College campuses across the United States lean predominantly liberal. At USC specifically, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression found that the student body’s liberal to conservative student ratio was 4.17 to 1.

So, in a largely liberal political sphere, how are conservative voices being heard at USC?

While accepted and maybe even amplified in classrooms and political clubs, conservative voices often feel discomfort at the individual level due to perceived judgment that can come from political disagreement, such as the apprehensive hesitation of bringing up their perspectives in every environment.

Channing Mack, a senior majoring in political science, is the president of USC’s Political Union, a chapter of BridgeUSA that aims to connect people across the political spectrum. He stressed the value of having open discussions, not only expressing, but also hearing, people’s unique viewpoints.

An example of the amplification of conservative dialogue in a professional or academic environment is the Open Dialogue Project, a university-wide initiative launched in October 2025 to promote free expression and open discourse across campus.

ODP has had about 25 workshops attended by more than 2,000 people, according to Neeraj Sood, the director of the ODP and a professor at the Price School of Public Policy. Sood acknowledged what he described as positive change in students more freely expressing their opinions as of late.

“Students [are] feeling more comfortable disagreeing with others,” Sood said.

Sood’s statement is backed up by third-party sources as well: FIRE has given USC a “green light” rating, the highest rating for university policies governing expression, when just a year prior it was ranked 216th.

The existence of the ODP gives students across the political spectrum who feel the need to self-censor an opportunity to be heard. It is important to note that left-leaning voices also have a history of being silenced at USC, making it all the more compelling to investigate the different causes that silence of conservatism on an individual level

Open dialogue proliferates in professional environments, such as in classrooms or formal debates, but stops at students’ real social lives.

Mack said that he found the majority left-leaning political climate of Los Angeles and USC “challenging.”

Coming from Louisiana and having a deeply religious background that influenced his conservatism, Mack said that “there is some type of self-censorship among my peers who are also conservative like me,” and that he feels that bringing up political views or experiences is “risking a social life.”

Similar to Mack, other conservative people on campus may share a sense of foreboding about expressing their political beliefs, even in environments that seem apolitical in casual conversation.

As seen with the ODP, the University is, at the moment, trying to incorporate diverse political perspectives. The problem is the top-down approach in free speech: Going all in on the idea that university policy is the only way to reduce self-censorship among conservative students is what fetters us. The University can spend millions of dollars, yet nothing will change if the behavior of students doesn’t.

Tom Hammond, a junior majoring in business administration and the president of the Trojan Democrats, a partisan group that seeks to represent Democratic views on campus, said that he believes conservative students “absolutely deserve a place to gather [and] discuss.”

Hammond said that rather than a marginalization of conservatism, what he’s observed is “a membership issue”; a struggle of conservative student organizations’ efforts to recruit new members.

The lack of agency of conservatism at USC mirrors the struggle of U.S. politics: Since 2016 and President Donald Trump’s first term, politics have become increasingly more polarized. It made bringing up political issues in a non-professional environment uncomfortable.

However, conservatism is not a view we must only consider in a theoretical sense. Outside a professional environment, conservatism deserves space because, like other ideologies, it is the culmination of the beliefs and perspectives of real people.

Through the ODP and integration within classrooms, the University amplifies conservative voices in more formal spaces. However, we, as a student body, need to work together to attempt to deconstruct our country’s political polarization from the bottom up and rediscover what it really means to discuss politics.

It’s an exchange of beliefs about what the future should look like. Only then can administrative effort, debates, speeches and workshops propagate open dialogue.