That’s the implication of the OneTaste case, in which a jury has returned a guilty verdict against Rachel Cherwitz and Nicole Daedone, who stood accused of a conspiracy to commit forced labor during their time with the sexual and spiritual self-help organization.

I have written many words about this case already, and I’m going to try to refrain from rehashing all of the details in today’s newsletter. (If you’re new to the case and want to dive deep, here you go. If you want a couple of overviews of how the trial played out, see here and here.)

What I want to focus on right now is the larger implications of this case. They’re not pretty.

From College Campuses to #MeToo to the DOJ

If these ideas about coercion and consent didn’t start on the college campuses of the 2010s, that’s at least when they became fully institutionalized —adopted as not just the framework favored by activist students and women’s studies professors but by college administrators and the Title IX offices they were beholden to. There was affirmative consent, sure, but also a broader suspicion of consent as a worthwhile standard, or at least a willingness to dismiss it for more arcane ideas about sexual permissibility.

Suddenly it wasn’t enough to say no and it wasn’t even enough to say yes—one had to consider a complex set of power dynamics, alcohol consumption levels, subtle nonverbal cues, and so on, to determine if consent counted. It stopped just short of taking astrological signs into account.

We went from a reasonable corrective (acknowledging that sexual assault needn’t necessarily involve force or violence) to women getting support for claims of sexual coercion and violation even when they seemed to willingly go along with sexual activity at the time but later said that they weren’t enthusiastic enough about it and a partner should have known that and stopped. Basically, it was only consensual if a woman felt deep down in her heart, during and after, that everything had been OK.

We saw this idea migrate from campus newspapers and Title IX offices to the broader world during the #MeToo movement. It’s perhaps best exemplified by a story about the actor Aziz Ansari. A young woman went to dinner with him, then back to his house, and later excoriated him in Babe magazine for not reading her cues about not wanting to fool around and allegedly pressuring her to do so. The piece called it sexual misconduct and a violation. But when the woman explicitly told Ansari no, he stopped, per her account of things. And when she wanted to go, she left.

The Babe article provoked a huge debate about whether this sort of thing—which in another era we might have just called a bad date or caddish behavior—was a form of sexual assault and where responsibility lies here. Are sexual partners supposed to be mind readers? Do women have any responsibility for explicitly making their wishes known?

Infantilizing Women

Obviously, not all or even most campus sexual misconduct or #MeToo stories were like the Aziz Ansari story. But there were enough that it was clearly not an isolated idea or belief system. It was a new paradigm—and one sold, perversely, as empowering to women.

That was a lie. Broadening the parameters of nonconsensual sex like this does women a disservice, portraying us as somehow having less agency and less moral culpability than male peers (which could have consequences far beyond the bedroom) while also telling women that it’s normal—desirable even—to just shut up and go along with unwanted or uncomfortable activity in the moment and then object afterward. Rather than encourage women to be bold and unflinching in expressing what they want and don’t want, it encourages putting out with a promise that later they can get their vengeance in public opinion or in court.

We’re uncomfortable as a culture with “assigning women complete sexual responsibility, even though we want them to have complete sexual liberty,” said Kat Rosenfield on a recent episode of the Feminine Chaos podcast. Rosenfield and her co-host were talking about the murky way we sometimes talk about women’s actions when allegations of sexual misconduct are concerned. People can do a lot of “squirming around to try and make a choice that was made [into] not actually a choice,” said Rosenfield. And once you’re in that mode, you end up with some real mental shenanigans around consent.

The OneTaste trial shows that these ideas have now crossed over from college values or cultural vibes to legal standards adopted by federal prosecutors with the power to help put people in prison.

Consent Withdrawn 15 Years Later

In the OneTaste trial, prosecutors elicited testimony after testimony from “victims” who admit they consented to various sexual activities, from orgasmic meditation (a core activity in OneTaste courses and communes) to random hook-ups to relationships with OneTaste community members, investors, and students. They not only did not say no, they affirmatively agreed to these encounters or even initiated them.

The repercussions they now claimed to have feared if they didn’t do these things—many of which were core parts of the intentional communities and/or classes they chose to partake in, applied for, paid for—were things like social disapproval or missing out on opportunities to move up in the OneTaste ranks. Some were not even employees when the activities in question took place, and even among those who were, much of the action they talked about took place in contexts outside their employment.

