- [Announcer] And now, an Arizona PBS Original Production.

The School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership presents the Civic Discourse Project.

Ideological Conformity on Campus and in American Society.

This week.

- We've got a big problem with right-leaning academics and a moderately sized problem with centrist academics in terms of that perception that it's a hostile climate and you've got a self-censor.

It's where you go if you're left wing.

If you're not left wing, you really don't want to become an academic in the social sciences and humanities.

- [Announcer] The Civic Discourse Project is brought to you by Arizona State University's School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership and the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law.

And now, Erik Kaufmann, professor and senior fellow at Policy Exchange and Professor of Politics at Birkbeck College talks about ideological conformity and censorship.

- What I want to talk about today is a broad societal trend which especially impacts universities.

It's really reflecting a new collision between two sets of ideas.

The first of which I refer to as cultural liberalism, which is sort of the traditional idea that held sway in the academy, which values free speech, due process, equal treatment without regard to color or creed, scientific reason, and objective truth.

What Jonathan Rauch would call the constitution of knowledge truth-based order.

Against that I think we have an merging ideology which is attaining a position I would argue of hegemony within the academy and within elite culture in the West, which I call cultural socialism.

And this ideology privileges equality over liberty and the pursuit of truth within the high culture.

Now, some of the terms such as wokeness and the successor ideology and intersectionality, all of these terms I think are not, they're not as useful in a way because I think really what we're talking about is something simpler than all of these ideological contortions and labels.

So, just as in the Cold War, we had a clash between sort of a free market economic liberalism and a sort of socialism, which was based on redistribution of wealth to achieve equality.

I think likewise what we have is a kind of cultural cold war between a cultural version of liberalism and a cultural version of socialism.

The cultural version of socialism really seeks to redistribute goods but in this case, cultural goods, self-esteem, power, and also economic resources to achieve equality between identity groups, equality of outcome.

The second part of this is to protect cultural minorities.

Again, identity groups define largely in race, gender, and sexual terms from harm, not physical harm only, but also psychological harm.

So, we have these two elements which correspond to Jonathan Haidt's two moral foundations of care harm, that is protection from harm on the one hand, and equality, equality of outcome on the other to the exclusion of the other moral foundations around, for example, group loyalty, respect for tradition, and so on.

In terms then of the broad scope of this talk, what I'm really looking at is this conflict and this clash between cultural liberalism and cultural socialism.

And what I see is the gradual ascent of cultural socialism as the dominant value in the high culture, including in universities.

What this results in is a loss of viewpoint diversity within the academy, particularly at the faculty level.

This starts really with essentially censorship and punishment for speech, whether in research and teaching or in public discussions, what I call hard authoritarianism.

So, that is essentially your administration either firing you, threatening to fire you, threatening to take you off a course, making you stay away from the university for six months, or even your department head threatening to take away certain teaching or give you certain administrative tasks that you don't want, more or less, to punish you for things that you've said in class or in your research or in public.

But that's only one part of the problem.

The other part of the problem is political discrimination, what I call soft authoritarianism.

So, hard authoritarianism is about getting fired.

Soft authoritarianism is about not getting hired, promoted, published, or people not sitting with you at lunch.

(audience laughing) So.

And Cass Sunstein in his book "Conformity" places a lot of emphasis on that sort of social pressure, right?

So, if you don't have the right views or you're seen as radioactive because of something you've said, then your peers, your colleagues can freeze you out and ostracize you.

And in a profession where we really rely on our colleagues to judge our work, judge our promotion applications, hiring applications, that's extremely important.

So, between these two forces, the political discrimination and the institutional punishment on the other, we then get to a point where these things chill speech leading dissenting academics, political minorities such as conservatives, such as gender critical feminists, these political minorities are going to then not speak up.

They're gonna hide their views, they won't publish their views, they'll perhaps seek areas of study that are less controversial.

We get then a self-censorship, which then leads to political minorities like conservatives selecting out of academia or not more importantly, not selecting into an academic track, being repelled because of the hostile climate from academia.

And what that then does is it creates more of a monoculture, it leads the political diversity to be forced outta the system.

And so, you get conformity to orthodoxy and you don't get much heterodoxy.

And the more orthodoxy you get, actually it worsens all of these problems.

So, the fact that you then get conformity means, hard authoritarianism becomes more of a problem.

Why?

John Ellis in his book, "The Breakdown of Higher Education" talks about the fact that when you get a consensus view, a consensus around certain values, the incentive moves towards exemplifying those values through fundamentalism.

And we see this in other fields and I'd be happy to talk about this in the QnA.

The more homogenous the value set, the politics of an institution, the more likely you are to get fundamentalism in the form of say, cancel culture attempts.

And it's really that cancel culture activism that drives the university to censor people or perhaps to fire people.

