(This is a reprint of an old post that was also a chapter in my 2022 book Against Illiberalism)
There has been much talk about illiberalism in institutions, focusing here on universities. There is no question that censorship, illiberalism, and intolerance have long existed within the political far right. However, such qualities are now also associated with social justice and identity politics areas within the far left. New York University social psychology professor Jonathan Haidt said, “Most people are horrified at what’s going on at universities.”
The following are several of the more egregious recent examples of illiberalism on campuses:
Skidmore College student activists called for the firing of and boycotting the classes of art professor David Peterson because he observed a Pro Police rally. They also called for the firing of his wife even though the university did not employ her. Peterson said he and his wife didn’t go to support the rally but to watch out of curiosity.
Local newspaper journalist Chris Churchill wrote: “A supposedly damning photo of the Petersons circulated by students shows them standing at the rally, which was advertised as a ‘positive, all-inclusive event’ designed to humanize and support officers. The Petersons weren’t wearing pro-police T-shirts. They weren’t carrying a banner, holding a sign, or waving a black-and-blue flag. They appear to just be listening. But merely listening to an opinion that some Skidmore students find objectionable is apparently enough to get a professor in hot water.”
UCLA accounting professor Gordon Klein was suspended and publicly called out by the Business School Dean because he told a student that he would not grade black students differently nor delay their tests following the George Floyd riots in Minneapolis. The university’s Faculty Code of Conduct prohibits engaging in race-based discrimination, the failure to hold exams as scheduled, and to evaluate students other than their course performance. The California Constitution forbids race-based discrimination in education. Klein, who also is a lawyer, said, “I was following university policy meticulously in refusing to discriminate.”
St. Olaf College philosophy professor Edmund Santurri was the Director of the school’s Institute for Freedom and Community. With a slogan of “Dialogue that opens minds,” the institute’s mission is to bring in prominent speakers to expose students to heterodox ideas. Santurri was removed as director after a group of students protested that they didn’t like some of the views of speaker Peter Singer, a Princeton bioethics professor and one of the world’s preeminent moral philosophers.
A headline read, “St. Olaf ousts faculty director of institute dedicated to bringing controversial speakers to campus—because speakers caused controversy.”
University of Chicago climate scientist Dorian Abbot co-wrote with Stanford business professor Ivan Marinovic an op-ed piece arguing for meritocracy in student admissions, faculty hiring, and the bestowing of awards. This is a position held by most Americans, including minorities. Student activists petitioned for Abbot to be removed from a position, and, under pressure from a Twitter campaign, MIT canceled a prestigious annual public science lecture he was scheduled to give.
Scholar Robert P. George wrote that the decision to cancel Abbot’s lecture was “chilling to academic freedom and free speech.”
University of Southern California business school foreign languages professor Greg Patton was publicly called out by the Dean and removed from teaching for using in a lecture the Mandarin word for “that” (那个, pronounced nàge or neìge), which sounds similar to an English-language racial epithet. He had taught the class dozens of times over ten years with no complaints.
The irony was that, as USC has a large ethnic Chinese population, there was a backlash against the university’s actions. Ethnic Chinese on campus and beyond decried it as anti-Asian bigotry with the professor being punished for speaking Chinese. It made newspaper headlines in China, and Chinese graduates of the business school signed a letter likening the university’s actions to Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
Further, a survey showed how outraged and scared were many of Patton’s colleagues. Quotes from different professors included:
“There was no judge, jury, or anything, only cancellation. If faculty with long records of good performance can lose reputation in a flash or parts of their job for this kind of five-second mix-up, which can happen to anybody by accident given how much material we have to cover, it means we will become a society where people always talk slow, prescreen every word, and take the safest possible route on everything they say. By nature, that will make us irrelevant.”
“It makes me frightened to teach students who can have a faculty member removed for giving an innocuous example in another language. It makes me feel like the dean’s office is willing to throw faculty under the bus in order [to] preserve the appearance of diversity and inclusion instead of opening up dialogues on both sides.”
