Greg Lukianoff

I feel like if you gave one of these things to Richard Feynman, he'd be like, he would tear it to pieces and then not get the job.

Oh, of course.

Yeah, I mean, when you ask professors about, you know, are they intimidated under the current environment, the answer is yes, and particularly conservative professors, you know, already, you know, reporting that they're, you know, afraid for their jobs in a lot of different cases.

And back to the Red Scare comparison, and this is one of the interesting things about the data as well.

is that that same study that I was talking about, the most comprehensive study of the Red Scare, there was polling about whether or not professors were self-censoring due to the fear of the environment.

And 9% of professors said that they were self-censoring their research and what they were saying.

9% is really bad.

That's almost a tenth of professors saying that their speech was chilled.

When we did this question for professors on our latest faculty survey, when you factor together, we asked them, are they self-censoring in their research?

Are they self-censoring in class?

Are they self-censoring online, et cetera?

It was 90%.

Of professors.

So the idea that we're actually in an environment that is historic in terms of like how scared people are actually of expressing controversial views, I think that it's the reason why we're going to actually be studying this in 50 years, the same way we study the Red Scare.

It's not – the idea that this isn't happening will just be correctly viewed as insane.

Yeah.

Yeah.

When I started at FIRE in 2001, I didn't take the viewpoint diversity issue as seriously.

I thought it was just something that right-wingers complained about.

But I really started to get what happens when you have a community with low viewpoint diversity.