Prosecutors argued that Daedone’s ideas (like daily orgasmic meditation being good for you, orgasm as a way to clear out bad energy, and the importance of being open to sexual encounters that might be out of your comfort zone) and Cherwitz’s encouragement or shunning amounted to a form of coercion that rendered these women’s seeming consent invalid.

We’re supposed to ignore the fact that these women admittedly never told Daedone or Cherwitz, let alone their sexual partners, that they were uncomfortable or didn’t want to do these things. We’re supposed to ignore the fact that contemporaneous accounts of these acts—emails, texts, journal entries, social media posts—often showed sunny feelings about what was going on. And we’re supposed to ignore the fact that these women didn’t report any crimes or labor violations at the time and are only testifying after being approached by FBI agents a decade or two later.

The defendants are being held accountable for how these women feel—or at least told FBI agents who were making promises and extolling their victimhood that they feel—about 10- and 15-year-old sexual activity that everyone seems to have been perfectly fine with at the time.

We’re looking at campus kangaroo courts come to a federal courthouse, with U.S. attorneys fully embracing ideas about consent that were weird and radical just a decade or two ago. I’m sure this will be cheered by some people. I find the prospect offensive and dangerous.

It’s a total affront to due process, giving people little notice about how to avoid liability (since consent in the moment clearly doesn’t matter). And unlike on college campuses, the arbiters of these disputes now have the power to help put people in prison for long stretches.

It creates a dangerous situation not only for people who engaged in sex acts with someone claiming, decades later, that their consent was invalid but also for anyone who might be said to have “conspired” to have encouraged these sexual encounters or to have “participated in a venture” that received any benefit from them. It opens the gate to forced labor or sex trafficking prosecutions based on sexual regret.

It’s also one more step in the total infantilization of women, negating the gains in sexual and social autonomy that we’ve won. This situation where we expect all the rights of adulthood but none of the responsibility can’t last. We’re going to start seeing—we are seeing—rights chipped away at, too. At a time when many are keen to use sexual “harms” to justify everything from online censorship to limiting LGBTQ expression, curtailing reproductive rights, and encouraging women to give up on college and just have babies, no feminist, friend of women, or woman who cares about her own bodily autonomy and ability to consent should be cheering this safe space–ification of the DOJ.

More Sex & Tech News

• The slippery slope of age-verification laws for adult content is on full display in France, where the “government is considering designating X as a porn platform — a move that will likely have the platform implementing strict age verification requirements,” per Politico. It’s not hard to imagine the same thing happening in the U.S., rendering laws aimed at carding people who visit porn websites as a backdoor to either require age verification for social media, too, or make social media websites ban sexually oriented content and accounts of any kind.

• President Donald Trump is expected to once again extend the deadline for TikTok parent company ByteDance to sell the company or be banned. “Remember when TikTok was supposedly an urgent national security threat that required emergency legislation? Funny how that ’emergency’ keeps getting 75-day extensions,” Techdirt Editor Mike Masnick writes. That “should tell you everything about how ‘urgent’ this national security threat actually was.”

• “It would help immensely if the critiques of porn, did not confuse ‘sex’ with ‘porn.’ The push to be ‘sexy’ and sexism are not rooted in one form of media,” comments Mike Stabile, director of public policy at the Free Speech Coalition, in response to a New Yorker review of the new book Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves. “But linking both evangelicals and anti-SW feminists is the idea that sexist evil can be traced to one tantalizing source. To do that, in these sexual monotheories, porn has to be a monolith. That it presents women one way (submissive) and with one look (skinny, with big tits). Antiporn texts depend on a charicature [sic] of porn, a flattening of sexual speech, in order to establish a clear directional effect on culture.”

As to the idea that focusing on consent in porn is somehow insufficient, Stabile posts: says: “We focus on ‘consent’…because it’s how we restrain the urge to police other people’s fantasies and sexualities. Because saying ‘your articulation of sexuality’ is damaging to ME, is the same impulse that underlies anti-LGBTQ censorship.”

Today’s Image

The post Federal Prosecutors Are Starting To Sound Like Campus Activists About Sex and Consent appeared first on Reason.com.

