We know that academia is filthy with hard-left leaning professors and students, and it seems like college-aged Republicans are few and far between in academia. As it turns out, they’re not uncommon, they’re just incredibly quiet due to fears that if they’ll speak out, their professors will harm their grades.

According to The College Fix, an online poll from last month showed that Republican students kept their mouths shut about their beliefs by a whopping 73 percent:

The online poll was conducted in late August exclusively for The College Fix by College Pulse, an online survey and analytics company focused on college students. Only students who self-identify as Republican or Republican-leaning were polled.

The question asked: “Have you ever withheld your political views in class for fear that your grades would suffer?” Seventy-three percent of students who identity as “strong Republican” reported that they had, while 71 percent of students who identify as “weak Republican” said yes.

Even students who identify as Republican-leaning independents indicated they’ve kept quiet: 70 percent reported they have withheld their political views to protect their grades.

This is a sad ordeal. Higher education is supposed to be where your beliefs and understanding of things are tested, that is true, but not being able to express any beliefs out of fear is horrible.

Students were asked to make comments, and some of them are stories of being singled out by their professors who acted angrily toward them or witnessed a professor fail a student for having a right-leaning paper.

“I wrote a 19 page research paper on a Christian pro-life movement. I was the only one in the class that, when presenting my paper, had a “surprise visitor” (who was the teacher’s very liberal friend) argue [with] me about their views,” wrote a student from Western Kentucky University.

“I actually got yelled at by a professor for my views on gun control. It wasn’t an argument or anything, just plain one-sided insulting,” wrote another student from Notre Dame.

“When writing papers for gen ed classes? Absolutely. I know a guy who chose to write a pro-border wall argumentative essay for our super liberal professor and the prof just wrote “this whole paper is one big fallacy” and bombed him. Me? I wrote about the evils of horse racing. Perfectly safe topic,” wrote a student from Clemson.

“In my sociology class, my professor asked us if we would give our child hormone blockers if they believed they were transgender (that was the day’s lesson). One guy said he would rather teach his daughter to love her body the way it is than change it. She [sat] straight up said “so you would be a bad parent then? What was your name again?” Then she went to type something on her computer. Not a good day for him, I’m sure,” said a student from Arizona State.

College Republican groups are catching on and becoming more popular, but would likely be much larger in size if it weren’t for the fact that many students feel it better to keep their heads down and get the necessary grades to graduate.

Students pay a lot of money to attend Universities and would rather not sacrifice the time, funds, and their future by vocalizing their “wrong-think” in front of their professors. While it’s easy to say that these students should be braver and stand up for themselves, the real attention should be focused on the professors.

Something needs to be done about this infection, and stripping government grants and funding if even one student is failed due to his or her political opinion should be just the start.