International Students & Conservative Students: How Are They Doing In Academic Philosophy? (guest post)
“Conservative and international students face different challenges: one feels forced to self-censor while the other reports fewer job opportunities. No significant impact on employment is found for either but conservative respondents report higher rates of satisfaction in philosophy.”
That’s a brief summary of findings about conservative graduate students and international graduate students currently or recently enrolled in philosophy PhD programs, based on data collected by Academic Philosophy Data and Analysis (APDA) in its 2025 survey.
In the following guest post, APDA founder and co-director Carolyn Dicey Jennings shares the details.
[A version of this post also appears at the APDA blog.]
[Vito Acconci, lithographs from the series, “Stones for a Wall”]
International Students & Conservative Students: How Are They Doing In Academic Philosophy?
by Carolyn Dicey Jennings
In this, the final summer post on the 2025 survey, we highlight two populations of survey participants: those who are or were international students and those with conservative political leanings. (See previous posts here.)
We chose these populations for a straightforward reason: both groups show signs of underrepresentation while also seeming to report higher satisfaction in prior surveys. That is, according to an analysis of the 2023 survey results, international students were less likely than local students to find permanent academic employment, while according to an analysis of the 2021 survey results, conservative students are underrepresented in philosophy PhD programs relative to both the U.S. population and doctoral recipients. Yet, in past surveys we have noted that both of these groups appear to report higher satisfaction than local or non-conservative participants (not tested for statistical significance). We thus wanted to better understand the experiences of both populations and the challenges they face in the discipline.
To explore this we added two text-based questions to the 2025 survey with a parallel structure. These questions appeared on the final, demographic page of the survey for a subset of participants. The first followed a question on international status: “Are you or were you an international student during your PhD studies?” If the participant answered “yes” (n=383) then they were provided a follow-up prompt: “Please describe the impact of your status as an international student on your academic career (i.e. as a student and in employment or the search for employment, if relevant).” The second followed a question on political leaning: “When it comes to politics, how do you usually think of yourself?” If the participant answered “conservative” or “very conservative” (n=58) they were provided a follow-up prompt: “Please describe the impact of your political beliefs on your academic career (i.e. as a student and in employment or the search for employment, if relevant).” Word clouds with the top 25 mentioned words by each group are provided in the image below.
Overlapping word clouds using the top 25 mentioned words in comments left by conservative and international student participants in the 2025 APDA survey.
We provide some insights on the responses to these prompts in this post. But, first, it may be useful to see how these groups differ in response to other questions on the survey. Since international and conservative status overlap for some participants, for statistical analyses we grouped them as follows: conservative participants were grouped together regardless of international status, due to the small size of this group (58 participants, 14 of whom are also international); international students (369 participants, with 150 very liberal, 132 liberal, 68 moderate, and 19 who didn’t answer on political leaning) were then distinguished from local students (708 participants, with 325 very liberal, 243 liberal, 105 moderate, and 35 who didn’t answer on political leaning); and left out were all those who were not conservative and did not provide their international status (73 participants). (Note that “students” is used here as shorthand for all those who currently are or once were international/local students; some are no longer students.)
Several questions measure satisfaction of some sort, whether with one’s PhD program overall, the climate of that program, one’s employment (if a recent graduate), or one’s financial situation (if a current graduate student). Conservative participants tend to provide higher ratings in general: if we combine the answers to these four questions the mean is 4.3 (out of 5) for conservative participants vs. 4.0 for both international and local students (p<.005). (The individual ratings are 4.3 vs. 4.2 for PhD program, 4.6 vs. 4.0 for climate, 4.3 vs. 4.1 for employment satisfaction, and 3.3 vs. 3.3 for financial satisfaction.) International students appear to provide higher program ratings than local students (4.2 vs. 4.1), but the difference is not statistically significant and they respond similarly to local students on the other satisfaction questions (both 4.0 on climate, both 4.1 on employment satisfaction, 3.3 vs. 3.4 on financial satisfaction).
