The Silent Revolution: Free Speech, Censorship, and the Campus Dilemma in America

Part 1

In recent years, America’s leadership class has become increasingly antagonistic toward long-standing norms around free speech. As we laid out in one of our recent pieces[1], government bureaucrats have increasing endorsed the use of censorship under the guise of protecting Americans from so-called mis- and disinformation.

In this piece, we focus specifically on some of the reasons for this shift in stated values and that shift’s impact on those who dare to dissent from elite orthodoxy particularly within academia. We feel the need to keep writing on this topic, because the state of affairs is becoming even more dangerously absurd — including for example with researchers from Yale University’s School of Management publishing a paper entitled “Anonymity and Identity Online”, which we plan to discuss more extensively in an upcoming piece.[2]

The reality is that many intellectuals have been hesitant to state anything publicly about this value shift, for fear of career or social reprisal. We hope that these pieces can serve as a springboard from which academics can have a good-faith discussion about the future of free speech and free inquiry on campus, especially in light of the inherent contradictions revealed in many universities’ responses to the activities of campus groups after Hamas’s terrorist attacks in Israel last month.

The Inevitability of This Cultural Shift

While many believe that these cultural changes appeared out of nowhere in the last decade, we argue that this change was almost inevitable with the rise of the internet and independent media. Prior to the existence of the internet, the American expert class was able to quietly dominate most major platforms in influencing public discourse and politics. With the democratization of information caused by the creation of the internet, the expert class had to develop new tactics to defend their territory. 

The observation that elite circles have had an outsized influence on public opinion is by no means new. For example, F.A. Hayek noted this phenomenon as far back as 1949 in his essay entitled The Intellectuals and Socialism. Hayek noticed that this expert class (i.e., those who are credentialed in all fields including academia, news, science, engineering, etc.) exerted substantial influence on public opinion. At the time, the public received all its information and framing of the information from this credentialed class of people. Thus, those who could most successfully populate or influence these professions had an incredible political opportunity. They could make their own ideas appear more popular to the general public through what appeared to be broad expert consensus.

These efforts are not necessarily always covert, as many within these professions (particularly within news) often view their roles in such explicit terms. To illustrate this more concretely, consider a revealing 2017 moment on MSNBC’s Morning Joe when co-host Mika Brzezinski lamented that “[President Trump] could have undermined the messaging [from the press] so much that he can actually control exactly what people think. And that, that is our job.”[3] 

Hayek in his essay observed that American conservatives had naively and consistently argued their cases for a variety of political issues in the proverbial “marketplace of ideas” with the broader public. The left proved much more effective in mainstreaming its ideas by focusing almost exclusively on influencing the expert class. Hayek provides some evidence for the effectiveness of leftists’ approach, pointing out that it is no accident that “socialism has never and nowhere been at first a working-class movement.”[4]

While those advocating for increased control over internet speech would argue that they are merely protecting Americans from fake or false information and not trying control how people think, this is simply not the case. Thanks to reporting from Bari Weiss, Michael Schellenberger and Matt Taibbi through the Twitter Files, we now know that government agencies as well as non-profit partners in the summer of 2020 were flagging factual stories as “misinformation.” For example, the Virality Project – a coalition of academic institutions led by Stanford University – flagged accurate stories reporting vaccine side effects as misinformation since they could lead to greater “hesitancy about vaccination overall.” The State Department’s Global Engagement Center was also caught flagging factual posts for Twitter as “foreign disinformation.”[5]

Narrative control is therefore a central component of these efforts to centralize information back into the hands of the expert class and more easily influence the general public. While people can have a variety of views on the wisdom of mandating mass vaccination, it is hard to imagine there being a particularly good argument for granting the government the power to censor factual information for the purpose of achieving its own policy ends.

The Rise of the Internet and the Fall of Ideological Heterodoxy on Campus

During this period in which elites have become openly hostile to the idea of the public making decisions for themselves, college campuses have become increasingly stratified with respect to the ideological representation among faculty, as well as increasingly hostile toward heterodox views among their professors and students. According to data from the Higher Education Research Institute, between 1969 and 1998, the share of faculty identifying as “liberal/far-left” remained remarkably consistent, shifting just one tenth of a percentage point from 44.7 percent to 44.8 percent. However, since 1998, this share has changed dramatically in a very short timespan, reaching about 60 percent by 2014. The share of those identifying as “moderate” has dropped from 40 percent to under 30 percent, and the share of “far right/conservative” from around 20 percent to just above 10 percent during this same timeframe.[6]

