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RETURN OF THE DARK AGES: THE LOOMING DANGER FOR DISSIDENT PROFESSORS

https://www.thegwpf.com/return-of-the-dark-ages-the-looming-danger-for-dissident-professors/

RETURN OF THE DARK AGES: THE LOOMING DANGER FOR DISSIDENT PROFESSORS

  • Date: 04/04/19
  • By Samuel J. Abrams, Minding the Campus

Dissenting from the powerful progressive currents on our nation’s campuses can be very dangerous. Those who challenge the orthodox norms find little support among faculty, students, and administrators and can be severely punished socially and professionally.

As I wrote here last week, students know that asking certain questions or holding particular public views can result in being bullied; many students across the ideological spectrum live in fear of being on the wrong side of a liberal mob.

Students are not alone here. It is also the case the professors – even those with tenure – are deeply concerned with being labeled a dissident as viewpoints that are not part of the progressive wave or do not publicly comply with liberal norms that dominate the discourse are not welcome. As such, many professors are now afraid to speak their minds as the professional and personal consequences to them can be severe.

Negative Reactions Hem in Professors

In 2017, I asked a national sample of faculty and administrators, “How often, if at all, have you avoided expressing a particular point of view on an issue because you expected a negative reaction from other students or faculty?’ Two-thirds of conservative professors stated that they simply avoided sharing their opinions because of fear of negative reactions compared to just one-third of liberals. This significant difference is strong evidence that viewpoint diversity is being silenced. Conservative professors – an endangered minority on campus – are well aware of the possible ramifications of sharing their views and fear professional repercussions for disagreeing with their liberal faculty and administrative colleagues.

Although Sarah Lawrence is proud of its extremely liberal bent, it turns out that I had a target on my back on my first day of teaching. I was told by various colleagues shortly after joining the community that I was a “diversity hire” because I was not an extreme progressive but an empirical social scientist who cares about facts and empirics and leans to the right. I could feel the derision and suspicion almost immediately from my colleagues, and relations deteriorated over time because I failed to virtue signal strongly enough to many. Working on the Sarah Lawrence campus began to feel like some uncomfortable high-school movie with powerful cliques and groups and me as the outcast. I would walk on campus and pass groups of faculty who would turn away as my views were regularly marginalized or ignored in various faculty and administrative settings.

It became unambiguously clear in 2018 that I became a persona non grata at the College after I wrote in The New York Times that I was concerned about the ideological imbalance of extracurricular programmingat both Sarah Lawrence and around the country. […]

In short, my story reveals that questioning prevailing orthodoxies is professionally dangerous, and it is clear that Sarah Lawrence College – students, faculty, and administration – wanted little do with me once my ideas and intellectual questions came to the forefront and challenged the progressive monoculture. My future at Sarah Lawrence College will be a challenge, but I intend to push for real viewpoint diversity and will demand that the College actually live up to its stated history and storied past in support of freedom of expression.

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