In terms of key terms used to describe PhD programs, differences also emerge. If we look, for example, at the most mentioned key terms in each group, all three groups have “Analytic”, “Ethics”, and “Epistemology” as their top three terms but start to diverge after that (see the chart below). For instance, while only conservative participants have “Ancient/Classical”, “Religion”, and “Medieval” in their top 10 terms; only international students have “Cognitive Science” and “Language”. Both conservative participants and local students (but not international students) have “Historical” and “Continental”, while both international and local students (but not conservative participants) have “Logic/Formal” and “Political/Social”. (The other top 10 terms shared by all three groups are “Metaphysics”, “Mind”, and “History & Philosophy of Science”). The chart below shows all the key terms with the percentage of mentions for those terms by each group.
A chart showing all key terms with the percentage of mentions by each group. For instance, the term “historical” is mentioned by 7.3% of conservative participants, 4.0% of local students, and 3.4% of international students. Conversely, “logic/formal” is mentioned by 5.3% of international students, 3.8% of local students, and 3.5% of conservative participants.
While the mean graduation years are about the same for these groups (2020 for conservative participants and international students, but 2019 for local students), international students include more current students: 48% of all participants, versus 34% for both conservative participants and local students.
Financial status and employment outcomes appear to differ between these groups, but only one difference is statistically significant. Namely, reported graduate student income is lower for conservative participants (mean=$26k) than for international (mean=$35k) or local students (mean=$36k; p<.005).
Other trends are not statistically significant, which could be due to small numbers or a reflection of mere “noise”/variation. Namely, conservative participants also appear more likely to prefer academic jobs (88%, versus 84% for both of the other two groups) but less likely to be in academic jobs (77% of conservative participants who are employed are in academic jobs vs. 85% of international students and 84% of local students). The median salary 0f conservative participants is slightly higher than other groups at $82k vs. $75k/$78k, while the mean salary is slightly lower at $89k vs. $97k/$95k.
International students, on the other hand, appear at first glance to be slightly less likely to have permanent academic jobs: 67% of international students now in academic jobs have permanent ones, versus 70% of local students and 73% of conservative participants. This difference was not statistically significant using chi-squared, while in 2023 the difference was significant using a regression equation. Since we noted that the top programs for international students were themselves more international (in our survey, only 16% of local students are from non-U.S. PhD programs, whereas 43% of international students are from non-U.S. PhD programs), we decided to check the numbers for two different subsets of this group: those in U.S. PhD programs versus those in non-U.S. PhD programs. We checked this because U.S. PhD programs tend to have higher permanent academic placement rates than non-U.S. programs according to past analyses. In fact, this difference does seem to be responsible for the effect. That is, for those with academic jobs who come from PhD programs in the U.S., the proportion with a permanent position is 72% for international students and 73% for local students. In contrast, for those with academic jobs who come from PhD programs outside the U.S., the proportion with a permanent position is 61% for international students and 53% for local students. As international students have about the same or higher rates of permanent academic employment within these subsets, it must be the difference between the subsets that is driving the effect.
Turning now to the text-based responses, clear differences emerge between respondents who report conservative leanings and those who report being or having been international students (for this portion of the blog post these groups partly overlap, with 8 participants providing responses to both questions). Namely, while both groups largely report a negative impact of their status on their academic career, the nature of that impact is quite different, with one group’s primary concern that of having to hide their status while the other group’s primary concern is that of losing out on employment opportunities.
To determine this we first read through all comments and then came up with a list of common themes: no or minimal impact, negative feelings/emotions, negative behavioral impact, negative social impact, reduced employment opportunities, signs of abuse or trauma, and positive impact. We then hand coded all the comments according to these 7 themes, with some comments containing multiple themes. In a forthcoming paper on a related dataset we found that hand coding sometimes captures negative sentiment that is not picked up through automated techniques; alternatively, one might argue that hand coding can be negatively biased on such topics. We thus used a freely-available automated method as a sanity check. Using the demo version of LIWC-22 on a sample of the (non-private) responses, “negative tone” of both samples was higher than normal, while “positive tone” was lower (see screenshots at the end of the blog post).