It may not seem unusual that a corporate CEO would want to focus on increasing shareholder value, but in October this was treated as big news. A Financial Times headline announced that “Unilever’s new chief says corporate purpose can be ‘unwelcome distraction.'” That new CEO, Hein Schumacher, went on to explain that he rejected the idea that “every brand should have a social or environmental purpose.” He intended, he said, to build a “performance culture” instead.

Why would it be newsworthy for a CEO to be focused on corporate performance? Not long ago, that was simply assumed. What changed?

The change is summed up by three letters of corporate jargon: ESG. The initials stand for environmental, social, and governance factors, and the term dates back two decades. Early ESG documents—such as the 2004 report “Who Cares Wins,” produced under the auspices of the United Nations (U.N.)—suggest an effort to globally coordinate private and public sector activity toward a shared set of social objectives. This was a departure from previous efforts at injecting political and moral values into business (such as corporate social responsibility, socially responsible investing, impact investing, and so on) in that it pointed to a future of uniform ESG standards, enforced and encouraged by governments around the world.

The rise of ESG has further blurred the lines between the government and the corporate world. Under an ESG regime, the government is called to advance goals in the private sector and the private sector is called to support the government’s policies. The public-private distinction has been foundational to both classical liberal principles and constitutional government, but the line is becoming increasingly difficult to find.

Unilever’s history is a microcosm both of the rise of ESG and of the challenges the ESG agenda is now facing. The British consumer packaged goods corporation owns several successful brands, including Ben & Jerry’s, Dove, and Magnum. It has prided itself on its ESG credentials, particularly under Paul Polman, Unilever’s CEO from 2009 to 2019.

Under Polman’s leadership, the company made a series of corporate commitments to environmental and social causes. It supported sustainable agriculture at the World Economic Forum. It helped create the United Nations’ “sustainable development goals.” It “made a stand to #unstereotype the way men and women are portrayed in marketing.” Again and again, it filtered its corporate purpose through a progressive worldview.

While it is now common for brands to advertise their commitments to such causes, Unilever took the lead in incorporating “purpose” into virtually everything it did. Polman often called for CEOs to focus on creating value for a wider group of “stakeholders,” as opposed to narrowly focusing on shareholders; he also campaigned for government efforts to fight climate change.

At first, Polman’s play worked. In his decade atop the company, Unilever’s stock price rose by about 150 percent—”well ahead of the FTSE [Financial Times Stock Exchange] 100 average,” The Guardian notes—and it reported decreasing emissions from its factories by 47 percent from 2008 to 2018. Perhaps it indeed was possible to achieve both purpose and profits, to serve both “stakeholders” and shareholders at once.

Toward the end of his term, though, signs of trouble appeared. Kraft Heinz, a firm closely associated with Warren Buffett and his holding company Berkshire Hathaway, made a bid for control of Unilever in 2017. The company rejected the offer. This event carried symbolic meaning, as Buffett has a long history of favoring profits over “purpose.” In the fallout, investors increasingly put pressure on Unilever to cut bureaucratic overhead.

After Polman left the company in 2019, his replacement Alan Jope eagerly picked up the ESG mantle. A 2021 Unilever blog post declared that there was “No trade-off between purpose and performance.” In 2022, after a backlash against ESG had begun, Jope declared at a Clinton Global Initiative event that Unilever “will not back down on this agenda despite these populist accusations.”

Indeed, the populists did not prompt Unilever to back down from ESG. After all, Unilever is a British company, and in Britain, even conservative politicians have embraced aspects of the ESG agenda. Market forces, on the other hand, have had an impact. Investor Terry Smith repeatedly ridiculed Unilever’s “virtue-signaling,” calling on the company to focus on fundamentals. Why did Hellmann’s mayonnaise need a purpose? Didn’t it already have one, as a salad and sandwich condiment? Nor was Smith the only investor concerned with Unilever’s flagging performance.

Within months of his promise not to back down, Jope announced that he was stepping down as CEO. His replacement, Schumacher, is the one who called the focus on ESG goals a “distraction.”

