Welcome to the Conformity Gauntlet!

Higher ed has created far too many pressures that promote conformity at the expense of truth

Cover of Feb. ‘24 Reason Magazine

I am excited to announce that an adapted chapter (with a ton of new data) from Rikki Schlott and my book ‘The Canceling of the American Mind’ will be the cover story at Reason magazine next month. It describes what we call the Conformity Gauntlet — the incredibly difficult road you have in academia if you step out of line or question the ideological orthodoxy. 

As in the phrase “running the gauntlet,” the process involves a series of hurdles, challenges, and setbacks you must overcome to reach your goal. In the Conformity Gauntlet, however, these trials have nothing to do with your level of skill, intelligence, or competence, but rather your rigidness in adhering to the ideas and behaviors of the academic ruling class. The idea is to keep dissenters out or at least make them extremely hesitant to dissent, and it works very well.

In the first part of the piece, Rikki and I explain the research which shows that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) statements function as political litmus tests. I mean, of course they do, but Nate Honeycutt at FIRE has done some really interesting experiments proving what should be obvious.

We then take the reader on an imaginary tour of academia from the point of view of an independent-minded highschooler and demonstrate how many conformity pressures he or she will face on their way to becoming a scientist. Layering the threats to free speech and conformity pressures on top of each other is key to really understanding how the Conformity Gauntlet works, because no single case really conveys how bad it’s gotten for freedom of inquiry and freedom of thought on campus on a systematic basis.

Here is an excerpt from that extensive feature article, beginning well into the Conformity Gauntlet when our imaginary student survives long enough to become a professor:

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 [Note: We are referring to Michael Bérubé and Jennifer Ruth, who I mentioned previously in my piece about Mike Adams. In their book “It's Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom,” Bérubé and Ruth propose protecting academic freedom — except for “white supremacy,” which, as we all know, can now mean virtually any speech that doesn’t conform to what Wesley Yang calls “the successor ideology” or what Yascha Mounk calls “the identity synthesis.”]

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.

Naysayers will likely point out that if the Conformity Gauntlet actually existed, nobody would make it through. Well, as the ratio of left-leaning to right-leaning faculty on campus shows, very few who aren’t sympathetic to the ideological orthodoxy become full-fledged academics. And then, when you add to that how many of those remaining professors say their speech is chilled — nearly six out of every ten conservative faculty members report regularly self-censoring — the picture for nonconformity seems especially grim.

And yes, some percentage of high school students will get through high school without being canceled, kicked out, or otherwise punished in a way that makes getting into a fancy college impossible. Some will be able to secure admission to their desired school without writing a personal statement that compromises their beliefs. Some will graduate without incident. But when the formal punishments, the informal punishments, and the social sanctions and general atmosphere of fear and conformity are combined at every stage, how many will remain? How many who do remain would admit, in a moment of self-reflection, that they are defeated and have simply stopped bothering to seriously dissent?

It shouldn’t be like this.

To produce better ideas and to inch closer to the truth, we should be encouraging radical open-mindedness, non-conformity, and a constant questioning of all the sacred cows currently held by increasingly expensive, bureaucratized, and dogmatic institutions in higher education. 

I’ve said it too many times to count, but we need smaller, cheaper, more rigorous alternatives if we hope to have even the vaguest chance out of this mess. And for legacy institutions, which will still be around no matter how successful smaller experiments are, a good place to start: FIRE’s 10 common-sense reforms.

Read the whole piece, “Universities Use DEI Statements To Enforce Groupthink,” at Reason online now.

SHOT FOR THE ROAD

Though I just included it in my very first ever Weekend Free Speech Update this past weekend, I think this video featuring FIRE Senior Fellow Nadine Strossen is excellent and worth sharing again. In it, Nadine discusses the “Weimar Fallacy,” a term coined by Eric Heinze, which describes the weird idea that if there were hate speech codes in Weimar Germany, they would have stopped the Nazis’ rise to power and prevented the Holocaust.

This is an article of faith among some advocates of hate speech codes, but it never made any sense. For one thing, the Nazis were voted into power in large numbers, and those laws would’ve been enforced by a Nazi government. But the claim is made all the more ludicrous once one realizes that Weimar Germany actually did have codes punishing anti-Semitic speech. Nazis were found guilty of violating these codes and were even jailed for it. Contrary to what advocates of hate speech codes presume would happen, the effort to suppress Nazi speech was twisted into a PR victory by the Nazis themselves.

Nadine and I co-wrote a piece on the old ERI blog on FIRE’s website called “Would censorship have stopped the rise of the Nazis?” as part of a longer series called “Answers to Arguments Against Free Speech” where we dispel the Weimar Fallacy in great detail. Still, nothing beats Nadine Strossen — herself the daughter of a Holocaust survivor — speaking on the topic: