Editor’s note: Fear of career-damaging reprisals from outraged parties in the “Twittersphere” coupled with unspoken rules about what can and can’t be said on college campuses constrain what faculty members teach, research and discuss, says sociology professor Ilana Redstone of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. In the recent book “Unassailable Ideas: How Unwritten Rules and Social Media Shape Discourse in American Higher Education” (Oxford University Press, 2020), Redstone and co-author John Villasenor of UCLA explored the impact of these trends. Redstone spoke recently with News Bureau education editor Sharita Forrest.
In your view, what beliefs or principles are the dominant forces in shaping college campus environments, and do they apply in other settings as well?
The premise of our book is that there are three beliefs that underpin the entire academic endeavor:
- Any action that aims to undermine traditional frameworks or power structures is automatically deemed to be good.
- Discrimination is behind all unequal outcomes.
- Everything should be viewed through the lens of identity – such as race and gender identity – even when there are reasonable, non-identity-centered ways of examining issues.
We do not claim that these principles are unimportant or should never be part of the discussion. However, we are saying that that they are beliefs, not facts, and need to be recognized as such.
While our book examines the influence of these beliefs in academia, they certainly apply to society more broadly. The academic enterprise in the U.S. is enormous and influential, as are its faculty members. Every year, millions of undergraduate and graduate students educated at these institutions enter the workforce, bringing with them the worldviews that were cultivated during their college experience.
How are these three beliefs reinforced, and are debate and dissent tolerated?
The beliefs have such a strong moral valence that merely questioning them can have significant negative professional consequences. These beliefs are upheld in part by the direct and indirect effects of social media. A direct effect is fear of social media users piling on faculty members if they do or say something that users disagree with or find unacceptable. Indirectly, social media play a role in maintaining the climate that supports these behaviors.
Further, the power of social media has given Twitter a seat at the table when it comes to controversial questions and how they should be addressed.
The growth of social media has made higher education fundamentally different and less welcoming to open inquiry and a diversity of perspectives than in the past.
Censorship and self-censorship shape who gets hired into tenure-track positions and who earns the right to keep working by being awarded tenure. While tenure was specifically designed to protect academic freedom, it isn’t what it once was and now comes with a number of caveats. These caveats include a wide range of opinions that run afoul of the three beliefs we outlined.
While most universities claim to value diverse perspectives and freedom of thought, you suggest that in practice they often don’t. How does this occur?
I’m not saying this is easy to navigate, but in higher education we’re not doing a particularly good job of welcoming diverse viewpoints. Administrators may make the claim that they value diversity of thought and freedom of expression – and in practice not implement that at all.
One of the common ways this contradiction happens is by having a long list of ideas, positions and questions that are considered unacceptable. This leads to claims of valuing viewpoint diversity, but only so long as those viewpoints remain within a narrowly defined range.
The second way it happens is by treating the three beliefs as though they’re facts. When they’re treated as factual, they become closed to debate and discussion.
Early on, social media were hailed as potential democratizing forces, providing platforms for a broader range of perspectives than might be heard otherwise. But you point out there’s also a downside. What is that?
Social media give everyone a voice. While in many ways that’s really beneficial, there are also downsides. One of them is that faculty aren’t just being evaluated by their peers or other academics, they’re being evaluated by anyone with a Twitter account.
In the book, we present multiple case studies in which decisions by college officials and publication decisions by the editors of scholarly journals were driven by their fears of backlash on social media platforms.
Are constraints on faculty members’ academic freedom another symptom of a flawed culture in higher education that marginalizes people of color, women and certain political groups?
Concerns about academic freedom and freedom of expression are serious, but in my view, they sit downstream of a different problem – and that is how we talk, think, work with students and do research on a wide range of issues related to race, identity and fairness.
This is not to minimize concerns about academic freedom and free speech; I think they’re very real concerns, but we need to address these issues more broadly.
You suggest eight possible solutions, such as encouraging people to tolerate greater discomfort during discussions of complicated issues and urging university officials to be aware that their communications might inadvertently silence people with differing views. Yet, you also explicitly discourage universities from mandating viewpoint diversity. Why?
We don’t think that universities should mandate how people think. Universities should be places that give students opportunities to engage with a diversity of ideas and to form their own opinions.