IT'S NOTHING LIKE THE RED SCARE

During the Red Scare and adjacent insanity, that terrible period 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 of them being fired or forced to resign for political or religious reasons.

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. And around that same period, the annual number of attempts to sanction sat at about three to five. But something shifted after 2014 and the numbers began rapidly climbing.

In 2021 alone the sanction attempts hit a high of 213. From there, a 2022 survey of 1,491 faculty showed that under the current regime 90% of professors report self-censoring at work, in academic publications, or on social media. Only 8% reported not self-censoring at all in their public offerings. Along with that, more than half (52%) reported being worried about losing their job or having their reputation destroyed due to someone misunderstanding or taking their work out of context. 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, there have been more than 1,080 attempts to have academics fired for holding and expressing the wrong ideas in recent years. Almost two-thirds (698 of 1,080 or 65%) of those attempts to sanction scholars were successful and 225 went so far as to result in termination. (And, in case you're wondering, 41% of those 1,080 attempts at sanction came from individuals or groups on the political right while 52% arrived from left-leaning sources.)

As such, it feels like we find ourselves in a historic period. The popular demand that "'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 this assessment?