So, the hard authoritarianism problem gets worse with a more homogenous faculty and less viewpoint diversity.

Likewise, with soft authoritarianism, just imagine a situation where it's 50% conservative and 50% liberal in a room of people hiring you.

Let's say, you're a conservative.

So, half the room will be biased against you and half will be biased in favor of you.

The two kind of wash out.

But if you're then in a situation where the room is 90-10, 90% let's say, liberal and 10% conservative, the prejudices of the 90% are gonna count a lot more.

Even if both individuals, the conservative individual is as prejudiced against the liberal as the liberal is against the conservative.

The pure math of it is the discriminatory effect hits much harder on the political minority.

And that's one of the reasons why as the academy has shifted say, to the left, that's actually increased the political discrimination effect on political minorities.

And so, what you're actually getting then is this cycle of the more homogenous it gets, the more the hard and soft authoritarianism increase, increasing the chilling effects, increasingly repelling political minorities from the system, which increases the entire homogeneity and the cycle moves again.

The combination then of this hard and soft authoritarianism is to chill very much those who are political minorities.

One of the questions we asked here is, have you ever self-censored in teaching research or discussions?

In the United States, which is the orange line, 70% of right-leaning academics.

Yes, there are a few of them.

70% of them say, they have self-censored.

42% of moderates say they have self-censored.

And about 25% of those on the left.

So, it's higher on the right that same pattern in Britain, 50% of right-leaning academics said they self-censored compared to a much lower rate among centrist and left-wing academics.

So, we have this serious problem of self-censorship amongst right-leaning academics and to some extent centrist academics, particularly in the US.

So, you've got this political discrimination and punishment, the hard authoritarianism combining to lead to self-censorship and the perception that one's department presents a hostile climate for your political beliefs.

And when we ask people, you know, is your department supportive or hostile place for your political beliefs?

Something between 60 and 75% of right-leaning academics in the UK, Canada, and US said it was a hostile climate for their beliefs.

Moderate academics, it's sort of 25 to 35%.

So, 35% of centrist moderate academics in the US say their departments are a hostile climate for their beliefs as well.

So, we've got a big problem with right-leaning academics and a moderately sized problem with centrist academics in terms of that perception that it's a hostile climate and you've got a self-censor.

So, when we've got self-censorship going on and we've got the threat of punishment for speech going on, that leads to this self-censoring perception of a hostile climate.

That then sends signals to the next generation of potential academics about whether this is a welcoming place where you want to build a career or is it a place that actually is where you go if you're left wing.

If you're not left wing, you really don't want to become an academic in the social sciences and humanities.

I don't have really time to get into the policy side.

We can talk about that later.

I think obviously what's happening with SCETL is an example of the kind of thing that needs to happen to break this cycle.

I also think however, that government intervention of the kind that we see with Britain's higher education freedom bill, the appointment of an academic freedom director who will actually be able to enforce through a 10 person office in the sector regulator enforce the idea that universities are not allowed to abrogate academic freedom.

And they must not only protect it, but they also have to promote it and are liable to fines, if they don't do so.

I think that's an important legislative intervention but I also think we need interventions to deal with the viewpoint diversity side and I'm happy to talk about that.

(audience clapping) - So, you characterized soft authoritarianism as quote, "Peer-to-peer norms enforcing conformity driven by an elite public morality of cultural socialism" unquote.

And you characterize cultural socialism as involving the rejection of the idea of objective truth.

Now, personally, I find it hard to believe that the academic elite in general rejects the notion of objective truth.

For one thing, I don't think I personally know any serious scholar who rejects the notion of objective truth.

And I imagine that most academics, whether in the hard sciences, the social sciences, or the humanities see themselves as trying to get at what they see as the objective truth.

Also, as far as they could see, you didn't actually give any evidence that the rejection of objective truth is a common position among academics.

So, what reason is there to think that what you call cultural socialism is dominant in academia?

- Yeah, good question.

Right.

So, I think these are ideal types obviously.

I mean, not every individual is gonna tick every one of these boxes.

I mean, I think that however, in these sort of critical theory studies disciplines, certainly this notion of lived experience as having some kind of a superior standing to positivism, let's call it is very much there.

And certainly you could, you know, obviously postmodernism doesn't have the cache it used to, but still that tradition, that continental tradition of kind of being more skeptical about objective truth, I think is there.

Now, how we can talk about its prevalence within the faculty in different disciplines.

And the balance is gonna change depending on whether you're in anthropology where there's probably a lot of skepticism towards objective truth compared to let's say, political science where there'd be more of that positivist tradition.

But again, I would say that the sort of unalloyed cultural socialist position would generally be to say that the lived experience, particularly of historically marginalized groups, you know, as exemplified by things like indigenous knowledge, you know, that has an equal standing, so equal or more of a standing and you can't really speak against that with something like a survey.

