a school ought to serve — should be maintained.
When we discuss free speech on college campuses, we ought to remember that dialogue can only occur in circumstances where all parties have an equal opportunity to participate — not just that they feel welcome to, but where they actually have the ability and capacity to do so. Reasoned dialogue can’t happen if one side is categorically underrepresented, not to mention intimidated. A culture of free speech is a culture of listening, not just of speaking. Meeting new people and broadening one’s perspective is a primary goal of the college experience, but that becomes all the more meaningful the greater the difference between each person.
Constructive dialogue has made me a better person. My views have grown more nuanced after discussions in the dining hall about Trump with people I deeply respect, yet disagree with, or chatting about Israel and Palestine with people who, unlike me, have family in the region. Conversations like these are rare in the liberal bubble of “Campusland,” but while Johnston spends most of the novel critiquing the university system, the novel’s ending implicitly supports ideological diversity.
At the end of the novel, the rich, entitled students are chastised, the vindictive Dean of DEI is humbled, and Ephraim Russell, an embattled professor, happily relocates from his liberal university to a small, rural school with a more politically diverse student body. While some of this is troubling, the message that a campus thrives when it discusses issues with cordiality, humility, and nuance is unequivocal. We can only wait and see if that vision pans out.