“I will never teach about anything having to do with diversity, or touching on anything having to do with diversity, if I can at all help it. It will clearly get me fired, regardless of how well I do it.”
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The question is whether these and other instances of ridiculous overreactions are aberrations, or are they representative of a general trend.
Veronique de Rugy and Tevi Troy of George Mason University’s Mercatus Center and Samuel Abrams of Sarah Lawrence University see a widespread increase in campus intolerance. However, Columbia University political science professor Jeffrey Adams Sachs does not. Haidt sees a rise in illiberalism but sees it primarily in East Coast elite schools, including Ivy League schools, and in areas on the West Coast. Haidt wrote, “The academic world in the social sciences is a monoculture—except in economics, which is the only social science that has some real diversity. Anthropology and sociology are the worst—those fields seem to be really hostile and rejecting toward people who aren’t devoted to social justice.”
Polls have shown that professors are increasingly politically left. However, professors’ political persuasions are not an inherent problem when the professors and schools allow a diversity of views and debate. I studied at a famously progressive private university and in a humanities department with a clear political and ideological slant. However, the professors not only allowed but encouraged debate and the expression of a diversity of ideas in the classroom. Well-argued dissent and outside-the-box thinking were rewarded.
Polls show that “intolerance is on the rise” among university students. Incoming freshmen are more willing to shut down speech they find offensive and more willing to ban extreme speakers. In turn, a survey showed that 80 percent of students self-censor out of fear of being criticized or called out. A liberal arts college professor wrote that “not a week goes by that I don’t hear from frustrated students who feel they cannot speak freely.”
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Illiberalism, censorship, and intolerance are bad for students, education, and research
Liberalism, freedom of speech, and the exchange of a diversity of ideas are essential for a university and education. They are necessary for creativity and learning. Students must learn to listen to and consider different opinions and views. This is how they expand their minds and gain knowledge, how they prepare for the multicultural world. Studies have shown that students who have friends with different views become more tolerant and open-minded.
Such freedom of thought and inquiry and diversity of ideological and political views are necessary for quality academic research. Social psychologist and research fellow Sean Stevens writes about the new illiberalism: “Research and scholarship will suffer. . . . Why place one’s job, or even one’s career, at risk by investigating a politically controversial topic or worse, publishing a finding that reaches a conclusion that is politically unpalatable to most of your colleagues?”
In her 2021 Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters paper ‘The Peril of Politicizing Science,’ Ukrainian-born and Russian-educated University of Southern California chemistry professor Anna Krylov wrote that she sees a similar type of ideological corruption of academic science research as in the former Soviet Union.
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What are the Causes Behind the New Illiberalism and Intolerance?
Psychologists, sociologists, political scientists, and philosophers have identified the following intertwined influences behind the ideological intolerance and illiberalism on some campuses.
Infantilization of students
Everyone should be aware of racism and other bigotry including in the dominant culture and language. We all have much to learn; we must listen and be sensitive to others’ perspectives and experiences. However, sensitivity can move to the extremes of fanaticism.
Jonathan Haidt says that safe spaces, excessive focus on microaggressions, and the idea of being emotionally “harmed” by words and ideas are not only bad for campuses and education but bad for students’ health. Campuses that are illiberal and intolerant are emotionally and educationally stunting young people. Haidt and education lawyer Greg Lukianoff have written extensively about this in the book The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure.
This is all done in the name of emotional well-being. Many students are being taught to be emotionally fragile and immature and that they must be protected from the normal tribulations of everyday life.
Haidt says that many young people have been taught that their subjective feelings are truth and that it is wrong and harmful for these feelings to be countered. Minorities’ subjective opinions are treated as indisputable truth-telling, and activists say it causes “harm” to even question their truths or ask for evidence. This leads to a stifling of debate and inquiry and a lack of due process in disputes. In the earlier examples, the professors were often punished without hearings. For the administrators, subjective claims of harm from a small group of students were all that was needed.
