Female Faculty More Likely to Support Speech Restrictions, Campus Investigations, Deplatforming
“Young faculty members and female faculty members are the least likely to tolerate heterodox speech: One in five faculty members under the age of 35 report some level of acceptance of students using violence to stop a controversial campus speaker”
We have been reporting about free speech issues on college campuses for years. A new report from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), has some shocking findings on the subject.
We’re basically back in the McCarthy era.
From FIRE:
REPORT: Faculty members more likely to self-censor today than during McCarthy era
At the end of the Second Red Scare in 1955, 9% of social scientists said they toned down their writing for fear of causing controversy. Today, one in four faculty say they’re very or extremely likely to self-censor in academic publications, and over one in three do so during interviews or lectures.
A new report from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression suggests that as younger faculty replace older faculty and more women join their ranks, the conditions for campus free expression may continue to deteriorate.
The survey sponsored by FIRE and administered by Social Science Research Services asked almost 1,500 university faculty members about their views on campus civil liberties. The data show that faculty members today are more fearful than during the Second Red Scare, with 72% of conservative faculty, 56% of moderate faculty, and even 40% of liberal faculty afraid of losing their jobs or reputations due to their speech. Untenured faculty are more afraid than tenured faculty, with 42% of untenured faculty censoring themselves, versus 31% of tenured faculty.
“We’re finally seeing the extent to which faculty have lost their peace of mind,” said FIRE Research Fellow Nathan Honeycutt. “When professors across the political spectrum become terrified of losing their jobs for exercising their rights, true academic inquiry and diversity of thought become nearly impossible.”
Young faculty members and female faculty members are the least likely to tolerate heterodox speech: One in five faculty members under the age of 35 report some level of acceptance of students using violence to stop a controversial campus speaker, and 19% of female faculty believe that it’s acceptable to limit potentially “hateful” speech even when that speech isn’t intended to be hateful.
“Faculty members complain that they can’t speak freely, but they’re also turning on each other,” said FIRE’s Director of Polling and Analytics Sean Stevens.
Professor Samuel J. Abrams, who teaches politics at Sarah Lawrence College has more on this at Reason:
Shockingly, younger faculty report more acceptance of violence to combat speech. While 97 percent of older faculty say it’s never acceptable for students to use violence to stop a campus speech, only 79 percent of younger faculty agree. That one in five younger professors show any level of acceptance for violence to stop speech should alarm all of us.
Mixing age with ideology reveals even more pronounced support for illiberal attitudes. Among liberal faculty 35 and under, only 23 percent indicated that students shouting down a speaker is never acceptable, compared with 88 percent of conservative faculty. Moderate faculty in this age group were also much more likely than their conservative colleagues to endorse the acceptability of these tactics.
Perhaps most alarming of all, only 64 percent of young and liberal faculty say it’s never acceptable for students to use violence to stop a campus speech.
Illiberalism runs deep among young liberal faculty members, and their views regrettably resemble those of their students rather than their more senior peers. As newer and far less tolerant numbers of professors replace older faculty, colleges and universities may be in a true crisis if the higher education enterprise destroys its core values.
Professor Abrams is right, this is shocking news, especially because it pertains to higher education. Colleges and universities are places where free speech and debate should be encouraged, not rejected.
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Comments
When there is no debate how does anything move forward? When feeling means more than debate you need to grow a thicker skin because at some point you will be the one restricted.
The “Life of Julia” on Steroids:
https://www.aei.org/poverty-studies/the-life-of-julia-on-steroids/
As with “Leftists Ready To Blame Republicans When SCOTUS Strikes Down Biden’s Unconstitutional Student Loan Forgiveness,” Water is wet, dog bites man, you name the cliche.
In other words, completely predictable. What has happened to so many progressive women that they turn into the Georgia grand jury foreperson, Randy Weingarten, you name the person.
Long live freedom of expression and diversity of thought!
Maybe some of these pro violence young profs need to be introduced to some violence personally.
So, the multi-level indoctrination program is producing indoctrination, at multiple levels, in the people it targets.
That makes three things The Apparatus is good at.
Women prefer harmony. That is not to say females cannot be vicious. High school Mean Girls are real. But in high school it is all done under the cover of cliques. But that is high school. Much more is expected of college professors. These women may well feel more comfortable teaching middle school kids.
I don’t think women prefer harmony to the point of being peaceful in all situations.
I think women prefer that everyone agree with them. Sadly, for some women, that means submitting to get along and never speaking up. For the other extreme, it means shutting down all dissent to give the appearance that everyone is in agreement.
There are good women in the middle of that spectrum and there are plenty of men in a spectrum of their own. Men just tend to be more overt about their disagreements.
That’s not my experience in leading and managing both men and women. Nor in my dating life. I have yet to find a woman who wouldn’t eventually tell me all about ‘that bitch Betty in accounting’. The sorts of things men brush off women tend to emphasize ‘you won’t believe what she said or did’. They seem to thrive on drama not harmony.