And so, I guess I would still argue that that's a very important challenge and certainly in certain fields and subfields, that is the dominant view.

- So, let's grant that it's the dominant view in some subfields.

- Right.

- Do you think it's the majority view?

And do you think you have any evidence for that?

- I don't have the survey to prove it.

So, it is a empirical question.

It's falsifiable.

With some more time and money, I can do that survey.

So, at this point, can I prove that, you know, most people in racial studies do not believe in objective truth or privilege standpoint epistemology over a Popperian method?

No, I don't.

I would say that, going into it, my prior would be that most of them would take the standpoint of an epistemology position but I don't have the data for you now.

- Let's just grant for the sake of argument that that is the dominant position within some subfields.

Do you think it's the dominant position in the hard sciences and in the quantitative social sciences?

- Of course not.

No.

Of course not.

- Okay.

So, it may well be a small minority of academics who actually hold this position.

- I'd love to find out.

I mean, we've also gotta look at the humanities and there I think it would be higher but I don't have the number for you.

I think it would be really interesting to know that actually.

It's a good research topic.

- All right.

Well, I'll support your grant proposal.

So, another question about cultural socialism.

At the beginning of your talk, you posed what you called cultural socialism and what you called cultural liberalism.

But it seems to me that most of the elements of these two views are actually consistent.

And I imagine that many left of center academics endorse elements on both lists.

So, I imagine that many would say that they're in favor of free speech, due process, equal treatment, and scientific reasoning, and that they're in favor of redistributing power and resources in order to protect minorities from psychological harm.

And they would disagree that the goal of redistributing power and resources trumps scientific reason and equal treatment because they would hold instead that redistributing power and resources to promote greater opportunity for minorities is consistent with liberty, equal treatment, and so forth.

So, what would you say to someone who holds that hybrid position?

- Well, my view is that they would actually often prioritize the cultural socialist values over the cultural liberal ones.

I mean, I use that example of being supportive of mandatory diversity statements in order to apply for a job.

And the majority of academics and the social sciences supporting that.

Now, what that means is, essentially those who disagree with the equity and diversity agenda, are essentially barred from applying from a job.

And I don't see how you can be in favor of equal treatment by political creed, for example and support that position.

Now, they would, I think what often happens, with the free speech issue, you will often get people saying, well, by more or less silencing some conservative voices, let's say, we are empowering the voices of historically disadvantaged groups and giving them freedom.

I think that's actually a distortion of the meaning of the word freedom.

What they're in favor of is equal speech, not free speech.

So, they want to prioritize people's speech power and equalize speech power.

And for them, that is more important than allowing somebody to say something that might offend a historically marginalized group.

So, what they're actually doing is justifying to themselves that they are actually liberals, even though they support clamping down on somebody's free speech 'cause it might be quote unquote "offensive" or cause emotional harm or trauma.

Their view as well, but that gives more speech power to historically disadvantaged groups, which improves freedom.

I think that's just semantics and I think it's actually not about freedom.

I think that's a violation of liberalism.

I don't think it is liberalism to say, somebody owns a radio station and so, they have a lot more speech power than I do.

We need to take away his radio station or not let him speak because he owns a radio station so that I'm on the same level with him and then we're equally free.

I think that's just a corruption of the meaning of freedom.

- Do you think you've given any reason to believe that political bias in hiring and promotion at universities poses a threat to liberal democracy?

If so, what is this threat and how exactly is it posed?

- Okay, good.

Not a threat to the universe, by the way.

But, yeah.

So, beyond academia, what is the issue here?

I think you have, first of all, direct effects.

So, the idea that more people are now saying that they don't feel free to share their political beliefs more generally, right?

So, I think the number who say they are afraid that if their political beliefs became known at work, that could affect them professionally in the US is about 35% or something.

In Britain, it's about 25%.

It's a bit lower.

So, you have this sense of people saying they feel less free to speak their minds about their true beliefs at work, for example.

So, that has increased substantially.

There's much of surveys that show that society feels less free.

And that on its own matters, I mean, you know, if you're in Hong Kong, you could say to somebody in Hong Kong, you've got a nice life.

The Chinese Communist Party takes care of the economy.

I mean, why do you need your free speech?

So, free speech matters in and of itself.

But also there are these kind of downstream effects.

If you can't have an open conversation about immigration, if the main political parties in Sweden can't talk about immigration levels because of these taboos.

That sort of would argue that, you know, in order not to make minorities feel uneasy, we don't want to talk about immigration.

Well, what is the result of that?

The result of that is you have then taken that issue off the table for debate amongst the main parties, opening up a market opportunity for populist entrepreneurs like the Sweden Democrats who just had an unprecedented electoral result in Sweden.

One of the reasons for the rise of populism is because of this narrowing of the overton window of acceptable debate.

Another is polarization.

