American Professors Are More Censored Than During McCarthyism
A few weeks ago, I wrote “The Slow Death of American Individualism,” citing data that reveals an unsettling reality. Namely, Americans are increasingly reticent to stand out from the crowd by voicing their own opinions. For a nation founded on rugged individualism, that’s a disturbing trend. How can a democracy authentically embody the will of the people if those very people are too afraid to make their will be known?
This week, I have an even darker statistic. As a former educator, I believe education is the cornerstone of democracy, not merely because it equips citizens with the tools to thrive professionally, nor because it deepens our understanding of the human condition through exposure to the arts, but because it fosters the critical capacity to make informed decisions.
Yet how can teachers accomplish this critical task if they are too scared to share their actual viewpoints with the class, even within the areas of their expertise?
In 1955, the historian Robert K. Murray wrote the book Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria, 1919-1920, about McCarthyism and the worst period of censorship in our nation’s past. The climate of fear was so pervasive at the time that when Murray was initially converting his dissertation into a book, his publisher Little, Brown and Company canceled the project. Despite this setback, the book was published two years later and remains the most comprehensive history of the McCarthy Era.1
Today, we find ourselves in an even worse age of censorship, in fact the worst that this country has ever known, and that’s not hyperbole, as you shall learn in a moment. The difference is, now our moral panic is over the black flag of fascism, which woke progressives see in every ripple and reflection of their existence. In terms of firing people for having the wrong opinions, or developing an atmosphere of terror that scares people out of expressing those opinions in the first place, our current Black Scare is in fact much worse than the Red Scare ever was.
What follows is an excerpt of an essay I recently wrote about a survey that illustrates precisely how bad the problem has become and how deep the rot truly runs.
For a number of faculty members, the threat of censorship is so pervasive on campuses across America that not even the cloak of anonymity is enough to make them feel safe expressing their ideas.
This year, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) surveyed 6,269 faculty members at 55 colleges and universities. The result is “Silence in the Classroom: The 2024 FIRE Faculty Survey Report,” which I co-wrote with the brilliant research fellow Nathan Honeycutt, and which is the largest faculty free speech survey ever performed. What we found shocked even us here at FIRE. A deeply entrenched atmosphere of silence and fear is endemic across higher education.
We found that self-censorship on US campuses is currently four times worse than it was at the height of the McCarthy era. Today, 35% of faculty say they have toned down their written work for fear of causing controversy. In a major survey conducted in 1954, the height of McCarthyism, by the sociologists Paul Lazarsfeld and Wagner Thielens, only 9% of social scientists said the same.
In fact, the problem is so bad that some academics were afraid even to respond to our already anonymous survey for fear of retaliation. Some asked us by email, or in their free response replies, to keep certain details they shared private. Some asked us to direct all correspondence to a private personal email. Others reached out beforehand just to confirm the results would truly be anonymous. Still others simply refused to speak at all.
For some, the danger is clear and concrete. As one professor wrote, “I am not at liberty to even share anonymously for fear of retribution.”
For others, it’s more nebulous, but the fear is no less real.
“I almost avoided filling out the survey for fear of losing my job somehow‚” one professor told us, adding that they “waited about two weeks before getting the courage to take the risk.”
It is totally unacceptable that this is a reality on today’s campuses.
Read the rest of the essay here.
If you’d like to read beyond Murray on the subject, then for an account of how McCarthyism ruined individual lives and bruised our institutions, I recommend Ellen Schrecker’s Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America. But if you want to learn more about the man himself, I suggest David Oshinsky’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy.
it certainly has reached epic proportions here in Seattle, Washington. The universities are just one of many places where pluralism has ceased to exist. It’s in the government of our city, our county, and our state. The county prosecutors office has a goal of zero youth incarceration as if that will solve our youth criminal problem. Everyone’s on board in their office cause that’s the group think. The reason we can’t get cops here is because it’s too frustrating to see that nothing is prosecuted. felonies become misdemeanors. charges are never pressed. It’s not just academia where the problems are festering. It’s literally in our criminal justice system. They’re certain that the reason black and Latino kids are arrested at higher rates than whites is racism instead of a cultural void in their families and communities. It’s so hard to live here with all of this nonsense abounding.