Schumacher had good reasons for a change in course. In the U.S., for example, a poll conducted by Todd Rose at Populace suggests, as Axios put it, that “an astonishing four times as many Democrats say CEOs should take a public stand on social issues (44%) than actually care (11%).” Gallup has found that support for large corporations plummeted among Republican voters during the same period that businesses most loudly proclaimed their environmental and social commitments.

Schumacher’s shift in focus is not guaranteed to pay off. Plenty of companies focus on performance and still fail. But that’s the point. Business is hard enough without extraneous political objectives. If you chase two objectives at once, you risk falling behind those with a singular focus.

Some advocates have argued that ESG is just good business. ESG, they say, is simply about managing the risks that environmental and social factors pose to businesses. But that understates the extent of the policies that ESG imposes. In the words of Reuters’ Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive Playbook, “the aim of these changes” is “to affect the whole business model of the Organization.” A company’s ESG reports, it declares, should disclose how its negative impacts are being mitigated “in relation to the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals.”

Why exactly should a business concern itself with U.N. goals?

ESG efforts have been on the retreat recently. The financial firm Vanguard announced in 2022 that it was withdrawing from the Net Zero Asset Managers initiative, and Blackrock CEO Larry Fink said in June that he was moving away from the term ESG. U.S. investors have been pulling their money out of ESG funds, and corporations are mentioning ESG on earnings calls far less frequently than at the trend’s peak in 2021.

ESG opponents may be tempted to declare victory. Perhaps ESG was just a byproduct of zero–interest rate policies. But to proclaim the battle over now would be to overlook the critical role of governments in advancing ESG. The effort initially stemmed, after all, from coordinated public and private sector activity. Government policy can prop up bad ideas long after they’ve exhausted their economic viability.

During a series of House of Representatives hearings this past summer, Politico reported, Democrats “characterized Republican opposition to ESG as anti-capitalist, discouraging market choice and investor freedom.” This was supposed to be an ironic, turn-the-tables moment.

But Democrats’ invocation of markets was just rhetorical. They are correct that some Republican responses to ESG, such as certain aspects of the anti-ESG law Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed in May, have reduced market choice. But many Democrats have pursued an aggressive policy agenda in the opposite direction, as when they support the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) mandatory climate disclosure rule. It is a strange free market phenomenon that requires a regulation that will, in The Wall Street Journal‘s words, “raise the cost to businesses of complying with its overall disclosure rules to $10.2 billion from $3.9 billion.”

Nor is the SEC alone. In November 2022, the Federal Acquisition Regulatory Council proposed a rule requiring all significant government contractors to “disclose their greenhouse gas emissions and climate-related financial risk and set science-based targets to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.” In other words, ESG disclosure and goals would become a condition for contractors making bombs, bullets, and planes for the U.S. government.

As the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has noted, this proposal “would require thousands of employee hours and saddle contractors with billions of dollars in added implementation and compliance costs. The government’s acquisition costs would rise as a consequence, and some contractors, and companies in the supply chain, would likely drop out of the market entirely, weakening the competitive forces that keep prices down. The Council substantiates no offsetting benefits to speak of.”

Meanwhile, the Department of Labor has moved to advance ESG objectives by amending the regulatory standards for private pension plans. President Joe Biden’s first veto was against a Congressional Review Act effort to repeal this rule.

Several Democrats in Congress supported the effort to repeal the Labor Department’s rule. Several have criticized the SEC’s climate disclosure rule too. Support for ESG has not been uniform within the party.

But the Biden administration has been firmly pro-ESG, adopting a “comprehensive, Government-wide strategy” for climate risk. Climate risk is a component of ESG that includes both physical risks and “transition risks.” The latter are attributed to potential future changes in government policy and consumer demand. This is inevitably highly speculative since no one can know much about consumer demand or government policies in the distant future. It’s also circular: The government is using the implicit threat of future environmental policies to achieve those policies’ expected effects now.

The whole-of-government ESG agenda raises major constitutional and knowledge problems for government agencies. As SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce remarked of the agency’s climate disclosure proposal, “the regulators designing the framework have no expertise in capital allocation, political and social insight, or the science used to justify these favored ends.” Similar concerns apply to climate risk efforts at the Federal Reserve, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and so on.

Europe and California are even further along the path of compulsory compliance. The European Union recently released the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, which will force banks to incorporate ESG into their credit decisions. California has passed two ESG reporting bills that go considerably further than the federal SEC is expected to go with its final climate disclosure rule.

