https://quillette.com/2018/11/27/the-problem
A group of academics recently announced plans to launch a new journal focused on research that its authors fear could lead to a backlash, putting their careers and perhaps even their physical safety in danger. With these concerns in mind, the journal will allow authors to publish their work anonymously, subject to peer review. Some are applauding the launch of what will be titled The Journal of Controversial Ideas.
They view it as a needed response to an academic and potentially broader culture that is increasingly afraid to grapple with sensitive topics and seeks to suppress ideas that may have merit but are socially unpopular. However, we think the creation of a journal like this, while serving as a prophetic warning about the new moral culture taking hold of academia and the future of our institutions of higher learning, may be a counterproductive way of dealing with the problems it addresses.
First, it is worth asking whether the concerns prompting the creation of this journal are warranted. Some writers and academics claim that stories of campus censorship, groupthink, and ideological bias are overblown, if not outright fantasy. We believe that these concerns are, in fact, justified. One need not look very hard to find cases of professors facing serious backlash, even threats, from students, faculty, and administrators because of ideas they have expressed in academic journals, opinion pieces, media interviews, and public lectures.
Just weeks ago Professor Samuel Abrams of Sarah Lawrence University published an op-ed in The New York Times documenting that among college administrators who are on the front lines interacting with students, liberals outnumber conservatives 12 to 1. He discussed how this imbalance can dramatically bias the campus social and educational agendas in favor of progressive viewpoints. In response to this article, campus activists vandalized his office and called for him to be fired. The student senate held an emergency meeting. The college president responded not with a forceful and unambiguous defense of free speech and academic freedom but by signaling support to campus activists and suggesting Professor Abrams had created a hostile work environment.
The lack of viewpoint diversity among college and university faculty gives further reason for scholars to be concerned about pursuing and attempting to publish “controversial” ideas.
University faculty, particularly in the social sciences and humanities, are overwhelmingly on the political left, and this may lead to social and professional consequences for academics whose ideas or research are perceived as at odds with a progressive worldview. For instance, in a survey of academics in the field of social psychology, researchers observed that conservative and moderate scholars reported experiencing a significantly more hostile work climate than liberals. The survey also found that the majority of respondents indicated some willingness to discriminate against colleagues who are conservative or whose research takes a conservative perspective. Surveys of faculty in other disciplines paint a similar picture of an academy populated by professors willing to block colleagues with divergent views from getting academic appointments, publishing their work, and receiving research funding.
Even while we recognize these and other threats to scholars who do work viewed as controversial, we believe the creation of The Journal of Controversial Ideas is ultimately a capitulation to the academic culture that motivated scholars to feel the need to establish such a journal.
One of us (Bradley) is a sociologist who has spent the last several years studying the rise of a new moral culture among progressive activists on college campuses. In The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars, Bradley and his coauthor Jason Manning point out that campus activists increasingly reject many widely held moral concepts and ideals—the injunction to have thick skin and ignore insults, for example, or the distinction between speech and violence. Those who embrace the new morality use a framework of oppression and victimhood to interpret even mundane human interaction as hostile or malignant. In this way, victimhood confers a kind of moral status as the adherents of this new ideology create new kinds of protections for oppressed groups.
