IT'S NOTHING LIKE THE RED SCARE

During the Red Scare and adjacent insanity, that terrible decade of right-wing propaganda, paranoia, and political persecution born of the Cold War, 9% of American social science professors surveyed reported self-censoring their research, teachings, or public statements out of fear. At the same time a survey of 2,451 professors identified a total of 990 incidents in which some kind of accusation was made against faculty. Almost half of these incidents resulted in sanction, with 104 faculty being fired or forced to resign for political or religious reasons. But times have changed.

A recent database review of academic freedom cases showed that between 2000-2014 there were 78 attempts to sanction scholars initiated from within academia at US colleges and universities. For that same period, the annual number of attempts to sanction sat at about three to five. But something shifted, and shifted rather dramatically, after 2014.

In a single year, 2021, sanction attempts at post-secondary institutions hit 213. From there, a 2022 survey of 1,491 faculty showed 90% of professors reporting self-censoring at work, in academic publications, or on social media. Only 8% reported doing no self-censoring at all in their public offerings. That's in a sense the opposite of the censorship and self-censorship during the Red Scare — that period of American history held up as an almost impossibly scary and Orwellian time.

Along with all that, more than half (52%) of faculty surveyed reported being worried about losing their job or having their reputation destroyed due to someone merely misunderstanding or taking their work out of context. I don't know how you read that, but I interpret it as most university professors being scared not about sharing their values, beliefs, thoughts, or political perspectives but of being falsely accused of harbouring or uttering ideas that they don't actually hold. I interpret them, a majority, being terrified of the folks in their midst who they perceive to be engaging in and getting away with almost medieval-style scapegoating and witch-hunting.

From there, 11% reported being disciplined or threatened with disciplinary action for their teaching, with almost half of those facing consequences for their research or non-academic publications. So to contrast with the 14 years and 78 attempts in the early 2000s, in all there have been more than 1,002 attempts to have academics fired for holding and expressing the wrong ideas between 2014 and 2022. Almost two-thirds (698 of 1,080 or 65%) of those attempts to sanction scholars were successful. 225 of those went so far as to result in termination. (And, in case you're wondering, 41% of those 1,002 attempts at sanction came from individuals or groups on the political right while 52% arrived from left-leaning sources.)

It feels to me like we find ourselves in a truly historic period. The popular demand that 'so-called cancel culture is not a thing' can now be seen for what it is: a wildly disconnected and untenable take. Is there any doubt we are now living through a period of censorship and persecution far worse than the Red Scare? After all, the current push for conformity, with widespread assaults on freedom of opinion and expression and sweeping demands for censorship, comes with full knowledge and hindsight of the McCarthy Era and with the abundance of speech protections established and reestablished since that time. What would be a good argument against that assessment?