When do conservatives try to silence people's opinions of the opposing views?
1. NFL player protests
2.
https://www.salon.com/2018/05/01/th...-rights-new-moral-panic-is-largely-imaginary/
--snip--
Not convinced? Consider another way that free speech on campus might be threatened: terminating faculty for political speech. Are faculty whose speech is perceived to be political more likely to be fired due to criticism from the left or the right? It is an important question, one that re-entered public debate recently following a Fresno State professor’s
controversial remark.
To begin to answer this question, I gathered together all cases from 2015 to 2017 involving:
- a faculty member at an American degree-granting postsecondary nonprofit institution;
- who was fired, forced to resign/resigned as part of a settlement, or demoted/denied promotion;
- due to speech perceived by critics as political.
Sources included the Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, AAUP, FIRE and Campus Reform. You can view the resulting dataset
here.
Inevitably there were ambiguous cases. Some involved professors who resigned over withering public criticism but retained the support of their institutions (e.g.,
Areej Zufari at Rollins College,
Dale Brigham at the University of Missouri). In others, the evidence was suggestive but ultimately too thin to establish causation (e.g.,
Daniel Browning at William Carey College). Such cases were excluded from the dataset. On the other hand, I chose to include deans and comparable non-faculty academics (e.g.,
Nicholas Christakis at Yale University,
N. Bruce Duthu at Dartmouth College) on the grounds that doing so contributes to an overall assessment of the campus free speech situation.
What remains are 45 cases from 2015 to 2017 where a faculty member was fired, resigned, or demoted/denied promotion due to speech deemed by critics as political. Of these, more than half (26) occurred in 2017, the clear majority (19) being over liberal speech. This disparity persists even after removing terminations occurring in private religious institutions.
Source: The US Faculty Termination for Political Speech Database
Figure 6: Faculty termination by speech type, 2015-2017.
For liberals, the most common types of speech to result in termination were those perceived by critics as “anti-white” or “anti-Christian” (e.g.,
George Ciccariello-Maher,
Phillip Lestman). For conservatives, they were “anti-minority” or “anti-diversity” (e.g.,
Susan Quade,
Paul Griffiths).
These cases can be further analyzed in terms of faculty ranking, which show an especially sharp increase in 2017 in the number of terminations involving contingent faculty (e.g., adjuncts, visiting scholars, graduate student lecturers). However, due to data collection problems, this number probably significantly undercounts the phenomenon.
Source: The US Faculty Termination for Political Speech Database
Figure 7: Faculty termination by rank, 2015-2017.
Finally, most of the increase in faculty terminations is taking place at public institutions. Considering the First Amendment rights that such employees enjoy, this may be surprising. However it is important to keep in mind that public institutions also employ the vast majority of faculty. Also, note that due to categorization issues, these figures probably undercount the number of terminations at religious colleges and universities.
Source: The US Faculty Termination for Political Speech Database
Figure 8: Faculty termination by institution, 2015-2017.
There are many ways to think about this data. The most straightforwardly partisan one is to focus on the large disparity between terminations due to criticism from the right versus the left. Certainly there exists a
vast infrastructure of
organizations on the political right designed to monitor the academy and publicize disagreeable speech. No equivalent infrastructure exists on the left, perhaps explaining the disparity.