My four years in the navy were shoreside. Our watch sections comprised maybe 1/3 women. The level of tension in the air could be felt.
Oddly enough, the ones I either knew were lesbians or suspected were, did the work and did not join in with the gossip and back stabbing.
I promise you, that trait does not go away with age!
Feelings vs structure. Women prioritize the first and men the second.
Structure in this case means something that forces even the wrong people to do the right thing. Men don’t mind the wrong people so much but want to limit the damage. Gentlemen’s agreements rule.
True. Men understand the cultural and behavioral lines not to cross. Doing so is liable to result in a physical confrontation with immediate consequences. Men instinctively understand and accept this fact.
Women tend not to appreciate or respect this fact. IMO, largely b/c societal norms haven’t adjusted to account for ‘equality’. Women can still claim non combatant status while engaging in behavior that would result in an ass kicking for a man.
I wonder how much of this is ideological, too? I mean the pajama boy soibois on the left are just whiny, disdainful, self-aggrandizing gossip-mongering harpies. All the worst traits typically ascribed to women but that few conservative women seem to possess. Likewise, conservative men tend to be real men, no matter their sexual orientation.
Good observation. I agree that there is a distinction but not so much along pure political ideological lines. More so it boils down to the simple difference in worldview about personal accountability.
Those who accept that their own actions will create positive and negative consequences and accept those as the price of life usually don’t make mountains out of the molehill. These same people tend to be more center/right. Not always but very often.
There is some truth to the adage that GoP is the ‘Daddy’ party bringing discipline and accountability while the d/prog are the ‘Mommy’ party who offer the opposite. Not always but often enough that the trope is justified.
You might be shocked if you got an up-close and personal look at that awful, bitchy, female culture in schools. It starts with the young girls, and I’ve seen it reflected in the grown ones.
Anybody who has worked alongside a bad secretarial pool knows exactly what I’m talking about.
The way to curb it is to add males.
My comment is not to denigrate women but to explain the difference between men and women in one area. Poll after poll over many decades has shown that women will give up some freedoms to secure safety for their families. Gun rights, free speech, censoring of public documents or speeches, and more issues have been offered to guarantee safety and security. This is not to say that ALL women think this way but many women with children will give up much more than any other group for guaranteed security.
Benjamin Franklin once said, “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
Karen’s all
Women are wired for a strictly hierarchical social arrangement, where status and position are paramount.
Men are wired for a proficiency-based arrangement where what needs to be done is what determines your importance at any given moment.
Men are therefore more open to opposing views because instinctively what matters is what will work best
From the article
” In stark contrast, the percentages of conservative faculty 35 and under who indicated it was never acceptable for students to use these tactics are 88%, 93%, and 100%, respectively.”
The stat of women are more likely to embrace this is talking about liberal women.
Specifically liberal women who went through the current education system.
In other news, the sun will rise in the east.
Bwahahaha!!!!!!
It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that the people who are most likely to support DIE policies are people who… directly benefit from DIE policies.
Abortion… cancel culture. It’s a Pro-Choice ethical religious thing.
Men, women, and “our Posterity” are from Earth. Feminists are from Venus. Masculinists are from Mars. Social progressives are from Uranus.
The problem with their approach is that all of their power is gained by way of claiming victimhood. There is no actual strength in being a victim, and it totally depends on someone giving a rodents tookus about your feelings. If they were to come up to me and scream, “you are discriminating against us,” I could simply end it with “so?” What they have failed to calculate, cause math be hard, is that they are reaching the end of peoples tolerance of their victimhood. Sure, they can demand stuff, but they possess zero substance to “take,” and that is where real power lies.
This appears to be more of a political thing than anything else. Recruited leftists are leftists.
Female Democrats are leftist, the article is almost clickbait.
The alarm isn’t that female Democrats are slightly more likely than male Democrats to be pro-censorship it is the total loss of academia.
We really need to stop being ashamed to defend ourselves.
This is what happens when higher education becomes an indoctrination camp in the false religiion of American Marxism,
All of this makes me appreciate even more the direction West Virginia is going with their new campus carry law. The ones likely to endorse violence are not likely to be the ones carrying concealed on campus. With the possibility of concealed carry in the classroom, will that female professor tone down the rhetoric some and allow a real discussion or debate? Hopefully.
I would go one step further into heterodoxy and state without equivocation that at least 50% of females belong to The Weaker Sex™.
These females remain essentially in an adolescent stage; feelings and emotions are paramount and rationality is largely missing from their ideation.
In previous generations, their belief systems would be mostly shaped by fathers and husbands; nowadays, usually lacking a strong male component in their lives, these women turn to feminism and marxism to tell them how and what to think.
Rational adult women inevitably trend conservative; the perennial teenagers of both sexes are the leftist tools which are so destructive to any civil society.
The irony is just too rich, that a blog decrying female intolerance to free speech, removes a comment that espouses older traditional relations between the sexes (employing no vulgarisms or obscenities) due to female intolerance.