Greg Lukianoff: belief

Transcript context

…y, everything from having their article removed to suspension, et cetera. About one-fifth of those result in professors being fired. Right now, it’s almost 200, it’s around 190 professors being fired. I want to give some context here. The Red Scare is generally considered to have been from 1947 to 1957. It ended, by the way, in ’57 when it finally became clear, thanks to the First Amendment, that you couldn’t actually fire people for their ideologies. Prior to that, a lot of universities thought they could. This guy is a very doctrinaire communist. “They can’t be just waited. I’m going to fire them.” They thought they actually could do that, and it was only ’57 when the law was established, so right now, these are happening in an environment where freedom of speech, academic freedom, are clearly protected at public colleges in the United States and we’re still seeing these kind of numbers. During the Red Scare, the biggest study that was done of what was going on is I think this came out in ’55, and the evaluation was that there was about 62 professors fired for being communists and about 90 something professors fired for political views overall that usually is reported as being about 100, so 60, 90, 100 depending on how you look at it. I think the number is actually higher, but that’s only because of hindsight. What I mean by hindsight is we can look back and we actually find there were more professors who were fired as time reveals. We’re at 190 professors fired, and I still have to put up with people saying this isn’t even happening, and I’m like, “In the nine and a half years of cancel culture, 190 professors fired. In the 11 years of the Red Scare, probably somewhere around 100, or probably more.” The number’s going to keep going up, but unlike during the Red Scare where people could clearly tell something was happening, the craziest thing about cancel culture is I’m still dealing with people who are saying this isn’t happening at all, and it hasn’t been subtle on campus. We know that’s a wild under count, by the way, because when we surveyed professors, 17% of them said that they had been threatened with investigation or actually investigated for what they taught, said, or their research, and one-third of them said that they were told by administrators not to take on controversial research. Extrapolating that out, that’s a huge number. The reason why you’re not going to hear about a lot of these cases is because there are so many different conformity inducing mechanisms in the whole thing, and that’s one of the reasons why the idea that you’d add something, like requiring a DEI statement to be hired or to get into a school under the current environment, is so completely nuts. We have had a genuine crisis of academic freedom over the last, particularly since 2017, on campuses. We have very low viewpoint diversity to begin with. Under these circumstances, administrators just start saying, “You know what the problem is? We have too much heterogeneous thought. We are not homogeneous enough. We need another political litmus test,” which is nuts. mstances, administrators just start saying, “You know what the problem is? We have too much heterogeneous thought. We are not homogeneous enough. We need another political litmus test,” which is nuts. That’s what a DEI statement effectively is because there’s no way to actually fill out a DEI statement without someone evaluating you on your politics. It’s crystal clear. We even did an experiment on this. Nate Honeycutt, he got something almost like 3,000 professors to participate evaluating different kinds of DEI statements. One was basically the standard kind of identity politics intersectionality, one was about viewpoint diversity, one was about religious diversity, and one was about socioeconomic diversity. As far as where my heart really is, it’s that we have too little socioeconomic diversity particularly in elite higher ed, but also in education period. The experiment had large participation, really interestingly set up, and it tried to model the way a lot of these DEI policies were actually implemented. One of the ways these have been implemented, and I think in some of the California schools, is that administrators go through the DEI statements before anyone else looks at them, and then eliminates people off the top depending on how they feel about their DEI statements. The one on viewpoint diversity, I think half of the people who reviewed it would eliminate it right out. I think it was basically the same for religious diversity. It was slightly better, like 40%, for socioeconomic diversity, but that kills me. The idea that kind of like, “Yeah, that actually is the kind of diversity that I think we need a great deal more of in higher education. ” You can agree with… It’s not hostile to the other kinds by the way, but the idea that we need more people from the bottom of three quarters of American society in higher education, I think, should be something we could all get around, that the only one that really succeeded was the one that sprouted back exactly the kind of ideology that they thought the readers would like, which is like, okay, there’s no way this couldn’t be a political litmus test. We’ve proved that it’s a political litmus test test, and still, school after school is adding these to its application process to make schools still more ideologically homogenous. Why does that have a negative effect? Is it because it enforces a kind of group think where people start becoming afraid to sort of think and speak freely, liberally, about whatever?…

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