The climate is bad not only for learning but for the student’s mental health. Young people must be exposed to a diversity of ideas, views, and challenges to grow into emotionally healthy and resilient people. Teaching young people that their subjective feelings are unquestionable truths is not only false but child abuse. It leaves them unable to function and cope in the real world, where not everyone will agree with or defer to them and where they will not always be correct. It contributes to mental health problems, including anxiety, depression, and cognitive distortion.
Psychologist Valerie Tarico writes, “Given these dynamics, it shouldn’t be surprising that some activists develop habits that can be hard on psychological and relationship health.”
It becomes so extreme that a population of students demand trigger warnings to prevent them from encountering words and ideas they don’t like.
Harvard law students asked professors not to teach rape law and not even use the word “violation,” as in “a violation of the law,” because it might cause distress. Law students called for the firing of the University of Illinois Chicago professor Jason Kilborne because he used witness court testimony on a test that included a redacted racial epithet and the redacted word ‘bitch.’ He intentionally used the type of testimony the future lawyers would regularly encounter in court.
Harvard law professor Jeannie Suk Gerson compared this to trying to teach “a medical student who is training to be a surgeon but who fears that he’ll become distressed if he sees or handles blood.”
A culture of victimhood and a new caste system
Sociology professors Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning have researched and written extensively about how there is a new victimhood culture on campuses and elsewhere.
They have written how social justice activists have created a new caste system where those who deem themselves most “marginalized” are morally and socially superior to others. Haidt identifies the groups that are currently treated as “sacred”: racial minorities, LGBTs, Latinos, Native Americans, women, people with disabilities, and Muslims. White, heterosexual males are at the bottom. An individual’s place in the caste system and the value of one’s opinions are not based on personal character or merit, but on such things as the color of one’s skin and one’s ethnicity and gender.
Hallmarks of victimhood culture are taking offense and expressing outrage at perceived microaggressions, censorship of opposing views, trying to prevent presentations by heterodox speakers, demanding safe spaces, politically correct language, publicly calling out and shaming perceived heretics, and characterizing people with different views as immoral.
Campbell and Manning wrote: “The combination of high sensitivity with dependence on others encourages people to emphasize or exaggerate the severity of offenses. There’s a corresponding tendency to emphasize one’s degree of victimization, one’s vulnerability to harm, and one’s need for assistance and protection. People who air grievances are likely to appeal to such concepts as disadvantage, marginality, or trauma, while casting the conflict as a matter of oppression. . . . The result is that this culture also emphasizes a particular source of moral worth: victimhood. Victim identities are deserving of special care and deference. Contrariwise, the privileged are morally suspect if not deserving of outright contempt. Privilege is to victimhood as cowardice is to honor.”
Former Yale professor William Deresiewicz writes that, unlike Vietnam War protests in the 1960s, the campus social justice crusaders are not protesting against institutional authority but appealing to it. This relates to the childlike fragility described by Haidt, with the students seeking protection. Haidt said that such appealing to authority “makes sense in situations when you’re talking about children; when reaching adulthood, however, students and potential employees should be able to navigate social interactions (even unpleasant but not harassing ones) themselves.”
John McWhorter and Glenn Loury say that, unlike previous civil rights movements, these students portray themselves as weak, not strong. The two professors say the claims of harm and the need for emotional protection and safe places often are transparent performances used to gain power and social status. Virtue signaling is defined as a hollow public display to raise one’s social and perceived moral status over others.
Education scholar and lawyer George Leef writes, “Once students figured out that declaring themselves to be victims of an evil society gave them a great deal of power, a culture of victimhood rapidly spread across our college campuses.”
Viewing one’s identity primarily and inescapably as that of a victim is mentally unhealthy and dysfunctional, contributing to depression, anxiety, and other disorders. Teaching children a victim mentality and to view the world and people through a binary victim versus oppressor lens is a form of child abuse that sets them up for a lifetime of failure, unhappiness, and unhealthy relationships.
