https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/12/academic-bias-and-censorship-are-huge-problems-and-we-can-prove-it/
A team of researchers measured contemporary levels of censorship in the American academy. Simply put, cancel culture is no myth.
Academic censorship just got accurately measured.
For the prestigious professional journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a team of top academics — which, in the interest of full disclosure, included Yours Truly as a bit player — recently attempted both to examine contemporary levels of censorship in the American academy and understand the motivations behind it. The results obtained by our team, led by UPenn’s Cory Clark, were interesting and to some extent not very surprising — but deeply unsettling.
Censorship is extraordinarily prevalent across modern academia. Per one large data set reviewed for the project, 34 percent of all tenured and tenure-track faculty members report open “peer pressure” to “avoid controversial research.” Interestingly, the motives of today’s bluenoses seem to be, at some level, positive ones (Clark uses the term “pro-social”). Censors genuinely want to interfere with the spread of ideas that they see as racist or sexist, rather than to simply exercise power. However, the in-practice effects are the same: Since contemporary leftists see almost everything as racist and sexist, the effects of the theoretically moral motivations that dominate on today’s campuses are frequently absurd — i.e., the resignation of Harvard president Larry Summers after he noted that men and women are different.
First, let’s look at the data. Drawing on both high-quality, preexisting databases and our own analyses, the Clark Team documented an extraordinarily high level of hard censorship (i.e., journal blacklisting of certain research categories), soft censorship (“cancellation”), and self-censorship (self-explanatory, one hopes) in the modern academy. Simply put, cancel culture is no myth. Overall, “hundreds of scholars have been sanctioned for expressing controversial ideas,” and the rate of sanctioning has increased substantially over the past decade.
This trend can be outlined empirically, using hard numbers. In sum, 4 to 11 percent of current university or collegiate faculty have been threatened with dismissal or other discipline related to some aspect of their teaching or research work, 34 percent have been “peer pressure[d] to avoid controversial research,” and fully 25 percent describe themselves as being very or “extremely” likely to self-censor during the professional research process. Hell, it may be no coincidence that we named the paper “Prosocial Motives Underlie Scientific Censorship by Scientists,” rather than simply “Censorship Is Everywhere in Academia!”
Disturbingly, the Inquisitional atmosphere of the contemporary campus seems to be supported by a sizable minority of its denizens. Per the data, “9-25% of academics and 43% of PhD students . . . support dismissal campaigns for controversial academics.” Many of these individuals report willingness to behave in a biased fashion against right-wingers and other controversial scholars in the context of “hiring, promotions, grants, and publications.”