Penelope Kopp remembers her high school frustration. She watched dismally as national climate policies unraveled under President-elect Donald Trump, still too young to cast her vote.
Now a junior at Tufts, Kopp has made activism a core part of her life, from attending protests with her family to working on campaigns for candidates like President Joe Biden. For the 2024 election, she coordinated phone banks twice a week, speaking with North Carolina voters for Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign.
“There are elections that are decided by margins of 1,000 votes, and in a typical phone banking session of two hours, you’re probably calling like 60 voters,” she said.
Kopp fits squarely into the classic image of a liberal arts student: politically engaged, progressive and motivated to make change. Yet, as she looks around campus, she feels that she’s part of a minority who actually cares about the election’s outcome. “There is a student body that cares a lot about political issues,” she says, “but that isn’t always necessarily followed up with concrete action.”
For all the talk of social justice and making a difference, some at Tufts express a quiet cynicism about politics. The once ubiquitous refrain of wanting to “make a difference” has lost some of its weight. In a space where activism can feel like a badge, true political engagement risks becoming performative. All discourse, no effort.
For Kopp, Tufts’ liberal bubble sometimes creates a kind of political complacency. “Living in a blue state, we take good policies and things for granted,” she explained. In the throes of the 2024 election, prior to which all interviews for this piece were conducted, this attitude has become more noticeable to her. While students appear engaged in political discourse, many have a limited sense of civic urgency.
Jen McAndrew, a senior director at Tisch College, is well aware of this national perception that young voters are apathetic. She explained that one of the young people’s biggest barriers to voting is access, arguing that low Gen Z turnout may be a product of increasingly ornate and restrictive voting policies.
Voter registration rates, in many key congressional districts in which young people were likely to be decisive, were strong. This active participation, McAndrew suggests, reflects an informed and motivated Gen Z electorate that campaign messaging doesn’t always capture. According to her, young voters are not just concerned about student debt but hold the economy and climate change among their top priorities as well.
Political apathy is difficult to measure but easy to prognosticate upon. Gen Z voters had overall lower turnout in the 2024 election than in 2020 — except in key battleground states. Youth voters also notably pushed towards the right this year but still favored Harris by double-digit margins. What the data really shows is that broad statements about the youth electorate do not always align with reality. As to whether students at Tufts — and young people writ large — are shrouded in an apathy bubble, the answer may be more complicated than expected.
Eitan Hersh, a political science professor who studies American conservatism, has observed a different type of ideological homogeneity at Tufts. He conducted an anonymous poll in his class: Out of 100 students, only about five identified as conservative. Nationally, about 26% of college students identify as conservative, but Tufts stands out as an enclave of left-leaning politics. Hersh attributes this to the messaging and branding Tufts has embraced for years, which prizes certain types of diversity such as race, gender and sexual orientation, while avoiding ideological or religious diversity.
“Tufts prioritizes in the language it uses to advertise itself a version of civic engagement that is coded as left-oriented,” he said. “A reasonable person would look at Tufts’ material and say, ‘This is a school that’s trying to recruit progressives.’”
Kopp does not see it that way: “It honestly feels like there is a wide range [of] political ideology on campus. It's more just the loudest voices tend to be those on the left, whereas I feel the more centrist voices aren’t as involved in activism or advocacy.”
Deborah Schildkraut, a political science professor at Tufts, also held an in-class survey. She found that students tend to focus on the broad issues, often more aware of the details of the Texas Senate race than the name of their own local representative.
“One of the questions I ask is, what’s the most important problem facing the country today?” Schildkraut said. “I have noticed a significant change over time, where people talk more about polarization and perceived threats to democracy. [That] never used to come up, and now those are the most common answers that I get.”
Polarization and threats to democracy are macro issues. They are born of discourse and inquiry, not rallies and action. While Democrats framed the 2024 election as the fight against threats to democracy, tangible economic issues like inflation won out. But many Tufts students need not think about these woes — after all, we are the 10th most disproportionately wealthy college in the country. Many students can stay wrapped up in thought, using their political brain over their feet.
“It’s certainly a privilege to be able to focus on long-term, theoretical change rather than immediate policy changes,” Kopp said. For her, translating progressive ideals into activism is a conscious choice, one she wishes more of her peers would embrace.
And, from within the political bubble, can Tufts students even handle information contrary to their rampant progressivism? Many high-profile conservatives argue the answer is no: In fact, the “anti-woke” University of Austin was recently founded on the principle that most major universities, including those like Tufts, are pushing their students towards progressivism. But Schildkraut pushes back: “There’s the perception that [students] are empty vessels that professors indoctrinate, which is not true. Our students are complex people with agency and their own experiences that they bring to the table. A lot of times, they challenge their professors to reevaluate their own perspectives.”
Schildkraut also points to the range of political discussions that take place on campus almost daily. Conservatives have long lamented the efforts to “deplatform” right-leaning speakers and panelists on university campuses. At Tufts, Schildkraut points out, disruptions are rare. Sure enough, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s database finds only two recent instances of student activism against campus speakers at Tufts, neither of which were canceled. Still, the perception of Tufts as an ideologically rigid space persists, even among students.
But Hersh stands firm in his belief of the university’s hard left tilt, noting that the excessively liberal ecosystem has diminished trust in academia. “Republican politicians and conservative leaders are really turning against higher education,” he warns. For him, the university’s political culture reinforces an ideological homogeneity that may be satisfying to the campus community but ultimately fuels public resentment.
It seems that everyone has an opinion on campus politics. Liberal arts students are vicious, speech-quashing progressives, or they’re immorally apathetic. They’re high-minded discourse junkies without action, or they’re overly partisan hacks. Commentators complain about bubbles on bubbles, but they can’t seem to agree on what kind of thought that bubble foments.
Even if there is a political bubble at Tufts, we’re bound to leave it with graduation. Schildkraut recently sat on an alumni panel with a former student now working for the Senate Rules Committee. They had gone on to help revise the Electoral Count Act — a consequential effort to safeguard democracy. “They do seem to have faith that they can make a difference,” Schildkraut said. “They do the work, and it’s really inspiring.”
