Academic Bias and Censorship Are Huge Problems, and We Can Prove It

By Wilfred Reilly

Friday, December 29, 2023

 

For the prestigious professional journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a team of top academics — which, in the interest of full disclosure, included Yours Truly as a bit player — recently attempted both to examine contemporary levels of censorship in the American academy and understand the motivations behind it. The results obtained by our team, led by UPenn’s Cory Clark, were interesting and to some extent not very surprising — but deeply unsettling.

 

Censorship is extraordinarily prevalent across modern academia. Per one large data set reviewed for the project, 34 percent of all tenured and tenure-track faculty members report open “peer pressure” to “avoid controversial research.” Interestingly, the motives of today’s bluenoses seem to be, at some level, positive ones (Clark uses the term “pro-social”). Censors genuinely want to interfere with the spread of ideas that they see as racist or sexist, rather than to simply exercise power. However, the in-practice effects are the same: Since contemporary leftists see almost everything as racist and sexist, the effects of the theoretically moral motivations that dominate on today’s campuses are frequently absurd — i.e., the resignation of Harvard president Larry Summers after he noted that men and women are different.

 

First, let’s look at the data. Drawing on both high-quality, preexisting databases and our own analyses, the Clark Team documented an extraordinarily high level of hard censorship (i.e., journal blacklisting of certain research categories), soft censorship (“cancellation”), and self-censorship (self-explanatory, one hopes) in the modern academy. Simply put, cancel culture is no myth. Overall, “hundreds of scholars have been sanctioned for expressing controversial ideas,” and the rate of sanctioning has increased substantially over the past decade.

 

This trend can be outlined empirically, using hard numbers. In sum, 4 to 11 percent of current university or collegiate faculty have been threatened with dismissal or other discipline related to some aspect of their teaching or research work, 34 percent have been “peer pressure[d] to avoid controversial research,” and fully 25 percent describe themselves as being very or “extremely” likely to self-censor during the professional research process. Hell, it may be no coincidence that we named the paper “Prosocial Motives Underlie Scientific Censorship by Scientists,” rather than simply “Censorship Is Everywhere in Academia!”

 

Disturbingly, the Inquisitional atmosphere of the contemporary campus seems to be supported by a sizable minority of its denizens. Per the data, “9-25% of academics and 43% of PhD students . . . support dismissal campaigns for controversial academics.” Many of these individuals report willingness to behave in a biased fashion against right-wingers and other controversial scholars in the context of “hiring, promotions, grants, and publications.”

 

These attitudes have clear and measurable consequences. The invaluable free-speech activist group Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has recently “tracked 486 cases of scholars targeted (for formal discipline) specifically for their pedagogy or scholarship,” more than a few of whom ended up fired. The Canceled People website hosts a very different list of victims which contains about the same number of names (albeit not all of them academics).

 

If this even needs to be said, the censorious attitudes of today do not apply equally to all types and directions of research. In an environment where sexology and gender-studies classes not-infrequently host live sexual performances, but where waving a Trump flag can be potential grounds for serious discipline, “bad” in practice often means “right of center.” As the paper says: “Most modern academics are politically left-leaning, and so certain right-leaning perspectives are likely targets for censorship.” To be fair, the same would likely prove true in reverse if left-wingers constituted only a 7 percent minority in academia — as rightists currently do across many major departments (and in the national media overall). However, while fantasy can often be fun, that simply is not the case.

 

In the World That Is, we found several more specific patterns of censorship within the overall trend toward regulation of “un-woke” thought. Male scholars, especially those researching topics of specific interest to men, often get hit harder than women. Female academics tend on average to be more “harm averse and protective of the vulnerable” than their male counterparts, and as a result are significantly more censorious. Similarly, whites have it worse — on this particular front — than “people of color” do: A major piece we cite finds that “ethics boards were likelier to reject proposals testing discrimination against white males than otherwise identical proposals testing discrimination against women and minorities.”

 

Overall, progressives — while no more generally censorious than many religious conservatives (think of the pornography and surrogacy debates) — are far more likely to object to or mentally reject information “perceived to threaten historically marginalized groups,” and this attitude underlies most phenomena discussed thus far. For example, the majority of the United States’ leading social psychologists have stated on the record that, “If science discovered a major genetic contribution to sex differences,” mainstream reporting on this fact “would be bad.” Similarly, the topic that was found to generate the most demands for censorship, across essentially all issues examined, was “race . . . especially comments about Black people.”

 

As these findings imply, most purple-haired academics do not think of themselves as annoying prudes or even as members of “the Left” enjoying the Thrasymachian exercise of pure power. They view themselves, rather, as good and decent people. Their motives genuinely do appear to be “pro-social,” in the context of a young and novel ethics.

 

What does that mean? Well, out of 64 of the most serious cases of “scholars targeting peers for their scholarship” analyzed by FIRE and then by our paper, “nearly all involved harm concerns” rather than open or even oblique political motivation. When the prestigious journal Nature Human Behavior stated recently that it would reject or even post-hoc retract articles dealing with certain sensitive racial (etc.) topics, their given rationale was rejection not of edgy material, but of anything with “potential to undermine the dignity of human groups.”

 

That’s cool. But, among adults, here’s the problem: It really does not matter why censors want to stop the dissemination of essential knowledge (one imagines that most data on the black crime rate, white suicide rate, or Biden-era surge in Hispanic illegal immigration might fall afoul of Nature). Actual Spanish Inquisitors were, quite probably, mostly deeply pious and conventionally “good” men. But, most of them believed that the sun revolved around the Earth, and they simply had to be removed from the intellectual landscape of their era so that knowledge could truly flourish.

 

Along the same lines, it does not matter if the major journals of 2023 end up rejecting a piece about a potential cure for cancer for a “good” reason — because it was developed by a non-diverse team, or could forever eclipse some aspect of traditional indigenous medicine — rather than an immoral one. Absent an explanation of the cure, citizens will still die unnecessarily from cancer. And, further, the constant and absurd denials of reality emerging from today’s academia decrease social trust in the institution itself, and thus slow the adoption of those medical cures and other good things it does provide.

 

The actual solution to any given cancer is to use every tool available to remove it. After extensive research, we now know how common “woke” censorship of useful speech is on the American campus. The next logical step is and must be ending that censorship. Check out our ideas on how to do that, and the rest of the PNAS article (Clark, Jussim, Frey, and von Hippel et al., 2023), right here.