Sources of Self-Censorship

Academicians are told that tenure and academic freedom protect us whenever we speak out and pursue political or provocative research. But more often than not, this autonomy is not afforded faculty who are of the wrong political persuasion, " race, " or religion. Suppression of academic freedom is especially pronounced for socially defined black faculty who critically examine white supremacy. This essay uses a cultural lens to examine why academic freedom is conditional and how its contingency is used to ensure that most faculty will not use their teaching and scholarship to foment the social seeds necessary to mobilize revolt against systemic oppressions. Speaking and writing about critical truths in the US academy can subject truth-tellers to ridicule, persecution, suffering, and even death. Despite such heavy suppression, some critical scholars 1 find the courage to identify and name white supremacist heteropatriarchal capitalism 2 as the source of ordinary people's immiseration. Critical scholars undertake the mission of exposing capitalism's deeply rooted structures of oppression so we can begin creating and preserving a human-centered rather than materialist-centered society. Critical scholars use their expertise and information to collaborate with the oppressed, developing our collective sense of agency to eliminate all systems of oppression (including racism, heteropatriarchy, and

Science, Technology & Human Values, 2020

The media have become an important arena where struggles over the symbolic legitimacy of expert authority take place and where scientific experts increasingly have to compete for public recognition. The rise of authoritarian and populist leaders in many countries and the growing importance of social media have fueled criticism against scientific institutions and individual researchers. This paper discusses the new hidden forms of suppression and self-censorship regarding scientists' roles as public experts. It is based on two web surveys conducted among Finnish researchers in 2015 and 2017. We focus on answers to the open-ended questions in these surveys, where respondents reflect upon issues of freedom of expression and the feedback they receive in public arenas. Building on previous research on suppression, "research silencing," and the

The Australian Universities' review, 2019

This paper is concerned with attacks on research and what they reveal about the revered yet poorly understood notion of 'academic freedom'. I present data from interviews with academics from Australia, Canada, the US and UK whose work has been attacked on what appear to be moral grounds, rather than for demonstrable misconduct or flawed methods. Although academic institutions promote and defend an ideal of academic freedom-that unfettered pursuit of knowledge is vital to the function of universities-research silencing reveals boundaries around what distinguishes 'acceptable' and 'unacceptable' enquiry in particular fields. I conclude these boundaries are only visible as 'the rules' once they have been transgressed, when those actors threatened by the transgression act to penalise rule breakers. This paper identifies 42 silencing behaviours present in attacks on research and interrogates what these behaviours mean for our understanding of academic freedom. It is important to distinguish between attacks based on moral objections and patent cases of wrongdoing, as the former are not accounted for in the 'legitimate' limits to academic freedom we see from an institutional perspective. That is, universities stress that with rights come responsibilities: that research must take place according to scholarly

Social Dynamics, 2007

As an 'ex-colonial' scholar, I have had to negotiate through many encounters that are displacing on both a personal and professional level: the more 'mobile' I've become, the more debilitating (and more frequent) the encounters I've experienced. Official, well-scripted performances or texts produced by academics are often clever about covering obvious traces of political problems and 'isms'; anecdotal evidence comes in to capture remarks and performances in less-guarded moments, where political and ideological battles are best fought. 'Telling the story' publicises the private encounter. But describing and advertising the existence of concealed structures underscores the difficulty of writing about xenophobia, racism, gender policing, or acts of academic territoriality, since one encounters further attempts to censor one's writing: unequal power structures are maintained -not by some nebulous entity -but by our colleagues who are deeply invested in maintaining the same conditions.