Representation stratification is even worse among those who make decisions at major academic publications. For example, in a 2020 paper from Mitchell Langbert at Econ Journal Watch, Langbert looked at the ideological diversity of the membership of the American Economic Association (AEA) as well as the editors and other officers who make publishing decisions for the eight journals it manages. While the AEA members have a Democrat to Republican voter-registration ratio of 3.8 to 1, the AEA editors and leadership group has a voter-registration ratio of 12.7 to 1.  The AEA “Boards of Editors” who oversee the journals have a voter-registration ratio of 29 to 1.[7]

During this period of ideological and political consolidation in points of view at the academy, students have expressed severe concerns about voicing their opinions on contentious subjects on campus. In a 2021 poll from Intelligent.com, 52 percent of college students said they “always” or “often” refrained from expressing views on political and social issues in classrooms out of concern for potential consequences. This was consistent across political identity, as 55 percent of conservatives, 49 percent of liberals, and 52 percent of moderates responded as such.[8]

This alarming trend also proves to be true among faculty. According to 2022 poll from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, 52 percent of faculty reported being worried about losing their jobs or reputation because someone misunderstands something they have said or done, takes it out of context, or posts something from their past online. This concern differed across ideological identity more significantly relative to students with 72 percent of conservatives, 56 percent of moderate faculty, and 40 percent of liberal faculty indicating concern.[9]

These concerns are assuredly not unfounded, as many academics in recent years have found themselves embroiled in scandals for completely trivial reasons if not due to outright fabrications. While there are countless examples to choose from, one useful and particularly absurd example was when University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business Professor Greg Patton tried to explain how Chinese speakers may, at times, use certain filler words in conversation like the Chinese word for “that”. Due to this Chinese term sounding somewhat similar to the N-word and because Patton spoke the term out loud, some of the students of the class reported him to the university, placing him under investigation. The Dean of the business school Geoffrey Garrett would write in a statement after the incident that Professor Patton’s use of the term “caused great pain and upset many students” before concluding that the school “must and… will do better.”[10]

While professor Patton thankfully was cleared of any wrongdoing by the university[11], it is not hard to imagine how this episode may give him or his colleagues pause at ever broaching any topic that has even the slightest chance of drawing the ire of his students even if that topic is completely appropriate in the context of the class.

Beyond the impacts on the class discussion, it seems clear that virtually all claims of supposed “harm” or “emotional distress” that occur in the aftermath of people on campus daring to dissent from progressive orthodoxy are not merely due to oversensitivity but rather they are leveraged against dissenters in a deliberate effort to shut down any potential discourse and debate on contentious subjects. As the rhetoric on campuses across the country that followed last month’s terrorist attack in Israel demonstrated quite clearly, many of the same students who ardently believe that misusing one’s preferred pronouns is an act of violence that demands university action[12] have no issue justifying actual violence in the form of the mass slaughter, rape, and torture of innocent civilians insofar as they can reverse engineer a basis on which to declare the innocents as “oppressors” within the morally bankrupt ideology of “decolonization.”[13]

This episode shows that the fixation on addressing so-called violence in the form of words does not appear to be some principled but confused attempt to stamp out all forms of violence on campus and beyond. Rather, it js a debate trick to silence any perceived ideological or political opponent. While professors from around the country have shown greater courage in pushing back against this loud group of students and professors this past month[14], universities have a long, long way to go before they have successfully re-established a culture that respects intellectual freedom.

Criminalizing Dissent Institutionally

With campuses becoming increasingly ideologically captured and less committed to open inquiry, policies have been implemented to further enforce progressive mores onto aspiring professors and to weed out any potential non-believers among the university’s ranks. The most notable way this has been done in recent years is through the use of so-called “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI) statements in the faculty hiring process. What appear to be innocuous statements affirming professors’ openness to varied perspectives and identities are in actuality overbearing political litmus tests that force applicants to commit themselves to certain ideological goals. If an applicant dares to write a statement that does not make his or her commitment to these goals abundantly clear, he or she risks even having a chance at getting an interview or a job offer.