While blue states like California have been supporting ESG, a number of red states have advanced anti-ESG regulation. This runs the gamut from protecting public pensions from politicization to banning state contracts with entities that engage in ESG-related activities. Critics of these bills allege they end up costing taxpayers significantly by limiting the pool of financial institutions that are available to the state. Advocates counter that ESG poses an existential threat to the states’ largest industries—oil, gas, coal, agriculture, mining, etc.—and that this justifies state action.

Another wrinkle: Public pensions and sovereign wealth funds are among the most significant institutional investors. This further complicates the public-private distinction, since many large companies count government entities among their largest shareholders.

For example, Norway manages the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund. The Financial Times reported in May the fund plans “to step up ESG proposals to US companies.” This suggests the Norwegian government is using its oil revenue to discourage oil production in other nations. Meanwhile, three New York City pension funds have been sued for violating their fiduciary responsibilities because they divested from oil and gas companies.

That original 2004 United Nations report called for governments, pension fund managers, and corporations worldwide to begin incorporating ESG into their decisions. Such global public-private coordination was necessary, the U.N. argued, because “only if all actors contribute to the integration of environmental, social and governance issues in investment decisions, can significant improvements in this field be achieved.” A follow-up report in 2005 suggested that significant progress had already been achieved in directing public- and private-sector activity toward ESG goals, noting actions by a French public pension fund and lauding new ESG regulations in the U.K. and Germany.

Some lament the “politicization” of ESG, but ESG has been political since inception. Though markets have been trending against ESG recently, governments may well step in to counteract that trend, rendering the line between public and private even blurrier than before.

The post Is ESG Already Over? appeared first on Reason.com.

Yoel Inbar must not be allowed to teach psychology at UCLA—or so a student petition informed the California university’s administration this past July.

Inbar is an eminent, influential, and highly cited researcher with a Ph.D. in social psychology from Cornell University. There is no question that he is qualified. Anyone worth their salt doing work on political polarization knows Inbar’s name. Inbar also jumped through all the hoops UCLA put up for the job, including submitting a diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) statement, which is currently all the rage in colleges and universities. He even shares the politics of the majority of the psychology department. But on his podcast, Inbar had expressed relatively mild concerns over the ideological pressures that DEI statements impose and wondered aloud whether they do harm to diversity of thought.

As a result of this petition—signed by only 66 students—UCLA did not hire Inbar. And he’s not the only academic this has happened to. Far from it.

DEI Statements Are Political Litmus Tests

Since 2014, an unprecedented number of college professors have been targeted, punished, or fired for what they said, published, or taught. Meanwhile, colleges and universities are becoming even less ideologically diverse than they already were. Professors around the country are reporting their speech chilled in an increasingly homogenous environment.

While you might expect universities to respond to this issue by making efforts to mitigate groupthink, the opposite has occurred. Over the past several years universities across the country have decided that it’s time to add DEI statements as part of the hiring and review process.

And while some argue that DEI statements are not litmus tests, we think that defies common sense and the evidence in front of us. Take this statement from Vassar College’s Office of the Dean of the Faculty:

All department and program hiring for tenure-track and multi-year faculty positions are requesting all candidates to submit a diversity statement. This statement should provide the candidate’s unique perspective on their past and present contributions to and future aspirations for promoting diversity, inclusion, and social justice in their professional career. The purpose of the diversity statement is to help departments and programs identify candidates who have professional experience, intellectual commitments, and/or willingness to engage in activities that could help the College contribute to its mission in these areas.

Even if you completely agree with the importance of DEI, there really isn’t any reason to ask a potential physics professor, for example, to discuss their prior, past, and future “intellectual commitments” to “social justice.” That is, unless you’re looking to test their political outlook as a condition for their employment. The purpose of DEI statements is obvious, and professors themselves know it.

In 2022, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) conducted a survey of 1,491 university professors to gauge their attitudes toward free expression on campus. About 50 percent said they believed DEI statements are political litmus tests that violate academic freedom. Ideological minorities on campus agree at even higher rates than that: 56 percent of moderates and 90 percent of conservatives.

