At a recent student society meeting, a friend drafted a question on their phone – not to dispute the cause being discussed, but to test a contradiction in the group’s stated aims. They deleted it before raising their hand.

Afterwards they said: “I wasn’t afraid of being wrong. I was afraid of being read the wrong way.”

That distinction captures how dissent now falters in many universities. The silencing agent is not argument but reputational risk. What often looks like consensus in academic spaces is increasingly a product of self-censorship rather than persuasion.

For universities, this matters not only culturally but academically: an environment that makes dissent reputationally costly inevitably weakens the conditions under which research-level thinking can develop. People do not withhold objections because they have been convinced but because the social cost of asking them has risen above the cognitive cost of staying quiet. There is no formal rule against dissent; the constraint is ambient and psychological.

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From the perspective of social cognition, this is predictable. Pluralistic ignorance – privately doubting while publicly aligning – produces a false impression of unanimity even when disagreement is common. Identity-protective cognition means that reputational incentives regularly overpower evidential ones: it is safer to belong than to be correct.

Once this equilibrium is established, it compounds; silence is misread as agreement, which raises the risk of being the first to break it.

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In many student settings, questions are not received as propositions to be examined but as signals of affiliation. Motive is inferred before meaning is parsed. When disagreement is cognitively coded as disloyalty, people begin to manage impressions rather than test ideas. This does not produce better arguments; it produces fewer arguments.

There is a paradox here. Universities explicitly train students in the practice of entertaining opposing frameworks without panicking, and many students can do this in written or supervised work. But in informal intellectual life, the equilibrium is different: people revert to binary categories and reputational management. The behaviours rewarded in assessment (careful reasoning, slow thinking, adversarial testing) are quietly discouraged in public peer discourse.

The consequences extend beyond campus culture. Universities are upstream environments. Graduates who learn to treat dissent as socially risky rather than intellectually necessary will carry those reflexes into newsrooms, policy units and professional institutions. If the dominant habit becomes to manage disagreement reputationally rather than resolve it analytically, public discourse downstream inherits that fragility.

There is an internal cost, too. When dissent becomes expensive, institutions lose the capacity for rigorous self-reflection, including the willingness to admit error. If people only speak when alignment is safe, organisations cannot detect when their intellectual instruments are drifting.

This is not an argument that universities are hostile to free expression in a formal sense. It is an argument that the main constraint on free speech has migrated away from rules or explicit instructions to toe the line, and into social norms. The pressure is not to agree, but to appear aligned.

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That distinction matters. A system that tolerates disagreement in principle but penalises it in practice does not achieve neutrality by default; it selects, without declaring it, for caution over inquiry.

Addressing this does not require new speech codes or bureaucratic interventions, but active modelling of dissent by those with social capital to afford it. Senior academics, tutors and student leaders can make a difference not by “encouraging” disagreement in the abstract, but by performing it visibly and constructively in their own settings – supervisions, seminars, committees. When students see status figures disagree without reputational penalty, they recalibrate what is safe. Social norms shift through example, not edict.

Universities could also make space for the kind of disagreement that doesn’t end in resolution – structured “unwinnable” debates where the aim is to test interpretation rather than defend identity. Done well, these can decouple intellectual dissent from social disloyalty and retrain the reflex that currently punishes divergence.

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Ultimately, the point is not that universities must manufacture dissent, but that they must lower its price. Reputational economies are social constructions, and they can be revalued. When people in authority publicly model curiosity over conformity, the psychological cost of speaking up falls. Naming the mechanism helps, but modelling the antidote changes it.

A university that wants to produce graduates capable of withstanding scrutiny must explicitly teach – and display – how to disagree well.

Otherwise, the habit of self-silencing will look indistinguishable from conviction, and the places built to cultivate independent reasoning will instead train its opposite. The easiest way for a university to lose the thing it claims to protect is to let reputation perform the censorship that rules no longer do.

Yashraj Garg is a psychological and behavioural sciences student at Trinity College, University of Cambridge, and president of the Cambridge University Behavioural Insights Society.

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