ACADEMIC FREEDOM!!!!
Ahem. Sorry, little shpilkes in my throat there. Don't ask me how that come out onto the keyboard. Anyway, Sachs looks at faculty termination and finds more faculty termination for left-wing speech than right-wing speech. I, of course, oppose any faculty termination for speech. I am consistent on this, and have been all along. Academic freedom is a serious thing, and I am a principled supporter of free speech.
Anyway, as a technical point, it is worth mentioning that Sachs specifically brings up George Cicciarello-Maher, formerly of Drexel University. That caught my eye because I knew the details of it. I even posted about it. Technically, he wasn't fired. He was pressured to resign. Of course, that may be a distinction without a difference, but once you start doing statistical analysis, I get picky about data coding. I am a stats guy, after all, and with small samples, I get really picky. When Sachs goes out of his way to mention Cicciarello-Maher, and gets the details wrong in the text, I get nervous about everything else he did. Regardless, quick summary of Cicciarello-Maher: he tweeted a bad, bad joke about wanting "white genocide" for Christmas. Relevant side note: he's white. Complaints ensued, he got suspended from teaching, and Drexel pressured him to resign. This kind of thing happens. But it is very, very rare.
And this is sort of Sachs's point. Faculty dismissals for speech are very rare, but when they happen, they are more likely to be for something that could be classified as left-wing speech than for what could be classified as right-wing speech. Coding issues aside, though, what's missing?
What do you not see? One of the issues raised in Sachs's piece is the issue of self-censorship. What do people not say because they are afraid of punishment? We don't know for certain because, by definition, they aren't saying it. In social science terms, this is a sampling issue. There is speech that doesn't get made, so we can't observe the consequences. To the degree that racists don't go around addressing every African-American male as, "boy," regardless of age... good, just to take a particularly crude and obvious example, even though systemic racism exists regardless of whether or not racists avoid that noxious trope. However, what about expressions of support for conservative policies, or even just Republican candidates? Remember what happened at Emory when someone chalked "Trump 2016" on their campus? Evelyn Beatrice Hall, not Voltaire, once wrote, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." I doubt you'll find a faculty member anywhere who hates Trump as much as I do, but seriously, Emory? After the MPSA conference last April, I posted about the level of contempt that we political scientists have for Donald Trump, as was evident in conversations throughout the conference, but statistically, given the number of political scientists, and the number of faculty more generally, there must be Trump supporters.
They're just keeping their mouths shut. With what happened at Emory, with the conversations at the MPSA, I'm not surprised. Self-preservation, as horrible as that is.
And there are conservative policy opinions that faculty would be advised not to speak aloud if they value their careers. There was a time when I would have laughed this off as right-wing paranoia, but I don't laugh this off anymore. My advice to anyone thinking about going into academia is as follows: if you hold any opinions that deviate from liberal orthodoxy, keep your fucking mouth shut about them, at least until you get tenure, and even then, it'll make your life easier if you keep those opinions a complete secret. I'm absolutely serious about this.
Self-censorship happens, and by definition, you can't hear what isn't being said.
The other problem of observation is that Sachs focused on termination. Firing a tenured professor is really, really hard. It's supposed to be. That's the point, and with academic freedom, any institution that tries, is pretty much guaranteed a major lawsuit. If a professor says something controversial, and that professor's institution tries to fire him or her because of it, it's lawsuit city, baby! And the institutions know it. That's why even George Cicciarello-Maher wasn't technically fired. They just hounded him out of the job, but even then, that's some legally treacherous shit given academic freedom and the fact that he was obviously, indisputably being ironic.
Messing with academic freedom is exceedingly dangerous.
I'm going to type that again, just to make it clear:
Messing with academic freedom is exceedingly dangerous.
Am I clear? Lawsuit. Big, big money. We're clear on this, right? So, go back to Sachs's graphs and the raw numbers. Remember how few faculty are actually terminated for speech of any kind? So, there's no problem, right?
No. Since firing a tenured professor is so difficult, most colleges or universities aren't stupid enough to try, when they are facing an academic freedom response because, did I mention, "lawsuit?" That doesn't mean a university won't do other things to faculty. What can they do? It depends on circumstances, but by focusing only on termination, Sachs doesn't cover other punishments, and I don't even know how to get any such data because I doubt they are compiled anywhere. They don't get covered in Inside Higher Ed or the Chronicles of Higher Education. Once a tenured faculty member is fired for something like speech, you've got a major scandal, and the college or university has to be ready to face a potential backlash, so they really better know what they are doing, but for anything less than that, nobody ever reads about it.
So you don't know about it. Sachs's method has some major measurement issues. Not only is self-censorship a really big deal, and especially so on the right given that, yes, conservative beliefs are persecuted on college and university campuses (I say this as a Trump-hater-extraordinaire), but the measurement system Sachs uses fails to account for the fact that universities will usually know that they can't get away with firing tenured faculty, and adjust their punishments accordingly, which means he misses what's really happening.
How bad is the free speech issue on college and university campuses? You don't really know. There are things that are hidden, and that's today's point.
I will conclude, though, with an observation about sanctions for speech. Shortly after the 2016 election, petitions like this one began circulating around campuses across the country. I call your attention, in particular, to Point 3-- an active refusal to comply with law enforcement officials. This petition was a call to break the law. The petition was signed by numerous faculty members at Case Western Reserve University, and similar petitions were signed around the country. This was two years before the family separations policy, so this wasn't about anyone making a specific statement refusing to participate in Trump's family separation vileness. It was a statement of refusal to comply with law enforcement officials without even knowing what those law enforcement officials would do.
Let that sink in. And look at how many faculty signed that petition, including certain members of my own department. I didn't, because I haven't and don't condone breaking the law. Instead, I posted this. Signing a petition is speech. Protected, and I will defend anyone's right with a dot dot dot, misattributed Voltaire quote, which was actually Evelyn Beatrice Hall. Hi! I'm a pedant! Anyway, my point is that, for the last two years, we have seen calls by faculty, to break the law. And they began before people actually knew what law enforcement agencies would do! And they didn't just tweet that shit. They wrote it, to university presidents.
Holy shit! But, as far as President Barbara Snyder was concerned, or any other university president, as far as I can tell, none of that mattered.
Should it? NO! Speech! That's my point. But there's stuff you don't see, and it ain't good...
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