That may not surprise you, given the ubiquity of DEI statements and the prevalence of social justice ideology on campus and elsewhere. What may shock you is that in another study, about 23 percent of tenured or tenure-track professors said that they saw DEI statements as ideological tests and that their use in this way is appropriate.

Let that sink in: Twenty-three percent of surveyed university professors had no problem admitting they endorsed behavior that was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. In its seminal 1967 decision in Keyishian v. Board of Regents, the Court held that academic freedom is “a special concern of the First Amendment, which does not tolerate laws that cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom.” They extended this protection even to speech that was arguably “treasonable,” “seditious,” or “advocat[ing] the overthrow of government by force.”

In the past, the Supreme Court has struck down far narrower litmus tests than this expansive review of candidates’ “commitment to social justice.” We have little doubt that the kind of DEI statements being unleashed on potential faculty members right now would be found unconstitutional as well. But a 2022 report by the American Association of University Professors found that 46 percent of large institutions surveyed already use DEI criteria in their tenure standards. An additional 36 percent are considering doing the same. In universities across the country, unconstitutionality seems to be of little concern.

One common defense of DEI statements is the claim that there are any number of valid answers to that prompt, and the applicant just needs to show interest in some sort of diversity—be it political, socioeconomic, regional, or religious diversity. FIRE’s Nate Honeycutt, also a founding member of the Society for Open Inquiry in Behavioral Science, decided to test whether this is actually true.

He conducted a series of experiments where faculty were randomly assigned to evaluate one of a number of different DEI statements: one focusing on race and gender diversity, one on socioeconomic diversity, one on viewpoint diversity, and another on rural diversity. He found that DEI statements failing to discuss race and gender were penalized—even if they did explicitly address another form of diversity.

An amazing 35 percent of faculty who evaluated a diversity statement advocating for greater socioeconomic diversity said they would not recommend that the candidate advance for further review. That means an effective rejection of people who would argue that socioeconomic diversity is the most lacking kind of diversity in elite higher education today.

Worse yet, 52 percent of faculty who evaluated a diversity statement advocating greater viewpoint diversity would not recommend that candidate for advancement. That means advocating for diversity of thought and opinion could often actually hurt your employment prospects in academia.

And we know that evaluators actually are eliminating candidates solely based on their diversity statements. A self-survey conducted by the University of California, Berkeley, found that, during a search for faculty in the life sciences department, 76 percent of applicants were eliminated solely on the basis of their diversity statements. Another departmental search found that the number was 78 percent. Through 800 pages of “Diversity Faculty Recruitment Reports” from Ohio State University, John Sailer of the National Association of Scholars discovered that “racial diversity was touted as a tool to achieve viewpoint diversity, but viewpoint conformity often served as a tool to meet de facto quotas.” Among other examples, Sailer notes that “a committee searching for a professor of freshwater biology selected finalists ‘based upon a weighted rubric of 67% research and 33% contribution to DEI,'” and that “for a search in astrophysics, ‘the DEI statement was given equal weight to the research and teaching statements.'” Sailer correctly points out that this “would strike many as a poor metric for judging astrophysicists.”

Running the Gauntlet

Imagine you’re an independent-minded high schooler who longs to be a famous scientist one day. You don’t consider yourself a conservative, but you’re highly critical of lefty groupthink. By today’s standards in higher education, you’re labeled a conservative, and therefore you will find a shocking number of hurdles between you and your dream.

First, you have to get through high school, where you may already feel pressure not to express the wrong views in the classroom. A 2022 survey by Sam Abrams and Next Gen Politics found that 60 percent of high school students have felt they could not express opinions because of how students, teachers, or the administration would respond.

Now it’s time to apply to your dream school: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Many of the schools on your application list require you to fill out a DEI statement. All of them ask for a personal statement too. You know it’s in your best interest to conform politically, because professors are willing to openly admit to discriminating against more conservative viewpoints.

The data are there to support your concerns that such statements are an ideological hurdle. One study of American faculty found that 22 percent were willing to explicitly discriminate against a Donald Trump supporter in a hiring decision, and nearly half of the graduate students surveyed endorsed ousting faculty members who expressed conservative views.

Numerous other surveys have found similar results. That means having any contrarian view is a big risk from the moment you enter higher education’s application process.

