What College Professors Think About Free Speech on Campus – 2022 Research

FIRE's new research regarding the ways university faculty think of free speech. Some of the findings:

- More than half of faculty (52%) reported being worried about losing their jobs or reputation because someone misunderstands something they have said or done, takes it out of context, or posts something from their past online. Almost three-quarters of conservative faculty (72%), 56% of moderate faculty, and 40% of liberal faculty reported feeling this way.

- A significant portion of faculty (ranging from 18% to 36%) endorsed their college’s administration launching a formal investigation into other faculty members for their controversial expression.

- Roughly one-third (34%) of faculty said they often feel they can not express their opinions on a subject because of how students, colleagues, or the administration would respond, compared to one-fifth of students surveyed for FIRE’s CFSR.

- The percentages of faculty who said they were very or extremely likely to self-censor in different contexts ranged from 25% (in academic publications) to 45% (on social media). Only 8% of all faculty said they do not self-censor in any of the four contexts asked about.

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Naomi Wolf Notices the Ubiquitous Lack of Courage to Tell the Truth

Gut wrenching essay about the conspicuous lack of truth-telling by Naomi Wolf. She names many names. Will they listen? Do they care? Her article is called "The Death of Culture: How Lies Killed Books." An Excerpt:

The bizarre thing about this moment in culture, is that the really important journalism, and the really important nonfiction books about the history, the racial and gender injustice, the economics, the public policy, of the “pandemic” years — are being written by — non-writers; by people who are trained as doctors, medical researchers, lawyers, politicians, and activists.

And their books are not displayed or even stocked in bookstores such as Jackson McNally.

So there is a massive hole in the central thought process of our culture.

The courageous non-writers have stepped in to tell the truth, because the famous writers, for the most part, can’t.

Or won’t. Or, for whatever reason, didn’t.

This is because the public intellectuals are by necessity, for the most part, AWOL to the truth-telling demands of this time.

You cannot be a public intellectual whose work is alive, if you have participated in manufacturing, or even accepting quietly, state-run lies.

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Cowardly Authoritarians

In the U.S., we have cowardly authoritarians. They pervert language in order to corrupt our ability to communicate with and disagree with each other. They use gilded, ruthless and insidious power to create the false consensus, making people with sincere objections disappear, trampling on free speech and, often, on our First Amendment.

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The Danger of an “Inert People”

"Without free speech and assembly discussion would be futile; that with them, discussion affords ordinarily adequate protection against the dissemination of noxious doctrine; that the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people; public discussion is a political duty." Justice Louis Brandeis, Concurrence in Whitney v California

"A man dies when he refuses to stand up for that which is right. A man dies when he refuses to stand up for justice. A man dies when he refuses to take a stand for that which is true." -Martin Luther King Jr.

“You can't be neutral on a moving train.” Howard Zinn

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