Survey Finds Many Professors Self-Censor Writing to Avoid Controversy
“If faculty don’t feel comfortable fully expressing themselves in their writing or research, then the whole purpose of colleges — the pursuit and generation of knowledge — is stymied”
This is not how it’s supposed to be in higher education. Will things start changing this year?
The College Fix reports:
‘Alarming’: Poll finds professors self-censor writing to avoid controversy
A leading free speech organization expressed alarm at a survey that found more than one third of professors “ton[e] down” their writing to avoid “controversy.”
In the recent Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression survey, 35 percent of faculty said they self-censor their writing, and only one in five said a conservative would “fit well in their department.” The organization polled more than 6,200 faculty at 55 higher education institutions.
“I was particularly concerned to hear 1 in 3 faculty have recently toned down their writing for fear of causing controversy,” FIRE Director of Policy Reform Laura Beltz told The College Fix.
“If faculty don’t feel comfortable fully expressing themselves in their writing or research, then the whole purpose of colleges — the pursuit and generation of knowledge — is stymied,” she said in a recent email.
The survey compared the 35 percent to another poll from 1954 in which only 9 percent of social scientists answered the same question that way. This was “at the height of McCarthyism,” according to a news release.
Beltz described the results as “alarming” but not surprising.
She told The Fix they track with “what I’ve been hearing anecdotally from faculty across the country and across the political spectrum: Faculty fear reprisal over their expression in and out of the classroom, and in their research.”
The survey also found that 47 percent of conservative faculty feel that they cannot voice their opinions. This is compared to 19 percent of liberal faculty who feel this way.
The findings align with what some professors told The College Fix in a recent series of analyses about the political affiliations of university faculty. The series consistently found Democrats vastly outnumber Republicans, sometimes with zero identified in whole departments.
Some Republican faculty declined to comment or spoke anonymously for fear of retribution.
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They also MUST pretend to enthusiastically back DEI and its racist principles, or they won’t get anything published. Even the Chronicle (a leftist leaning publication) has commented on how professors must show a DEI component to all of their research proposals:
https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-ruthless-politicization-of-science-funding?sra=true
Also, I believe that several of the top scientific journals (including Nature and Science) have made official statements that they will not publish research (no matter how true and well documented) that does not support woke activist positions. A few examples:
https://unherd.com/newsroom/science-magazine-promotes-faulty-race-discrimination-claim/
https://michaelshermer.substack.com/p/scientific-american-goes-woke
https://lawrencekrauss.substack.com/p/science-shouldnt-offend-so-says-nature
https://www.wsj.com/articles/woke-science-is-an-experiment-certain-to-fail-11600972161
https://x.com/primalpoly/status/1715430359196684547
Many more examples abound. Probably the worst examples were the Scientific American articles that said sex is not binary and the one trashing EO Wilson for being a racist (by association).
It’s not easy being a real scientist, and speaking the truth to wokeness.
While the professoriate has long leaned Democrat/liberal, in times past there was more tolerance–and expression–of different views. In the ‘6os, a professor put a poster against the Vietnam War on his door. Two doors down, a professor put an American flag on HIS door. The professor in between put a Demilitarized Zone on his door. 🙂
All three of the professors were veterans, two of WW2. The American flag professor was too young to have served in WW2.
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