Yves here. Rajiv Sethi reviews and raises questions about a recent survey of political views and self-censorship among teaching faculty at 55 universities. Not surprisingly, quite a few report believing they have to keep some views, notably on Israel and Palestine, to themselves.
Many of you are in academia or have close connections there. Please describe your experiences in comments.
By Rajiv Sethi, Professor of Economics, Barnard College, Columbia University &; External Professor, Santa Fe Institute. Originally published at his site
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has released the results of a national survey of university faculty that deals with freedom of expression on campus. There’s plenty of interesting material in the report, but it needs to be interpreted with some care.
The organization contacted all active faculty in undergraduate-facing departments at 55 colleges and universities. Most elite private institutions and many flagship state universities were included, and the list of invited participants numbered 112,510. A total of 6269 people completed the survey, for a response rate of about 5.6 percent.
This rate is within the typical range for surveys of this kind, but immediately raises the question of representativeness. Those who took the time and trouble to submit responses were a self-selected group who probably differ along multiple dimensions from those who chose not to participate. I suspect that the respondents were disproportionately likely to have a generally favorable (or at least neutral) view of the organization, and to have witnessed or experienced things that they felt an urge to communicate.
This ought to be kept in mind as one interprets the report.
For instance, suppose that faculty in the ideological minority on a campus are more likely to self-censor in the course of their professional lives, and also more inclined to submit responses to such surveys. This will have two effects—the pool of respondents will be more ideologically balanced than the campus faculty as a whole, and the reported degree of self-censorship will be greater than its actual incidence. And one can imagine many other ways in which self-selection into the pool of respondents can lead reports to diverge from underlying realities.
This doesn’t mean that the survey is uninformative; on the contrary, I think its value is immense. But the value lies in the exposure of general qualitative regularities rather than specific quantitative claims.
With that preamble out of the way, let’s take a look at the findings.
The degree of self-censorship in the professional lives of responding faculty is substantial, affecting areas of research for one-fifth of them, classroom discussion for two-fifths, and online activity for a majority:
In addition, about a quarter of respondents engage in self-censorship in conversations with administrators, colleagues, and students, prompted by “fear of social, professional, legal, or violent consequences.” According to the report, these “self-censorship dynamics… are more prevalent and salient to conservative faculty, but also more pronounced for faculty who have weaker job protections.”
There are many issues about which faculty feel unable or unwilling to speak openly and honestly, but on almost every campus the one that tops the list is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This was mentioned by 70 percent of respondents overall, and by more than 80 percent of those at Columbia, Harvard, Indiana University, Oklahoma State, Rutgers, Stanford, Syracuse, the University of Oregon, and Yale. The survey asked participants where their sympathies lay in this conflict, and got the following distribution of responses:
Source: Silence in the Classroom: The 2024 FIRE Faculty Survey Report
This suggests to me that that faculty with a wide range of views are holding their tongues.
Next, consider self-reported party affiliation. About 61 percent of respondents identify with or lean Democrat, 12 percent identify with or lean Republican, 13 percent are independent, and the rest are allied with smaller parties, no parties at all, or choose not to disclose any affiliation:
Source: Silence in the Classroom: The 2024 FIRE Faculty Survey Report
The distribution of self-reported political ideology is similar: about 59 percent are on the left, 17 percent on the right, 17 percent are moderates, and the remainder either do not disclose any ideological commitment or do not place themselves on this spectrum.
Finally, consider attitudes towards diversity statements for hiring or promotion. These are considered never or rarely justified by about half of respondents:
As in the case of self-censorship, there are significant differences in responses by faculty ideology—conservative faculty are overwhelmingly opposed to such requirements, moderates are somewhat less strongly opposed, and liberals are quite evenly divided.
What should one infer about the faculty at large based on results in the report? This question can’t be answered without making some judgments about the kinds of characteristics that affect response rates. My own view is that in the population invited to participate, conservative faculty are present in fewer numbers, self-censorship is less frequent, and diversity statements are less strongly opposed than a literal reading of the report would suggest. But I don’t think these distortions are large, and the general qualitative picture emerging from the survey is reasonably accurate.1
I’ll make two other points in closing.
A couple of years ago, Lara Bazelon published an article in which she argued that the ACLU, “once a bastion of free speech and high-minded ideals… has become in many respects a caricature of its former self.” It seems to me that FIRE now occupies the space that the ACLU has vacated.2 But it is not the only organization taking a principled stand on behalf of free expression—an amicus brief by PEN America in support of University of Washington computer scientist Stuart Reges is worth reading.3
Free speech and academic freedom are currently topics of animated debate on campuses across the country, and things are in a state of flux. Many institutions have taken steps towards institutional neutrality and the adoption of the Chicago principleson freedom of expression. But the embrace of abstract principles such as these will do little to restore a climate of free expression unless the thorny problem of self-censorship is squarely addressed. The FIRE faculty survey—problems with self-selection notwithstanding—gives us a sense of the nature and scale of the problem, and is therefore an essential starting point.
There has been a surge of new subscribers to this newsletter over the past few days, which I think is due to a mention on the DealBook holiday reading list. I’m grateful to Sarah Kessler and the rest of the team for that recommendation, and hope that the new arrivals find something of value here. And this will be my last post of 2024, so I wish all readers a very Happy New Year.
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1 One way to address the question of representativeness empirically is to examine the demographics of survey respondents alongside those of academic faculty as a whole. About 64 percent of respondents to the survey were male, and about 76 percent were white. These numbers can be compared with the faculty composition at the relevant institutions using a searchable list published by the Chronicle of Higher Education. The largest number of responses to the survey came from the University of Michigan, which has a faculty that is about 57 percent male and 53 percent white. Most other participating institutions have similar demographics, suggesting that respondents were more likely to be white and male than the population that was invited to participate. This doesn’t necessarily imply that race or gender affected response rates conditional on other characteristics such as age or seniority, but does mean that self-selection matters—respondents were not evenly drawn from different segments of the surveyed population.
2 I attended the organization’s annual faculty network conference this year, discussed the experience with Glenn Loury on his podcast, and participated (with Diana Mutz, Eugene Volokh, and John Hasnas) in a webinar on campus speech that was hosted by FIRE’s Director of Faculty Outreach, Komi Frey.
3 Reges responded to a suggestion by university administrators that he include a land acknowledgement on his syllabus by posting one that clearly mocked the very idea of such acknowledgements, and was disciplined for it. He sued, and a federal district court sided with the university. The PEN America brief was submitted to the Ninth Circuit where an appeal is pending.