Social Justice ideologies that are illiberal and dogmatic
Extreme social justice activists not only use the victimhood caste system but present their ideologies as dogma. Even minor deviation from accepted ideas and ideological language can elicit coordinated public attack and censorship.
Dogmatic and zealous adoption of these ideologies, such as on some university campuses, clamp down on standard educational methods of debate, free inquiry, and the exchange of ideas.
Hyperpartisanship
Compounding this, things have become hyperpartisan in much of American society. Some Americans believe that people with different views are not just wrong but bad, making it easier to silence and punish them.
A 2020 Scientific American report noted that many Americans have “a basic abhorrence for their opponents—an ‘othering’ in which a group conceives of its rivals as wholly alien in every way. This toxic form of polarization has fundamentally altered political discourse, public civility, and even the way politicians govern.” In her New York Times column “America Has a Scorn Problem,” Anglican priest Trish Warren Harrison wrote, “We find one another repugnant—not just wrong but bad. Our rhetoric casts the arguments of others as profound moral failings.”
This destructive tribalism is not merely between the right and left but within both the right and the left. Within the left these days, radicals attack liberals and moderates, resulting in circular firing squads and the “left eating their own.”
There are brilliant thinkers all along the political spectrum. Even though you aren’t going to agree with everything they say, it’s your loss to not listen to the sharp minds on both sides of the aisle.
Intelligent, broad-minded conservatives and progressives get along fine and have intelligent conversations with each other. It’s the closed-minded ones who don’t.
The power of Twitter and other social media platforms
All of the incidents described at the beginning of this chapter involved Twitter campaigns calling out that the professors be punished and campus administrators reacting out of fear of bad publicity.
These social media campaigns come from a small minority of students and activists. The Pew Research Center reported that ten percent of Twitter users make 80 percent of the tweets. Of that ten percent, users are more likely to be younger, Democrats, politically active, more highly educated, and women. Studies have shown how Twitter movements can be controlled by a small but vocal minority unrepresentative of the larger population and how manipulative and corrosive this is to society and discourse.
Writes McWhorter: “I think the spark for the current situation is perhaps more mundane than we’d like to think. I don’t think that for some reason everybody went crazy. I don’t think it’s because of the president we happen to have in office [Trump]. I think it’s social media. Social media, especially when you have it in your pocket in the form of the iPhone, allows bubbles of consensus to come together such that you can whip people up in a way that was not possible a generation before, or even ten years before.”
University administrators as enablers
A key problem isn’t the students, but that they are enabled by administrators. Undergrads are young. The school presidents, deans, and other administrators are supposed to be the adults in the room. However, administrators fear bad publicity and see students as paying customers to be catered to.
Samuel Abrams, a political science professor and board member of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), additionally argues that many administrators belong to an ideological monoculture, with over half having education degrees where they were schooled in the same pedagogical theories.
Responding to MIT’s cancellation of Dorian Abbot’s lecture, MIT chemical engineering professor Bernhardt Trout wrote that “upper administration would clearly have just wanted to cancel Professor Abbot and be done with it and only spoke in defense of speech because of pushback from the community.”
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This new culture is bad for community health
Communities that do not allow the expression of a diversity of thought, communities where people are intimidated into silence and unable to express their personal truths, are unhealthy and dysfunctional. Suppressing the diversity of ideas, debate, and the consideration of different ideas is bad in myriad ways. Forced conformity through shaming, punishment, and censorship should not be tolerated anywhere, but especially not in places of learning.
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I don’t think there’s a nail you didn’t hit right square on the head in this piece regarding what’s happened to the academic environment and the bastardisation of the teaching/learning experience. I wonder if this is the reason behind what seems like an unimaginably large waste of research funding supporting completely uninformative studies, that end up being published as positive papers, finally completely polluting the practice of two fields I’m familiar with: psychology and physiotherapy. The gurus who arise from this stench are treated like emperors and of course pointing out that they’re naked results only in mass attack from rampant followers.