Below we provide a breakdown of our hand coding results for both groups along with some sample comments from participants (note that ellipses are sometimes used to replace irrelevant text).
Those with conservative leanings mostly report self-censoring behavioral changes (31% of the 39 posts include this sort of comment); but also concerns about lost jobs or positions (26%); concerns about social standing, such as being ostracized (23%); and feelings of fear or anxiety (13%). A robust proportion saw little to no impact of their political leanings on their academic career (21%). A relatively small number reported abuse or trauma, such as promotion denial or bullying (5%), while another relatively small number reported positive effects (10%). An example of each is provided below:
- no impact: “None”
- feelings: “…As a professor, I have been made uncomfortable at some point at every single conference I have ever attended by casual disparagement of my beliefs, either in general or with reference to me in particular…”
- behavioral changes: “To avoid any (potential) trouble in obtaining a permanent position, I consciously kept my (moderate to right-leaning) political beliefs to myself.“
- social standing: “…I think my political beliefs often put me in intellectual conflict (and social alienation) with my peers due to my different perspectives and resulting philosophical interests…”
- jobs/positions: “I keep my political views very very quiet. I hear so much explicit antagonism towards conservatives and have no interest in constantly being on the defensive vis a vis my peers. I have also heard too many stories of people being rejected from academic positions because a committee member heard they were conservative and refused to hire them.”
- abuse/trauma: “…I often had to silently endure people who think like I do being mocked by my peers and professors…”
- positive effects: “I thought being conservative and Christian would hurt me, but there’s a growing niche market for conservative and Christian academics. You just have to know where to find these opportunities.”
Those who have or had international student status mostly report limitations on jobs or positions (34% of 203 posts); but also significant behavioral changes (31%) in order to manage financial restrictions, paperwork headaches, language barriers, cultural difficulties, and travel challenges (both academic and to see family/friends); feelings of anxiety and stress (20%); and concerns about social standing (8%), such as discrimination for being foreign. A robust proportion again saw little to no impact of their status on their academic career (21%). About the same number reported abuse or trauma (5%), such as extreme stress from precarity, as positive effects (6%). An example of each is provided below:
- no impact: “none”
- feelings: “The stress of study and work permits—financial, time, and emotional drain—impacted me. I was never denied a permit but it was always a risk…”
- behavioral changes: “As an international student, the initial one or two years of PhD program are often challenging due to the need to adapt to the language and a different course structure, making it difficult to complete required reading and essay assignments…”
- social standing: “Feeling marginalized in the earlier years of the program; more comfortable as time went on.”
- jobs/positions: “Probably detrimental. Some positions didn’t offer visas so I couldn’t be hired at all. At others, my status was a consideration against me (not because of some discrimination, just b/c hiring international for the kinds of positions I’d be considered is bureaucratically more difficult).”
- abuse/trauma: “It was extremely stressful…I had to complete my degree in 3 years instead of the normative 6—hence, others who were going on the job market around the same time as me had twice as much time to, e.g., publish, teach, present at conferences, network, etc”
- positive effects: “The department and university are, in my experience and to my knowledge, very supportive of international students.”
In sum, whereas conservative participants report feeling forced to hide their status to avoid discrimination, international students report lost job opportunities due to administrative and other hurdles. A major difference is that while both are concerned about employment outcomes one group manages that concern through self-censoring, while the other is unable to hide their status.
As mentioned above, we did not find statistically significant effects of either conservative or international status on employment outcomes. It may nonetheless be the case that these groups have to work harder, or with greater stressors, in order to achieve similar rates of employment to non-conservative or local students.
LIWC-22 analysis of randomly selected text-based responses from conservative participants (left) and international students (right) showing lower positive tone and higher negative tone in comparison to “other language.”
