Thread by @glukianoff

THREAD: This week I am in @reason Magazine with a feature on ‘The Second Great Age of Political Correctness.’ By the mid-90s “PC” had become a joke, derided across the political spectrum See: the (not good) Jeremy Piven movie PCU. 1/14

reason.com/2021/12/13/the…

Many students stopped calling it “PC,” but the trend it described didn’t disappear, it just went off the public radar in the “ignored years” of campus #freespeech. During that time problems persisted & got worse. 2/14

Stanford’s infamous speech code banning insults & stigmatization was struck down in court in 1995, one of a half dozen losses for speech codes, but they STILL proliferated. By 2009 74% of universities had extremely restrictive speech codes. 3/14

Viewpoint diversity plummeted. In 1996 the ratio of self-ID’d liberal faculty to self-ID’d conservative faculty was 2:1. A 2019 study found registered Democrat faculty outnumber registered Republican faculty 9:1. In the Northeast, 15:1. 4/14

The ‘00s brought “bias response teams," empowering anyone to file complaints, often anonymous, with the administration to report “biased” behavior, while “microaggressions” & “trigger warnings” entered common parlance. Speaker disinvitations crept up. 5/14

ZERO TWEET: Keep reading for more from my Reason feature, or click the link below for our thread on recent controversies at #Yale. 0/14

https://twitter.com/glukianoff/status/1467949091845980168

Ed schools became more politicized. The largest accreditor, NCATE began recommending students be required to show a commitment to social justice. @TheFIREorg protested, leading NCATE to drop the litmus test in 2005, but many schools still require it. 6/14

thefire.org/catching-up-wi…

DATA UPDATE: Since 2015 our Scholars Under Fire database identified 505 attempts to get professors fired or punished for constitutionally protected speech. Almost ¾ of attempts resulted in some form of sanction. More than ⅕ ended in termination. 27 TENURED profs were fired. 7/14

One lazy way to dismiss #freespeech concerns is to say “there are thousands of colleges!” but in reality about 620 schools account for 80% of students at 4-year nonprofit schools. 69 of the top 100 @usnews schools appear in the database. 8/14

Attempts to professionally punish scholars are even more concentrated at elite schools — the top 10 average 7 incidents in our database. Harvard has 12. Stanford has 20. Elite schools matter bc they overwhelmingly produce our ruling class. 9/14

thefire.org/research/schol…

Since 2020 many anti-CRT bills have aimed to restrict the academic freedom of higher ed faculty, often using the language of protecting students from “discomfort.” As @conor64 noted, these are similar to the arguments made by CRT scholars & speech code advocates of old. 10/14

How to save higher ed? Have college presidents do these 5 things immediately. Alumni, refuse to donate until your schools make these changes. 11/14

thefire.org/five-ways-univ…

But we also need alternative institutions, like @khanacademy, @MinervaUni/@minervaproject , @uaustinorg, @RalstonCollege & others that haven’t been thought of yet to challenge the model of traditional 4-year universities. 12/14

The ideal time for achieving real change in higher ed was 30 or even 40 years ago. The next best time is now. 13/14

Lastly, I’d like to thank @petersuderman, @sladesr, @AdGo, @Komi_Tea, Sean Stevens, and @RynoWeiss for their help with getting this big article across the finish line! 14/14

BONUS: @freespeechtalk had their 150th episode this week on George Orwell. Give it a listen! 15/14

thefire.org/so-to-speak-po…