Leftist Censorship Is a Potent Political Issue

R ecently, a Johns Hopkins University study of abortions in Texas received a great deal of media attention. The results indicated that the state’s ban on abortions of fetuses beyond the sixth week of pregnancy increased infant mortality by at least 8 percent, and possibly far more, likely by forcing women to carry to term fetuses that were unlikely to survive. In light of this coverage, some Democrats fear that a future Republican administration might curtail research that calls into question support for pro-life and related causes.

Whatever one’s views on abortion, every researcher should agree that in a free society, politics cannot dictate scientific findings. As Alice Dreger details in her 2015 book Galileo’s Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science, allowing political authorities, whether medieval Vatican inquisitors or today’s university and government bureaucrats, to determine what questions we ask and what findings we report would wreck science. Unfortunately, in this polarized era, one’s position on whether political or religious interest groups should have the power to censor scientific research depends less on respect for science than on whose ox gets gored.

Currently, there is far more censorship from the institutional Left, including the Biden administration, than from the populist Right, simply because the Left dominates higher education. This is certainly no endorsement of Donald Trump, but if scholarly expertise is to regain widespread respect, then academia and government must do better than the Biden administration and the censors it supports.

Examples of leftist politics constraining research abound.

As economist Melissa S. Kearney shows in The Two-Parent Privilege, the rise of single-parent homes, giving children far less attention than in the past, is the greatest statistical contributor to increased inequality. Yet as one of us has documented, social scientists avoid the subject for fear of being called racist, since family structure varies across demographic groups and likely explains income differences across groups. Questioning the narratives of racial activists also explains why, under then–dean of faculty Claudine Gay, Harvard University attempted to terminate the respected — and tenured — professor Roland Fryer after his careful statistical scholarship found that police do not disproportionately kill African Americans.

Likewise, as anthropologist Elizabeth Weiss documents in a new book, On the Warpath: My Battles with Indians, Pretendians, and Woke Warriors, the California state government and San Jose State University worked with Native American activists to veto certain projects in archaeological research. These included studies of ancient skeletons that call into question indigenous religious convictions about whether tribes have always occupied their ancestral homes and whether they engaged in practices like war and slavery. By comparison, no state government would allow Christian creationists to block research on evolution.

Research on human sexuality is even more constrained. Weiss herself was shown the door when under pressure from activists. Her professional organization, the American Anthropological Association, unprofessionally canceled a debate she had organized about whether biological sex is binary. Likewise, as documented by Dreger in her book, Michael Bailey, our fellow board member of the Society for Open Inquiry in Behavioral Science (SOIBS), faced years of harassment and investigations for publishing studies of trans individuals that failed to fit the queer-theory narrative that sex is wholly mutable.

Now the Biden administration is working to increase government influence over both teaching and research. In March, the administration reissued Obama-era Title IX rules that will allow a single university bureaucrat to serve as prosecutor, judge, and jury in cases involving certain alleged violations of campus rules. Those bureaucrats will have the power to investigate and sanction students, faculty, and researchers accused of subjective offenses, as happened to Northwestern University professor Laura Kipnis when she dared write an essay criticizing the investigation of another professor. Kipnis’s writings supposedly caused an unsafe environment. That means that any scholarship or commentary that offends leftist activists risks punishment by leftist university bureaucrats. What could go wrong?

Analyzing large-scale surveys, political scientist Eric Kaufmann found that over a third of conservative professors and doctoral students reported having faced threats of discipline for their views. So do one in ten liberals, often censored by those farther to the left. Off campus, as reported in our forthcoming edited collection, The Free Inquiry Papers, 48 percent of Americans now self-censor at work.

To repeat, it’s not that the Left is necessarily any more censorious than the Right. Rather, as Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt point out in The Coddling of the American Mind (2018), university “safety” bureaucracies are so overwhelmingly left-wing that censorship to avoid offending leftist constituencies just seems natural. Ivy League deans and deanlets censor speech that might offend “victim” groups, while treating far more blatant cases of antisemitism with derision, as the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Education and the Workforce has shown. This same mind-set increasingly dominates Democratic Party elites.

Such censoriousness is also common in many other Western countries, not only in their academic institutions but also their political and legal bodies. In Canada, the Trudeau government’s Online Harms Act (Bill C-63) is part of a plan to establish a digital-safety commission to regulate social-media companies and force them to limit “harmful” content online. This involves creating a digital-safety ombudsman to whom Canadians can bring their concerns and a new digital-safety office — this, despite cross-partisan concerns about the new bureaucracy’s inability to provide protection and the likelihood of its impinging on the free-speech rights of Canadians. During the pandemic, when the Trudeau government declared a state of emergency, it used financial coercion against the truckers’ protest movement, bypassing the usual democratic and legal processes and freezing personal financial accounts. Similar policies seem likely to be imposed by Britain’s new Labour government. We would likely see the same approaches in a Biden second term or a Harris first term (if either of them leads the ticket in the wake of the chaos currently engulfing the Democratic Party, and wins).

As professors at American universities, we signed up to work at institutions where controversial ideas and different viewpoints could be critically examined, not crushed by an authoritarian, Lysenko-esque narrative. We should not let the ideological fixations that have taken hold in American political culture and universities destroy the culture of open inquiry required for science and modern civilization to flourish.

At the political level, we need to reaffirm and protect our free-speech rights, perhaps through congressional action. At the university level, the system might be beyond repair, in which case abandoning it altogether, in favor of new academic centers like the University of Austin, committed to balanced education, is the only solution. More optimistically, one could argue that Congress and state legislatures have the power to encourage free debate and ideological diversity in higher education before it is too late. There are now proposals in Congress intended to do just that.

One thing seems certain. In a country in which nearly half of those surveyed report that they self-censor, free speech and free inquiry are sleeping-giant issues that, if addressed, could appeal to hundreds of thousands of voters in states like Michigan, Arizona, and Georgia. Whichever presidential candidate takes this on could greatly improve the chances of winning.

Robert Maranto is the 21st Century Chair in Leadership in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas. Catherine Salmon is a professor of psychology at the University of Redlands in Southern California. They serve on the executive board of the Society for Open Inquiry in Behavioral Science (SOIBS) and are among the editors of The Free Inquiry Papers (forthcoming).