Academic Freedom in Crisis: Punishment, Political Discrimination, and Self-Censorship
02 Mar 2021 EWR Online
Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo campus
According to a recent study, there is systematic discrimination against conservative academics in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, both in terms of career opportunities and in terms of scholarships and publications.
This is the conclusion of the report by Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology (CSPI), which aims to support under-researched ideas in the field of political psychology and social sciences.
Almost all universities are very left-leaning, both in terms of teachers and students. Political discrimination against conservatives and other intellectual minorities (such as gender-critical feminists who do not deny the existence of biological sex) affects nearly half of academics.
Right-wing academics are said to be under strong authoritarian pressure and group pressure. More than a third of conservative academics and doctoral students in the United States have been threatened with disciplinary action for their views. 70% of conservative academics say that their home university has a hostile attitude towards right-wing views.
Although not everyone publicly acknowledges the existence of political discrimination, the survey suggests that just over 20% of academics and around 30% of doctoral students are willing to publicly acknowledge their reluctance to approve a right-wing grant application. In principle, this means that almost half of the evaluators of grant applications are politically biased and that an application with conservative views is rejected in 80% of cases. At the same time, the trend towards left-leaning applications is the opposite - they are rather favored.
More than half of conservative researchers in North America and the United Kingdom admit to using self-censorship in their research and teaching. Self-censorship is particularly prevalent in progressive categories of "holidays" such as race, gender, and sexuality.
In North American universities, 70-80% of academics are left-wing and only 5-10% are right-wing, and researchers believe that the lack of freedom of opinion among teachers supports the emergence of authoritarianism in universities. As left-wing academics are also preferred for recruitment, the number of right-wing and conservative lecturers and researchers in universities is declining.
In the 1960s, the ratio was two to one (two on the left, one on the right), but now about ten to one. The study also showed that people with a right-wing degree are less interested in an academic career because they fear political discrimination.