How should higher education respond to legally mandated limits on hateful, discriminatory, or provocative speech? Should public universities fortify government rules in the name of equal dignity for vulnerable groups, by imposing even further restrictions of their own? Or should they oppose such restrictions in the name of free speech? Or should they do neither, seeking neither amplification nor repeal, instead simply joining in whatever the government status quo happens to be, as they would do with most other background legal rules? This article advocates the second position: through a brief examination of 'no-platforming' and 'safe space' polices, it is argued that, within fully-fledged democracies, viewpoint-selective censorship is always indefensible for higher education. Examples are drawn from high-profile controversies involving far-right speakers as well as pro-and anti-Israel speech. Viewpoint-based censorship generates one of two scenarios, neither of which coheres with the mission of higher education. One the one hand, no-platformers' declared principles could never be applied with ethical coherence without becoming so broad as to require massive censorship. On the other hand, if those principles are to apply only rarely, then they lose internal consistency and become outright ad hoc impositions of campus decision-makers' own political preferences.

I provide an overview of some of the arguments in Sue Curry Jansen’s classic 1988 book Censorship: The Knot that Binds Knowledge and Power. Then I describe some of my own areas of interest connecting with censorship: suppression of dissent, power and scientific knowledge, and whistleblowing. The connections with censorship in these areas are compatible with Sue’s framework, while also suggesting avenues for broadening its application.

Invited remarks at New England Regional SBL, held at Yale Divinity School in March 2017. Co-panelist Matthew Neujahr.

While much attention has been paid to controversies over free speech and academic freedom related to university campus debates, events, and activities, I demonstrate that higher education is also under threat by the undermining of academic publishing ethics, integrity and standards, as well as what counts as scholarly rigor. The rise of problematic rhetoric and overtures as well as the circumvention of academic publishing standards pose threats to academia writ large, whereby academia is threatened from not just from outside but also from within the academy when some academics themselves participate in the erosion of academic integrity. At a time when there are concerted efforts to decolonize academia, there is a concurrent rise of colonial nostalgia and white supremacy among some academics, who are supported by and end up lending support to the escalating far-right movements globally, which misuse notions of free speech and academic freedom to further their agendas and attack higher education. Critical scholars thus need to hold accountable fellow academics, academic publishers, and universities in order to protect academic integrity and scholarship. The stakes are high at the current conjuncture and require greater introspection and intervention within academia to counter the dangerous

The Australian Universities' review, 2021

Periodically, the academy, and its friends and critics, pause to consider the idea of academic freedom. This is often connected with events outside the academy, as in the 1950s when 'loyalty oaths' were sometimes imposed on academics in the United States, or after 9/11, when security concerns were leveraged to permit oversight of 'sensitive' scholarly and scientific enquiries. Thirty years ago, from the very place where we write, a series of 'managerial' changes to the governance of Australian universities (the so-called 'Dawkins Reforms') prompted the Bulletin of the Australian Society of Legal Philosophy to devote a special issue to discussing 'Academic Freedom Today' (Moens, 1991). So-called political correctness (in the form of things like 'de-platforming' , 'speech codes' , 'cancel culture' , and 'safe spaces') has recently provoked heated debate, while the Commonwealth government was so concerned about these matters that in 2018 the Minister for Education commissioned former High Court Chief Justice Robert French AC to set up an inquiry. (And a subsequent 2020 inquiry into the results of the inquiry, led by Professor Sally Walker AM.) Justice French's findings yielded, among other things, a model code for universities, some of which have adopted it, with or without modifications. On this topic we believe something already asserted by the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU), which said in its submission to a 2008 Parliamentary review, 'The dialogue about protecting academic freedom needs to move beyond old debates about political correctness [already old thirteen years ago!] to the real threats that incursions on academic freedom can have for our universities and for our society more broadly' (2008, p. 8). We aim to show how to move the debate beyond these hackneyed questions, though not, perhaps, in the direction that the NTEU had in mind in that earlier intervention. Public airing of this topic frequently suggests that there is nothing more to the concept of academic freedom than the idea of freedom of speech (within a particular community), where this is read as a negative liberty, in the sense that Isaiah Berlin (1969) first proposed in 1958. Berlin thought of 'negative liberty' as an absence of enforced institutional constraints such as laws and regulations that explicitly limit certain behaviours. In this case it refers to the ability for people to say what they please, within broadly described legal limits. However, some notable discussants have been careful to distinguish academic freedom from such a libertarian conception of freedom of speech. Professor Carolyn Evans,