Consider for example the University of California. According to University of California Berkeley’s online rubric, a DEI statement is graded out of 15 with 3 separate dimensions graded on a scale from 1-5: i) “Knowledge about Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging”, ii) “Track Record in Advancing Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging”, and iii) “Plans for Advancing Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging”.[15] What does it take to get a top score? If a candidate indicates that he or she believes that “it's better not to have outreach or affinity groups aimed at particular individuals because it keeps them separate from everyone else, or will make them feel less valued”, then this candidate will receive a score of just 1-2 for dimension (i). Additionally, if the candidate suggests that he or she is “welcome to students of all backgrounds” in a lab or elsewhere and to mentoring students of all backgrounds, but failed to state that he or she actively encourages diverse students not currently involved in the lab to participate, then he or she, again, will be scored a 1-2 on dimension (ii). Finally, if an applicant makes the grave error of asserting that he or she aims to “treat everyone the same”, then this person would receive a score of 1-2 on dimension (iii).[16]

While some may try to downplay the impact of these statements on hiring, recent evidence suggests that they have become integral to the process. Take for example a recent hiring process for the “Life Sciences Initiative” at Berkely. A reported 3/4ths of the applicants were weeded out by DEI statements alone.[17] Beyond the specific case of UC Berkely, 1/5^th of colleges and universities in a recent study from the American Association of University Professors indicated that DEI criteria are used in tenure decisions, including 45.6 percent of large institutions (i.e., those with more than 5,000 students).[18] Similarly, a 2021 American Enterprise Institute study found that about 1/5^th of all academic job postings require DEI statements with elite institutions most likely to require them.[19]

Conclusion

The rapidly changing media environment and decentralization of information have presented new challenges to leaders of countries who have historically at least pretended to care about freedom of speech and inquiry. These changes make it increasingly difficult for leaders to stifle information or perspectives that might be inconvenient in their pursuit of policy objectives. While many have earnestly argued that these efforts are simply to curb efforts of foreign governments as well as other bad actors from deliberately misleading the public, the evidence suggests that governments have a much more expansive vision of censorship than merely misinformation. The ruling of Judge Terry A. Doughty of the 5^th Circuit in Missouri v. Biden, a case in which the plaintiffs alleged the federal government censored opinions of those who dissented from government narratives about the COVID-19 pandemic, highlights this. The facts of the case, “depict an almost dystopian scenario,” in which the federal government “seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.’”[20]

Unfortunately, many of the worst aspects of this broader trend among elites and other leaders are becoming entrenched in other ways on college campuses. Professors increasingly must agree to all sorts of political positions simply to be considered for academic positions at many academic institutions across the country. These commitments have gone beyond assurances of equal treatment of students and have effectively become loyalty oaths to progressive orthodoxy. University leadership must reverse this trend if universities are to continue to claim their societal position as centers of knowledge creation and the search for truth.

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[1] https://libertylensecon.substack.com/p/who-watches-the-watchmen-assessing

[2] https://www.insidehighered.com/sites/default/files/2023-07/ejmr_paper_nber(1).pdf

[3] https://freebeacon.com/politics/mika-brzezinski-medias-job-control-what-people-think/

[4] https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2555&context=uclrev, pg. 417.

[5] https://dailycaller.com/2023/03/17/twitter-files-covid-19-misinformation-censorship-virality-project/

[6] https://jonathanhaidt.com/viewpoint-diversity/

[7] https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2020/10/political-diversity-at-aea.html

[8] https://www.intelligent.com/college-students-fear-expressing-ideas-in-classroom/

[9] https://www.thefire.org/research-learn/academic-mind-2022-what-faculty-think-about-free-expression-and-academic-freedom

[10] https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/10/us/usc-chinese-professor-racism-intl-hnk-scli/index.html

[11] https://poetsandquants.com/2020/09/26/usc-marshall-finds-students-were-sincere-but-prof-did-no-wrong-in-racial-flap/

[12] https://www.dailywire.com/news/misgendering-is-act-of-violence-university-says

[13] https://www.adl.org/resources/blog/anti-israel-activists-celebrate-hamas-attacks-have-killed-hundreds-israelis

[14] https://docs.google.com/document/u/1/d/e/2PACX-1vRYUSR01Cb6zV50rDtm88q0ppSz-bn40oJ28YTG5cYJGpAjNF4hkiCAwQKya2iI5h--cb633CbeAtL6/pub?urp=gmail_link

[15] https://ofew.berkeley.edu/recruitment/contributions-diversity/rubric-assessing-candidate-contributions-diversity-equity

[16] Ibid.

[17] https://unherd.com/thepost/american-colleges-embrace-californias-dei-model/

[18] https://www.aaup.org/report/2022-aaup-survey-tenure-practices

[19] https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Other-than-merit-The-prevalence-of-diversity-equity-and-inclusion-statements-in-university-hiring.pdf?x91208

[20] https://fedsoc.org/commentary/fedsoc-blog/missouri-v-biden-the-crossroads-between-misinformation-and-free-speech