Other recent posts about the APDA survey can be found here.
I’m a tenured professor (tenured within the past 5 years). As a moderate-conservative, I definitely have views that significantly diverge from most of my colleagues and probably most people who are readings this. Like many I have tried to keep my views hidden out of fear. I think to some extent the fear was, and is, justified because I have heard much ridicule from academic colleagues about how x-ist or x-phobic such views are. Of course, I just disagree with those labelings since I sincerely believe that I’m not x-ist or x-phobic. (And yes, maybe I’m just deceiving myself but I have thought long and hard about this.) I should say though that I think things are getting better and I honestly really like my colleagues. What I wish was different (and the blame is on me here too) is that I could have more honest, reason-based discussions about some of these issues. But I don’t know if we really can because the the issues so morally charged. I mean, there are people who would argue that even just voicing my actual beliefs is an instance of causing ‘metaphysical violence’ to someone. Still, I wonder if it would be better if we all just put our positions out there which would give us opportunity to learn and maybe even adjust our beliefs through reasoned discussion. (Sounds a bit like doing philosophy…) But I’m a very sensitive and agreeable person, and worry too much (still) about social backlash. I might just be too chicken-shit and maybe I just need to become more honest and courageous. I’m still working on those things.
I’m puzzled as to how any conclusions can be reached about conservatives on the basis of this, given two things (even setting aside low numbers). (1) *Only* conservatives were asked to reflect on how it affected their professional life, (2) feelings of having to self-censor are not the same as facts. The first is more serious in my view, but the second is non-negligible. There’s a LOT of pumped up media coverage about how awful academics are for conservatives, enough that you combine that with a random anecdote or two and you can easily get a situation where the self-censoring feelings outstrip their reasonable bases. Meanwhile, I (and many others) have demonstrated, adjudicated proof of being discriminated against in serious career affecting ways (in my case, sexist and anti-gay discrimination at different points and at some in combination with one another) by people who, like the first comment on this page, declare that they are not anti-gay.
As a survey though, I don’t understand why the lack of parallel/comparison question
I self-censor because in nearly every professional setting it is taken as self-evident that conservative views on whatever are not only obviously false but also immoral. Not that I really care, I’m just here to do philosophy and would like a job doing philosophy. My reasons (or, if you like, feelings) that motivate self-censorship have almost nothing to do with media coverage.
And even if the self-censorship is unwarranted, we conservatives would very much like to know.
Yes.
I mean… I “self-censor” too, because it’s not always advisable to candidly report what I really think about something or someone. That’s just what getting around in the social world or the classroom requires. But calling that ‘self-censorship’ seems like overkill.
Oh, but there you go. I’m ‘self-censoring’ here, too.
I think it’s quite advisable to candidly report your political views if they are left and you want to be hired by left-wing people. The same is true the other way around, of course, but more hiring committees in philosophy have left-wing views.
In case this helps to get more of a flavor of what is meant by “self-censoring” in the above, here are some relevant public comments from conservative respondents (2 private comments are also relevant, as are a further few comments that are more ambiguous about the reason for not discussing politics).
1) I hold right-of-center views, and as a result I had to self-censor a lot, especially before tenure.
2) I hid my political beliefs from my advisors and peers.
3) I generally do not advertise my political beliefs in the academy. It’s just more trouble than it’s worth. I think some faculty and students have guessed my leanings, and they have not been rude about it, but generally speaking in casual political discussions it is assumed that everyone is very far to the left, and unless you like debating politics with colleagues there’s no advantage to disabusing them of that assumption. That makes it very easy to fly under the radar; it seems not to cross most other grad students’ minds that someone in their midst might be a conservative.
4) As a student I used to avoid talking about them with philosophy peers in fear of being cast out. In college, on the other hand, it was mostly fine because it was not too liberal. As staff now I just avoid the subject, especially when students are around.