Another might be, can we have an honest debate about issues like immigration, crime, homelessness.

These are the kinds of issues that don't actually get discussed properly.

And so, we can't work out what is the best policy in order to improve racial equality of outcome.

Can we come up with the most scientifically consistent policy to improve the condition, let's say, of African-Americans here or native Canadians in Canada where I'm from?

Well, that's gonna be very tricky when you don't have an open speech climate.

So, it's not just that society is less free and universities might not pursue truth as squarely, it's also these kind of downstream effects on the society as a whole.

Is it a threat to democracy?

Well, if you consider polarization and populism to potentially pose threats to democracy, then yes.

I would say this does flow from a narrowing of the ability to have these debates.

- So, my question is, do we think that, you know, the higher ups at the university, the Michael Crows, the different leaders in the administration, are they on board with the same kind of ideological preferences or do they no longer feel as though they can have a backbone to disagree with the masses at the university and then has it compromised the structure?

- Yeah, a really good question.

I think that the top levels of a lot of universities are not ideological in the same way as activist faculty and students are in most universities but they're very sensitive to bad publicity.

And also, you have often an equity and diversity, you have an equity diversity bureaucracy.

Don't have that in UK so much but you have it in the US.

You also have faculty committees for equity and diversity.

And if they make recommendations and often the kinds of people that are on these committees, very much are of the cultural socialist mindset.

If they make recommendations, if they threaten to raise a stink, then the university will often capitulate.

So, I think it's the activism coming out of the faculty and students pressuring the administrations to capitulate, including firing people, whether that be open letters, whether that be internal complaints, you know, against somebody.

If that is strong enough, then the administration will often capitulate.

And one of the questions is, how do you actually fortify these administrations so that they can say no to the activists?

And that's one of the reasons I favor government intervention, particularly in state-run public institutions.

If the government says you must protect and promote free speech as with the UK higher education freedom bill, the administration in the universities can just tell the activists, sorry our hands are tied, the legislation prevents us from doing anything about it, go away.

That's sort of the position I think we need to get to.

But right now, without that kind of legislative framework and bureaucratic framework in place, I think the incentives are very much for the administration to capitulate to this kind of pressure.

- Thank you.

- Okay.

- Censorship I feel has become a very politicized term but we all self-center from birth just as humans.

You know, I don't say, oh, I hate your shoes.

You know, like, we're self-centered.

So, do you think there's any time in academia where censorship actually is a good thing and does lead to more productive conversations?

- Yeah, I think this is a really good question.

'Cause you are right.

Like, if I don't like my mother-in-law, maybe it's better for me not to say that.

And of course society has norms around being courteous and polite, which is kind of like saying that you are gonna suppress truth or freedom in order maybe not to hurt somebody's feelings.

So, that does exist.

And this is partly why, I wouldn't reject absolutely everything that cultural socialism stands for.

I mean, it's like with the economy, you know, we have a mixed capitalism.

We've adopted some ideas from socialism, but just haven't gone as far as command and control, for example.

And likewise, I think there is a place for norms of politeness and courtesy, which would mean that, you know, it might be frowned upon for me to say what I think about an individual who I don't like or whatever what I notice about them.

So, I think there's a place for that.

Where it I think becomes a problem is, once that makes its way into speech codes, something formal and institutional.

I think the institutions should remain essentially liberal and freedom dominated.

But you can have norms of both behavior, which sort of regulate the degree to which someone will state their true views.

I think that can be productive.

It's important for social interaction.

However, I think at a university, I think when that starts to interfere with the pursuit of truth, that's when I think actually it's counterproductive to have those kinds of speech norms.

- Okay.

And then just really quickly going along with that, I think hostility also can push truth down.

It seems we're kind of considering or talking within a gray area.

Do you think there is any time within academia that the more forcible actions should be taken?

Like, is there a spot when, yeah, that's not okay to say around to say?

- Around speech?

- Yeah, around speech - I mean, you can have, you know, individual harassment of individuals in a classroom.

You know, so you have, first of all, you have the law.

So, incitement to violence, harassment, defamation.

So, these sorts of areas I think should obviously, I mean, that's breaking the law.

Should universities be able to go beyond the law?

I think you can have norms, but I am uncomfortable with universities drafting codes that move beyond the law.

I think you can have norms of politeness, norms of academic comportment, but I think writing that into regulations, I think is a bad idea.

- Okay.

That's helpful.

Thank you.

- If you value this kind of exchange of ideas, which I tend to agree with Erik, it's not entirely welcome in all departments or all places in all universities, especially in the United States, we hope you'll consider supporting the school.

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Let's thank our terrific guest and our moderator one last time.

(audience clapping) - [Announcer] The Civic Discourse Project.

Ideological Conformity on Campus and in American Society is brought to you by Arizona State University's School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership and the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law.

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