The proportion of liberal commencement speakers has increased since 2011, the researchers found.
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David Johnson’s interest in the political leanings of commencement speakers was sparked in 2020, when a podcaster he was listening to asserted that conservatives “aren’t welcome” on college campuses.
“I thought, that doesn’t resonate with me. At minimum, it sounds not terribly nuanced,” recalled Johnson, a sociologist and associate professor of higher education in the Department of Educational Policy Studies at Georgia State University.
To understand whether conservatives are, in fact,
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