5) To avoid any (potential) trouble in obtaining a permanent position, I consciously kept my (moderate to right-leaning) political beliefs to myself.
6) I keep my political views very very quiet. I hear so much explicit antagonism towards conservatives and have no interest in constantly being on the defensive vis a vis my peers. I have also heard too many stories of people being rejected from academic positions because a committee member heard they were conservative and refused to hire them.
7) I kept my views completely to myself and tried to avoid discussions of politics as much as possible. When searching for a job I think I had an advantage with institutions that shared my beliefs and values.
8) I spoke about my political beliefs as little as possible; I assumed doing so would hurt my career prospects. I think this strategy was successful and doubt my beliefs made a difference since few others knew them.
9) I kept them to myself. If I hadn’t, I suppose they would have harmed me.
10) Peers would either just assume I am liberal, or else show antipathy if they knew I was conservative. I tried to not talk about politics or enter into fields where talking about politics was necessary.
11) Little to no impact, largely because I keep my political beliefs to myself. I keep my political beliefs to myself because the political climate in academia, and especially in the humanities like philosophy, are very hostile to conservative individuals. It would hurt my chances in acquiring a job in academia if my conservative views were made known to others.
12) I have often believed that openly disclosing my political beliefs would jeopardize my employment or reduce my chances of advancement. So I have mostly kept my political thoughts to myself, while colleagues sharing majority opinions often flaunt their beliefs publicly.
Why would you need a comparison? Is it less bad that conservatives self-censor and face discrimination if other groups also self-censor and face discrimination?
Sure, it might be interesting to see how perceived discrimination differs among these groups. Probably the kind of discrimination as well as the experiences thereof are quite different.
Because you want to know the base rate? Because you want to have some sense of whether this is a widespread issue, or one which genuinely seems to affect a particular minority? Because people have tied this issue to practical measures, and you might want to be sure it’s a genuine issue before lending credence to it or adopting measures which may cost time, money, and goodwill?
I’d think you’d also want some sense of the content being ‘self-censored’, as well as the contexts in which it occurs. Because, again, you want to be able to separate the kind of self-censorship that is just normal, daily social lubricant or otherwise justified/justifiable from the kind that is genuinely oppressive.
Good points. I haven’t looked into this yet, but my sense of having read all of the comments on all of the questions (for this and prior years) is that I haven’t seen anyone mention hiding their status before. Perhaps because for the other forms of underrepresentation in philosophy this is often difficult or impossible. I will take a look at some point and see if this holds up for some key terms.
So what if the “base rate” of perceived discrimination is equal to perceived discrimination by conservatives? Does that tell you there is no genuine issue?
And if the conservative rate is higher than the base rate that doesn’t change much, since it could be to a number of other factors, such as, as you mention, media coverage.
I don’t understand how the base rate would be informative at all given the heterogeneity of discrimination. All groups are discriminated in different ways and for different things, so you’re not comparing a single attribute. In this light I’m not sure if the “base rate” is a well-defined concept at all in this context.
I am open to the possibility that there may be groundless interpersonal hostility towards “conservatives” (for some value of the term) which should be remedied. But when the claim is put in such broad terms as “self-censorship” and when I am given no real information about the content being “self-censored” or the contexts in which it’s happening, then I have questions. And one of those follow-up questions is whether this is just the normal thing everyone does to get by in society, or something more pernicious. If it turns out most people are doing something similar, then I’m not sure we need to be so worried–or, at least, so worried about “conservatives” in particular.
As I said, I absolutely “self-censor,” for some values of the term. And I wouldn’t describe it using that term, because it’s part of the universal social grease. I once had a conspiracy loon colleague (everything was a plot to destroy Science and elevate PoMo non-white scholarship; one incident involved Indigenous cancer care stealing money from space lasers); I could have taken the time to call them out and correct them repeatedly, and tell them precisely what I thought of them. But… That’s not a very good way to go around the world, let alone to navigate a department. It’s self-censorship, for some values of the term, but also perfectly reasonable. If we’re talking about being afraid to say one was at a church event the other day, for fear of ostracism or worse, then that’s a different story (though unless it’s something like the Westboro Baptists, I doubt that particular case offers a very realistic worry).
