Buckley Survey: 45% of College Students Say Violence Can Be Justified to Stop 'Hate Speech'
The Buckley Institute poll found 54% of liberal students and 30% of conservative students agree. A Christian university president says the problem is moral formation, not free speech.
Nearly half of the undergraduates in a new national survey say violence can be justified to stop speech they consider hateful.
Fox News Digital reports on the Buckley Institute's 2026 National Undergraduate Student Survey. In it, 45% of students said physical violence can be justified to stop what they deem "hate speech." That includes 54% of liberal students, 36% of moderates and 30% of conservatives.
Other findings. According to Fox, 46% of students support shouting down speakers, and 40% say offensive speech should be subject to criminal prosecution. Asked about economic systems, 42% said they would rather live under socialism and 28% chose capitalism. Fox also reports that 22% said the U.S. deserved the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
How it was done. The survey was conducted by Inquire LLC. It covered 803 full-time undergraduates under 25 at four-year public and private colleges, who answered online between Sept. 5 and Sept. 14. That is a modest sample, and we did not see the full questionnaire or margin of error.
The reaction. Dr. Gerson Moreno-Riaño, president of Cornerstone University, a private Christian school in Grand Rapids, Michigan, told Fox it is "more of a 'moral formation issue'" than a free speech issue. He said colleges "have really ceased to form students morally and are teaching resentment, teaching grievance politics, teaching violent entitlement." He said that when there is "no moral compass in higher ed, there's a vacuum, and what fills it? Ideologies, communism, socialism, grievance, culture."
The jobs angle. Moreno-Riaño said employers are worried about degrees that do not prepare graduates for hard problems and about their ideological bent. He suggested some may start training workers directly out of high school. "A sharp mind without a moral compass is a weapon looking for a target," he said, adding that artificial intelligence raises the stakes.
Note for readers: the characterization of colleges is Moreno-Riaño's opinion. Fox's report does not include a response from a university association or from the Buckley survey's critics.