But let’s say you pass that hurdle and make it into MIT. You’ve landed in perhaps the greatest science university in the entire world, only to find the environment on campus quite chilled. MIT came in 136th of the 248 schools listed in FIRE’s campus free speech rankings.

As one member of the MIT class of 2023 put it, “I never feel like I can express my views around my classmates, even a lot of my close friends. They frequently talk about how evil all conservatives are and even talk about how they’d wish they’d all just die.”

FIRE’s rankings rely heavily on student surveys, which found that at MIT:

Sixty-nine percent of students are uncomfortable “publicly disagreeing with a professor about a controversial topic.”

Fifty-nine percent of students are worried about damaging their reputations because someone misunderstands something they’ve said or done.

Forty-three percent of students are uncomfortable “expressing [their] views on a controversial political topic to other students during a discussion in a common campus space, such as a quad, dining hall, or lounge.”

Despite overwhelmingly reporting a chilled environment on campus, your fellow MIT students don’t have such a great record on free speech themselves. Only 49 percent say it’s never OK to block students from attending a speech. And just 26 percent of your classmates say it’s never okay to shout down a speaker.

While this social pressure alone is enough to silence most people, your school and many others have also set up bureaucratic systems in the form of bias response teams—often including a hotline you can call at any time to report your classmates and professors for offensive speech. In a survey of over 2,000 undergraduates published this summer, over 70 percent said a professor or class instructor should be reported to the university for saying something offensive. FIRE’s 2022 survey of professors found that one in six were threatened with punishment or actually investigated for their speech. And students experience a similar climate.

In a more recent FIRE survey of 2,000 students, nearly one in 10 students say they were disciplined or threatened with discipline for their expression and almost two in five say that something they have heard someone say on campus is an “act of violence.”

As an MIT student, you will surely be aware of prominent geophysics professor Dorian Abbot’s canceled speech about exoplanets. Why was he disinvited? Because in summer 2020 he wrote an op-ed in Newsweek arguing that promotions should be based on merit rather than race. Affirmative action has nothing to do with exoplanets, but MIT canceled the event anyway.

You may have heard about cancel culture and the myriad unhelpful ways of thinking and arguing that make social media and our public discourse a nightmare to deal with. Well, they’re also thriving on your campus. But, hey, let’s say you made it through and dodged all the attempts to tear you down so far.

The next stop on the road to becoming a professor is applying to Ph.D. programs. Good luck with that! Here comes another round of DEI statements—which, again, are evaluated by faculty who are willing to openly admit they would discriminate against their political opponents in the evaluation process. And since college faculty and administrators overwhelmingly lean left—and since your criticisms of lefty overreach will be coded as “right-wing” or “conservative” by most, if not all, of them—this means your application is in dire straits.

But let’s say you manage the minor miracle of clearing that hurdle into a Ph.D. program at a top school. What’s next?

You’ll continue to face all the previously described pressures to conform or be silent—but this time in an even less politically diverse environment. At MIT the faculty liberal-to-conservative ratio is only six to one, so count yourself luckier than most. At Harvard, in the College of Arts and Sciences, it’s a whopping 27 to one. A survey last year put it at 56 to one.

Now it’s time to start doing some student teaching. This is an easy time to get canceled, though, considering that at MIT:

Thirty-eight percent of faculty believe the administration is “not very” or “not at all” likely to defend controversial speech.

Forty-one percent of faculty believe the administration’s stance on free speech is “extremely” or “somewhat” unclear.

Forty percent of faculty were “more” or “much more” likely to self-censor on campus in summer 2022 compared to before the start of 2020.

Thirty-seven percent of faculty believe that requiring a DEI statement with a job application is a “justifiable requirement for a job at a university.”

Here’s something you probably don’t know unless you’ve learned it the hard way: There are secret hearings at universities all over the country, and too often they are focused on investigating and/or punishing professors for protected speech.

The Kafkaesque nature of these hearings has been highlighted by authors such as The Atlantic‘s Anne Applebaum and Northwestern University media studies professor Laura Kipnis, in her 2017 book Unwanted Advances. Readers may recall that Kipnis was herself subjected to a secret hearing after she published an article saying Title IX was being used to squelch speech on campus. Ironically, she was subsequently investigated by Northwestern’s office of Title IX.

