There are, astonishingly enough, people who continue to insist that college faculties do not skew heavily to the left or that their underrepresentation of conservative viewpoints has no negative effect on the robustness of debate or the quality of instruction. I heard a lot from such people after my column this week on what can be done to promote intellectual diversity in colleges.
Today, my AEI colleague Samuel Abrams reports on a new large survey of college professors.
An excerpt:
In 1955, at the end of the second Red Scare after World War II during the age of McCarthy and deep anti-communist fear, 9 percent of social scientists said they toned down their writing for fear of causing controversy. Today, 25 percent say they’re very or extremely likely to self-censor their writing in academic publications.
More than half of faculty—52 percent—say they’re afraid they’ll lose their job or reputation over a misunderstanding of something they said or did, or because someone posted something from their past online. While almost three-quarters of conservative faculty expressed this year, 40 percent of even liberal faculty agree.
Something is going badly wrong at colleges and universities, and there’s no good reason for the taxpaying public to accept it.