As our nation’s colleges and universities reopen for the new academic year, incoming college students have expressed fears of being bullied and silenced by liberal student mobs like the one that came after me at Sarah Lawrence College in the spring of last year.

They have shared this fear with me and in various online forums. Weekly emails show up in my inbox from scores of students around the country, revealing that our incoming first-years are well aware of how mobs can quickly form and turn on someone for questioning and challenging certain ideas. Students know that they are entering a climate where speakers are shouted down and silenced. Non ultra-liberal ideas surrounding race, identity, and sexuality are protested, and those who support conservative thought and principles are shamed and intimidated.

Students are cognizant of the real reputational risks that exist when challenging particular sentiments. But I want to encourage incoming students to be bold and steadfast in questioning campus liberal orthodoxy. Because these mobs do not reflect the reality of the student body.

The reality on campus is that these mobs are run by small minorities of students and activist administrators . In contrast, today’s students as a whole are far more open and balanced than news stories reveal. In fact, students want to embrace a diversity of views while on campus.

The most recent report from the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI), for instance, shows that only 4% of incoming first year students in 2017 identify as far-left with 2% being on the far right. This is hardly a large group of students on the extremes In fact, 41% of incoming students ideologically identify as being middle of the road while 36% identify as being liberal or on the Left and the remaining 23% hold that they are conservative or are on the Right.

While students are more liberal than the national population , the bulk of students mirror the rest of the country in terms of the predominance of moderates. Thus, it is hard to make the case that our nation’s undergraduates are particularly liberal when only a third actually identify as such, while the remaining two-thirds are centrists or conservative. The liberal monoculture present is out of sync with the students themselves.

Going further, data from HERI speaks to the question of diverse ideas directly and demonstrates that students want to not only hear a multiplicity of views but consider themselves as more than capable of empathizing with others who hold divergent ideas and beliefs.

In 2015, HERI found that over two-thirds of students agreed with the statement that “dissent is a critical component of the political process” and a minority of students — just 43% — believe that “colleges have the right to ban extreme speakers from campus.” This is strong evidence that most students are not only aware that ideas should be both debated and challenged, but also that speakers should not be forcibly banned — they can be engaged through more speech and reason.

HERI also confirmed that incoming college students overwhelmingly respect and crave alternative views as a general principle. As an example, in 2017, 81% of students rated themselves highly as being tolerant “of others with different beliefs” and 77% believed that a major strength of theirs is the “ability to see the world from someone else’s perspective.” Going further, over two-thirds of incoming students stated that a major strength of theirs is an “openness to having [their] own views challenged” and a similar number took pride in their ability to discuss and negotiate controversial issues. The most impressive finding is that 88% held that a major strength of theirs was the “ability to work cooperatively with diverse people.” These are exactly the qualities one should bring to higher education and its marketplace of ideas.

Like the ideology findings, the data tell a very clear story: Incoming students are interested in a multiplicity of ideas and experiences and take pride in their ability to absorb, confront, engage, and react to these varied views. Students are not particularly liberal in general and myopic in terms of how they want to engage with ideas and each other either — they want to empathize and understand.

Sadly, as these first-year students will be setting foot on their respective campuses, they will be bombarded with progressive ideas and dictates about how to participate through their orientation programs, their dormitories, and in their student life centers from a handful of l oud, liberal student leaders and administrators . These directives will frame debates and discourse and will tell them what can be discussed and what is off-limits. These prescriptions are not only antithetical to the goals and virtues of higher education, they are also out of line with how students see themselves ideologically and how they want to grapple with different ideas and worldviews.

It is crucial that students begin their semesters around the country aware that the liberal messaging that they are going to encounter everywhere they turn does not represent the political views of their peers, and certainly not their peers’ intellectual virtues.

While it may be daunting to stand up to a strong vocal minority of students and a powerful administrative class, students who want to push back should know that those around them are not necessarily extremely liberal or uninterested in hearing alternative views; often the majority are simply too afraid to speak out. Students who push back for real viewpoint diversity may be surprised by just how many allies they will find all around them.

Samuel J. Abrams is professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.