Professor Eric Kaufmann (Birkbeck College, University of London) has an article in The Wall Street Journal on his report documenting the degree of politicization and cancel-culture in American, Canadian, and British universities. From a summary:
Based on a “new report for the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology (CSPI), Academic Freedom in Crisis: Punishment, Political Discrimination and Self-Censorship, the largest survey-based study to date of cancel culture and political discrimination among professors and grad students in the US, as well as Britain and Canada. It is now possible to get beyond anecdotes to hard data, though the report also contains numerous testimonials from academics inside the system.”
“Among the key findings:
• Across the US, the UK, and Canada, a significant portion of academics discriminate against conservatives in hiring, promotion, grants and publications. Over 4 in 10 US and Canadian academics would not hire a Trump supporter, and 1 in 3 British academics would not hire a Brexit supporter.
• Just 29% of American academics would be comfortable having lunch with a gender-critical scholar who opposes the idea of trans women accessing women’s shelters.
• 91% of Trump-supporting US academics say Trump supporters are not comfortable sharing their views with a colleague. 82% of Brexit-supporting social sciences and humanities academics in Britain say the same about expressing support for Brexit.
• In the US, over a third of conservative academics and PhD students have been threatened with disciplinary action for their views. Among conservative academics in the social sciences and humanities, 70% of Americans and 50% of British scholars self-censor in teaching and research. This compares to just 10-25% among left-wing faculty.
• 75% of conservative American and British academics in the social sciences and humanities say there is a hostile climate for their beliefs in their department. This compares to just 5% among left-wing faculty in the United States.
• Less than 10% of academics support campaigns to dismiss scholars who report controversial findings around race and gender. A much larger number, however, do not oppose cancellation.
• More American social sciences and humanities academics support than oppose political correctness and mandatory race and gender quotas for reading lists.
• Younger academics are twice as likely to support dismissal as older academics in the US and Britain, with 40% of American social sciences and humanities academics under age 40 supporting at least one of four hypothetical dismissal campaigns. PhD students are even more intolerant than other young academics. 55% of American PhD students under 40 support at least one campaign.
• 53% of conservative social sciences and humanities graduate students say that their political beliefs would make a difficult fit with an academic career compared to under 7% of leftists and centrists.
• The report finds that conservatives self-select away from academia, first as students, and later by retiring early. This helps reproduce the left-right skew of 14:1 we find among American and Canadian academics in the social sciences and humanities in leading universities.
• The problem of progressive illiberalism has persisted for close to four decades. Universities cannot reform themselves – only external forces can achieve this. A promising model involves state or federal government auditing public universities on an annual basis to ensure that they adhere to the First Amendment and do not engage in discrimination against political minorities.
• The UK report recommended a range of legislative and regulatory actions, most of which were adopted by the British government, announced in February 2021 by the Education minister and endorsed by Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
Together, this study reveals the massive, pervasive structural barriers faced by conservative academics and explains why research in the social sciences and humanities is often skewed in topic, method and perspective. By providing incontrovertible data from the perspectives of both perpetrators and victims, this report can help us move beyond the debate about the extent of bias in academia and focus attention on how to solve it.”
Third-generation postmodernism is flexing its muscles.
Related: Cancel Culture defined.