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 controversyA 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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