With that ever-present threat, it shouldn’t be a surprise, then, that faculty reported enormous concerns over academic freedom in FIRE’s most recent faculty survey.

A whopping 91 percent of professors said they were at least somewhat likely to self-censor in their speech on social media, in class, in their publications, or online. (Compare this with the 9 percent of social science faculty during the Joseph McCarthy era who answered yes to the question, “Have you toned down anything you have written lately because you were worried that it might cause too much controversy?”) The survey also found that:

Sixteen percent said they had either been disciplined or threatened with discipline for their speech, teaching, or academic research.

Twenty-nine percent say they’d been pressured by administrators to avoid controversial research.

Seven percent said they had actually been investigated for speech. Extrapolate that to the population of professors across the country and that equals tens of thousands of professors.

If you’ve gotten this far in your quest, that means you’ve managed to get through another round of personal and DEI statements, navigated a system that allows your coworkers and students to anonymously report you, avoided cancellation attempts online, and have somehow overcome the growing tendency among scientists to self-censor—as a recent Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study by Cory J. Clark, Lee Jussim, FIRE’s Komi Frey, Musa al-Gharbi, and others outlines. Where do you go from here?

If you’re somehow not totally sick of this venomous environment and still want to continue in academia, you’ll probably want to become a faculty member. Good luck getting tenure! It’s increasingly rare, and the process is entirely opaque. That means those biases against you can be confidently aired and the rationale behind decisions kept entirely secret. As the internet writer Tim Urban told us, “The entire purpose of tenure was to protect faculty from mobbish fads, and what we’re seeing today is faculty being left unprotected by a mobbish fad. Completely defeats the purpose.”

We think the odds you get through the tenure approval process are probably pretty low. But you’ve been a miraculously successful hypothetical thus far, so let’s just say you do.

You’ll then find that your tenured status actually provides less protection to your academic freedom today than ever before. Since 2000, a total of 60 tenured professors have been fired for speech that is—or in public settings would be—protected by the First Amendment. More than two-thirds of those firings have happened since 2015 alone. Tenure is increasingly toothless.

It seems like just about everyone is coming for your academic freedom. Even representatives of the American Association of University Professors—a group meant to support you—are agitating for a more constrained view of academic freedom that would make it even easier than it already is to get you fired.

In the extremely unlikely event that you make it to tenured professorhood with your independent mind intact, your research will still be called into question. If anything you discover is too controversial, it might not get published. The journal Nature Human Behaviour has admitted as much with its dedication not to publish anything that could subjectively “harm” certain groups. Just as the academy operates under a social-reputational system for hiring and promotion, it does for publishing as well.

Even if you do manage to somehow publish controversial research, be prepared to be labeled as “right-wing” and face the possibility of cancellation. Alternatively, you may have your work entirely ignored, misinterpreted, suppressed, or metaphorically “burned.” And if you manage to anger the right wing instead, watch out also for professor watchlists and religious nonprofit organizations that could target you.

The Case for Nonconformity

Conformity in higher education is a serious problem begging for reforms. We need a system of academic advancement that is nonideological enough that, at every stage, it encourages professors and students alike to do what the 1974 Woodward Report at Yale so loftily outlined:

The history of intellectual growth and discovery clearly demonstrates the need for unfettered freedom, the right to think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable. To curtail free expression strikes twice at intellectual freedom, for whoever deprives another of the right to state unpopular views necessarily also deprives others of the right to listen to those views.

Unfortunately, Yale, the very university which commissioned this report, has drifted far away from that ideal in the years since. For that matter, most of our elite schools come nowhere near meeting these lofty goals.

If we want a better society that produces better solutions to the problems it faces, we need to be teaching nonconformity at every single level of the education process. Not even our most sacred cows can be spared from devil’s advocacy and thought experimentation.

Yet our education system is incentivizing conformity and groupthink. Unless this environment drastically improves—and quickly—we shouldn’t be surprised that trust in the accuracy of professors’ and experts’ findings diminishes. Mistakes abound when groupthink goes unchallenged.

“Where all think alike,” the essayist Walter Lippmann once wrote, “no one thinks very much.”

This article was adapted from The Canceling of the American Mind by permission of Simon & Schuster.

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