Will conservative profs "fit well" into Bay Area community colleges?
Image by rosipaw
Post-lawsuit, CA Community Colleges has pinky-promised to stop mandating DEI alignment for local faculty. But we wonder if it'll take time for colleges like De Anza to fully shift from ideological hostility to not-far-left folks. Case in point: a telling recent survey from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (with 6k+ profs).
FIRE surveyed 6,269 faculty members at 55 major colleges and universities over a three-month period for “Silence in the Classroom: The 2024 FIRE Faculty Survey Report,” and discovered a fraught campus atmosphere in which wide swaths of those surveyed admitted to hiding their political views to avoid censure.
Among the many findings:
87% of faculty reported finding it difficult to have an open and honest conversation on campus about at least one hot button political topic.
About 1 in 7 faculty members (14%) reported being disciplined or threatened with discipline for their teaching, research, academic discussions, or off-campus speech.
35% reported toning down their written work to avoid controversy. Shockingly, this is nearly four times the 9% of faculty who said this when the same question was asked of social scientists in the 1950s.
“The McCarthy era is considered a low point in the history of American academic freedom with witchhunts, loyalty tests, and blacklisting in universities across the country,” said FIRE’s Manager of Polling and Analytics Nathan Honeycutt. “That today’s scholars feel less free to speak their minds than in the 1950s is a blistering indictment of the current state of academic freedom and discourse.”
Faculty reported the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as the most challenging topic to have an open and honest discussion about, with 70% experiencing difficulty discussing it. Other hard-to-discuss issues include racial inequality (51%), transgender rights (49%), and affirmative action (47%). Only about 13% of faculty reported feeling comfortable discussing all 19 of the hot button issues asked about by FIRE.
Conservative faculty were much more likely than their liberal and moderate peers to report self-censoring. More than half — 55% — say they at least occasionally hide their political views in order to keep their jobs, compared to only 17% of liberal faculty.
“There are very few conservative faculty,” explains Honeycutt. “If they’re not expressing their views, then students are even less exposed to conservative perspectives than one might expect based on the numbers.”
Respondents were also more likely to express skepticism that conservatives would be welcomed within their departments. While 71% of faculty said that a liberal individual would fit into their departments either “very” or “somewhat” well, only 20% said the same of a conservative individual.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, faculty without tenure were more likely to report self-censoring across the board than their tenured peers. But the difference was not vast: Between tenured and non tenured faculty, there was only a 9-point difference for hiding their political views, and a 5-point difference for likelihood of self-censoring in emails or during classroom discussions.
“Tenure is supposed to be an ironclad promise that a university will defend a professor against backlash from students and politicians alike,” said Komi Frey, director of faculty outreach. “The alarming number of tenured faculty who self-censor or fear losing their jobs over their speech suggests many believe their administrations won’t actually have their backs when push comes to shove.”
Read the whole thing here.
Follow Opportunity Now on Twitter @svopportunity
We prize letters from our thoughtful readers. Typed on a Smith Corona. Written in longhand on fine stationery. Scribbled on a napkin. Hey, even composed on email. Feel free to send your comments to us at opportunitynowsv@gmail.com or (snail mail) 1590 Calaveras Ave., SJ, CA 95126. Remember to be thoughtful and polite. We will post letters on an irregular basis on the main Opp Now site.