Very often, when I encounter this claim from American conservatives in particular, it seems to amount to the fact that they feel they can’t say the nasty things they want to say about racial IQ, or women, or queer and trans people, or the stupid denialist things they want to say about the climate, etc. If those are the kinds of things being “self-censored,” then we shouldn’t be very worried about it.
But I don’t know. What we have is a bunch of self-reporting with no real content or context. And nothing to indicate whether there may be parallel worries elsewhere along the political spectrum. And that seems pretty relevant in a political context where expressing certain views coded “left” (gender stuff, trans stuff, race stuff, Palestine/Israel stuff, etc.) is grounds for termination, deportation, harassment, intimidation, etc.
Context: Surveys show significant expressed endorsement of ideological discrimination. Keep in mind that the number who *express* endorsement of ideological discrimination in a survey does not include those who endorse it but would not express it in a survey (I find it shocking that *anyone* would express it in a survey), nor does it include those who do not endorse it but enact it through affective assessments of department “fit,” motivated reasoning, etc.
Peters, U., Honeycutt, N., De Block, A., & Jussim, L. (2020). Ideological diversity, hostility, and discrimination in philosophy. Philosophical Psychology, 33(4), 511–548. https://doi.org/10.1080/09515089.2020.1743257
https://dailynous.com/2019/07/29/political-hostility-willingness-discriminate-philosophy/
Good question, left professor. In short, these questions were added as a form of exploratory qualitative research, rather than for quantitative analyses. That is, we felt that we needed more information from these groups on their experiences in order to better understand some trends we have seen. This might help us to better frame questions in the future, to know what we are looking for. A focus of our project has been diversity and inclusion. In our 2019 report we found some surprising areas of underrepresentation (i.e. veterans, first generation college students). This led the project to look at diversity in philosophy with a wider lens, including political leaning in a later survey. In the last several years we have seen some interesting/puzzling trends that could be explained in different ways concerning both international students and conservative students (see the post for details on this). So we wanted to better understand the experiences of these groups. You are right that, as far as we know, there is a very small proportion of conservatives in academic philosophy; fewer than you would expect given how many are in doctoral programs overall (but perhaps not in comparison to humanities programs overall; I haven’t checked this formally). We worded the questions neutrally to allow for both positive and negative responses. Yet, the responses were largely negative for both groups of students (even though the satisfaction scores for conservatives tend to be higher, which I find interesting). It could be that any group would have answered negatively, which we would only know if in a future version of the survey we asked all groups. But we would have to rethink the framing of the questions, as it would have likely struck a non-international student as odd to be asked if their non-international status impacted their academic career. Similarly, at the time I thought it would have struck liberal and moderate leaning respondents as odd to be asked about the impact of their political leanings on their academic career, since I knew from past surveys that the vast majority of our respondents are left leaning. But I take the point from Jenny, below, that this may have been an oversight.
I’m surprised you only asked about the career effects of conservative politics. Especially in the current state of things in the US, I would expect a lot of left-wing views to have extremely detrimental career effects.
Yes, good point. These were exploratory qualitative questions; we didn’t expect the answers that they provided. Specifically, we didn’t expect conservative respondents to report hiding their views. I provide a bit more information in response to another person, above, but I take your point that if we continue to look into these issues we might want to do a more formal, comparative study. In this case we were trying to understand some interesting trends from prior surveys to see if they were worth further exploration, and to help us do that well.
The self-censorship of conservatives is important, but I think that most self-censorship in academia is done by progressives who don’t fit the narrow academic political orthodoxy.
Absolutely. (But it will be funny if you get a huge ton of up-votes for that. We’re all above average in our progressiveness.)
I mean, “or so we think”