U.S. Academics Have Freer Speech Than We Think

Academics in the United States face threats to their intellectual and expressive freedoms from both sides of the political spectrum. These threats are comparable to or greater than the threats of the McCarthy era, by some measures. However, far more academics self-censor than are censored by others. Although self-censorship may sometimes be rational from a careerist perspective, here I argue that academic self-censorship is often irrational. Theoretical and empirical evidence suggests that academic reward systems favor intellectual risk-taking in the long run, on average. In contrast, academics often avoid rational expressive risks due to fears of adverse non-careerist consequences and short-term incentives for risk avoidance. Personality traits correlated with risk aversion may be overrepresented among those who self-select into academia. Academics’ large-scale self-censorship behaviors create a free-rider problem and underappreciated risks to academia’s value proposition, its public trust, and, by extension, its funding and student enrollment. Self-censorship also makes free expression appear more transgressive, which may magnify both its real and perceived risks. Despite ongoing censorship threats, U.S. academia remains one of the expressively freest professions in the history of the world. Yet our freedoms are only useful – to ourselves and society – if we have the courage to use them.