March 3, 2021

The Crumbling Foundation of Academic Freedom

American colleges and universities are more hostile today than ever toward those who don’t embrace progressive ideology.

More and more, sending your kids off to college is like paying big bucks to take them to an outrageously overpriced restaurant despite knowing that you’re going to get food poisoning, and despite knowing that the waitstaff are going to try to make your kids hate you.

Why on earth do we keep doing it? Well, because our kids need to show the receipt for that terrible dining experience to prospective employers if they want to land a job. It’s madness.

Things aren’t getting any better at the academy, either. In fact, they’re getting worse. Eric Kaufmann ought to know. He’s a professor of politics at the University of London’s Birkbeck College and a board member at an organization called the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology.

As Kaufmann writes in The Wall Street Journal, “Academic freedom is in crisis on American campuses. Last year, the National Association of Scholars recorded 65 instances of professors being disciplined or fired for protected speech, a fivefold increase from the year before.”

And just who are the targets of these attempts at cancelation? You guessed it: conservative academics and graduate students, the most endangered of species on college campuses. He reports that roughly one in three of them has been disciplined or threatened with disciplinary action, as an increasingly strident progressive authoritarianism attacks what was once the crown jewel of the Western university: academic freedom. (For tangible evidence of this malignant illiberalism, one need only consider a pair of incidents from 2017: the mob violence directed toward professors Charles Murray at Middlebury State College and Bret Weinstein at Evergreen State University.)

On Monday, Kaufmann published an exhaustive 195-page report on the topic titled “Academic Freedom in Crisis: Punishment, Political Discrimination, and Self-Censorship,” which he says is the first of its kind to investigate these topics while relying on survey responses from both the perpetrators and the targets of discrimination.

Fortunately, he also published a much more manageable executive summary, whose graphs, charts, and main findings show just how hostile an environment the traditional university has become for non-leftists and free-thinkers generally, with routine discrimination in hiring, promotion, grants, and publications. Among the findings:

  • More than 4 in 10 U.S. and Canadian academics wouldn’t hire a Trump supporter, and 1 in 3 British academics wouldn’t hire a Brexit supporter.

  • Gender-critical feminist scholars (those who believe there’s a biological basis for womanhood) have a really hard time. Only 28% of American and Canadian academics would feel comfortable having lunch with someone who opposes the idea of “transgender” women accessing women’s facilities.

  • In the U.S., over a third of conservative academics and Ph.D. students have been threatened with disciplinary action for their views, while 70% of conservative academics report a hostile departmental climate for their beliefs.

  • More than half of North American and British conservative academics admit self-censoring in research and teaching.

  • Younger academics and Ph.D. students (think: Mao’s Red Guards), especially in the U.S., are significantly more willing than older academics to support the dismissal of controversial scholars, indicating that progressive authoritarianism is likely to get worse in the coming years.

“The result of this hostile environment,” writes Kaufmann, “is conformity to a culture that is out of alignment with the nation’s. As in previous studies, I find a low level of political diversity, with only 5% of American scholars in the social sciences and humanities identifying as conservative. In the U.S. and Canada, academics on the left outnumber those on the right by a ratio of 14 to 1.”

Fourteen to one? Clearly, today’s colleges and universities value all manner of “diversity” and “tolerance” except one.

What’s the solution? “At this point,” concludes Kaufmann, “only a proactive approach can work, such as the policies recently announced in Britain, in which public universities are to be audited and potentially fined for academic freedom violations each year by the government. In the U.S., state or federal authorities must regulate public universities to ensure they protect the First Amendment rights of staff and students and don’t discriminate against political minorities.”

Where might the momentum for this proactive approach come from? Economic pressure, perhaps. But unless we consumers stop throwing our money at these leftist indoctrination camps, they’re unlikely to get the message.

Who We Are

The Patriot Post is a highly acclaimed weekday digest of news analysis, policy and opinion written from the heartland — as opposed to the MSM’s ubiquitous Beltway echo chambers — for grassroots leaders nationwide. More

What We Offer

On the Web

We provide solid conservative perspective on the most important issues, including analysis, opinion columns, headline summaries, memes, cartoons and much more.

Via Email

Choose our full-length Digest or our quick-reading Snapshot for a summary of important news. We also offer Cartoons & Memes on Monday and Alexander’s column on Wednesday.

Our Mission

The Patriot Post is steadfast in our mission to extend the endowment of Liberty to the next generation by advocating for individual rights and responsibilities, supporting the restoration of constitutional limits on government and the judiciary, and promoting free enterprise, national defense and traditional American values. We are a rock-solid conservative touchstone for the expanding ranks of grassroots Americans Patriots from all walks of life. Our mission and operation budgets are not financed by any political or special interest groups, and to protect our editorial integrity, we accept no advertising. We are sustained solely by you. Please support The Patriot Fund today!


The Patriot Post and Patriot Foundation Trust, in keeping with our Military Mission of Service to our uniformed service members and veterans, are proud to support and promote the National Medal of Honor Heritage Center, the Congressional Medal of Honor Society, both the Honoring the Sacrifice and Warrior Freedom Service Dogs aiding wounded veterans, the National Veterans Entrepreneurship Program, the Folds of Honor outreach, and Officer Christian Fellowship, the Air University Foundation, and Naval War College Foundation, and the Naval Aviation Museum Foundation. "Greater love has no one than this, to lay down one's life for his friends." (John 15:13)

★ PUBLIUS ★

“Our cause is noble; it is the cause of mankind!” —George Washington

Please join us in prayer for our nation — that righteous leaders would rise and prevail and we would be united as Americans. Pray also for the protection of our Military Patriots, Veterans, First Responders, and their families. Please lift up your Patriot team and our mission to support and defend our Republic's Founding Principle of Liberty, that the fires of freedom would be ignited in the hearts and minds of our countrymen.

The Patriot Post is protected speech, as enumerated in the First Amendment and enforced by the Second Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America, in accordance with the endowed and unalienable Rights of All Mankind.

Copyright © 2024 The Patriot Post. All Rights Reserved.

The Patriot Post does not support Internet Explorer. We recommend installing the latest version of Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, or Google Chrome.