A new report shows that only 20% of university faculty believe a conservative would fit in well in their department.
The report comes from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) surveying 6,269 faculty members at 55 major colleges and universities over a three-month period.
“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,” the report stated.
FIRE’s report “discovered a fraught campus atmosphere in which wide swaths of those surveyed admitted to hiding their political views to avoid censure.”
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FIRE’s Manager of Polling and Analytics Nathan Honeycutt evoked the infamous Joseph McCarthy era to make a relevant connection to the reports’ findings.
“The McCarthy era is considered a low point in the history of American academic freedom with witch hunts, loyalty tests, and blacklisting in universities across the country,” Honeycutt said.
“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.”
Furthermore, conservative faculty were far more likely than their liberal and moderate colleagues to report self-censoring. More than half of conservative faculty expressed that they occasionally had to hide their political beliefs to keep their jobs.
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However, only 17% of liberal faculty felt that they had to hide their political views.
“There are very few conservative faculty,” Honeycutt said. She continued, “If they’re not expressing their views, then students are even less exposed to conservative perspectives than one might expect based on the numbers.”
Other findings in the report show that 87% of faculty found it challenging to have an honest and open conversation about “hot-button political topics” on campus.
More professors have toned down their published works since the 1950s. The report stated that 35% expressed having to tone down their written works to “avoid controversy,” which is four times more than what social science faculty reported regarding the same question in the 1950s.
