Friends:
I'm finally getting around to reading this piece that is listed by the Chronicle of Higher Education as one of its most widely read articles last year. There's a lot to unpack here—and I encourage you to read this engaging essay in its entirety—but the bottom line for Canadian emeritus professor, Paul Bloom, is that the academic system makes caution rational.
Expressed differently, self-censorship is not a moral failure of individuals. It is a predictable response to a culture that penalizes dissent through informal but powerful mechanisms. The path forward, Bloom suggests, lies not in demanding heroism, but in dismantling the "habits of punishment" that make honesty costly.
Bloom points, for example, to a set of informal, normalized practices in academic life that quietly discipline behavior—even when no formal rule has been broken. These include being labeled “difficult,” being excluded from collaborations, receiving hostile peer reviews unrelated to scholarly merit, being quietly passed over for leadership roles, or being deemed “not a good fit” in hiring and promotion decisions. None of these actions require justification, and none violate academic freedom on paper—but together they create a powerful deterrent against speaking openly.
Perhaps, as Bloom suggests, part of the solution lies in cultivating greater generosity toward those with whom we disagree—even as I remain troubled by his tendency to conflate disagreement with perpetual conflict. I am a professor, too, teaching in the classroom for 35 years and what he describes does not characterize my experience. I attribute that to great leadership—something missing in Bloom's narrative. I do wonder though, as Bloom suggests, differentials in levels of interpersonal acrimony may very well be field-specific.
Rebuilding academic life around disagreement as a normal and productive condition of knowledge production is an appealing ideal. Yet this aspiration is far easier to articulate than to realize, particularly in a context where many academics are either politically naïve or insufficiently prepared for policy advocacy—even when their own professional autonomy, institutional integrity, and material interests are directly at stake.
To be sure, universities reward compliance far more consistently than individual or collective resistance. However, another layer that Bloom fails to address is that many faculty members have little experience organizing, building coalitions, or pushing back against institutional power in sustained ways. I nevertheless very much appreciate, if brief, learning of Bloom's experience and am grateful for this opportunity to weigh in on such an important topic.
If you're in Texas, a faculty member, adjunct, graduate instructor, researcher, or higher education professional, a good first step is to join Texas AAUP-Texas AFT. Membership offers:
Collective protection in the face of politically motivated dismissals.
Advocacy for academic freedom and shared governance.
A community committed to defending higher education as a space of inquiry, not intimidation.
Spaces like AAUP matter because they offer what individual courage cannot: collective protection, shared strategy, and the capacity to push back against informal, normalized, habits of punishment practices.
Deeper still, the implication is straightforward and sobering. If the goal is to protect academic freedom and robust inquiry, the problem is not whether professors are brave enough. The problem is an emerging regime of governance that makes risk avoidance a rational professional posture.
Addressing that reality requires identifying and contesting complaint channels inscribed in policies like Senate Bill 37 that invite surveillance and centralized oversight that sidelines faculty judgment, together with discourses that recode politics as procedure. Only then can disagreement become a normal and productive condition of knowledge rather than a liability to be managed.
If universities have made caution rational, then an additional task before us is to make solidarity rational as well. Academic freedom will not be preserved by silence, nor restored by nostalgia—it will endure only if faculty and academic workers organize to defend it together. Sí se puede! Yes we can!
-Angela Valenzuela
Why Aren't Professors Braver? Fear and Self-Censorship in Academe.
By Paul Bloom | September 24, 2025 |Chronicle of Higher Education
Ireally like professors. I’m a professor, my wife is a professor, and most of my friends are professors. I heard about a retirement community in Arizona that’s specifically for professors, and if I ever end up in a retirement community, that’s where I’d like to go.
It’s not just that professors are my people; I think there are objectively good things about us. We tend to be pretty smart. We are sometimes socially inept, but in a sweet way. We are genuinely excited about ideas — professors spend a lot of time thinking about questions such as the origin of the universe, the nature of truth, the evolution of species, and whether Shakespeare discovered the unconscious. We are often generous. For instance, many professors spend a lot of time mentoring students in ways that aren’t requirements of the job and don’t lead to any tangible rewards. And we are a peaceable lot. If you’re sitting at a bar, minding your own business, and some drunk takes a swing at you, the drunk is unlikely to be a professor.
But I don’t think we are very brave. We don’t tend to be troublemakers. I’m not denying that many of us say and write things that upset the public. Professors make bold and shocking claims — there is no immaterial soul; there are many genders; Shakespeare didn’t write Hamlet; empathy makes the world worse; and so on. Philosophers are particularly provocative in this regard. I’ve heard them argue that babies don’t feel pain, that dogs and chairs don’t exist (because the only things that really exist are elementary particles), that atoms are conscious, and that life is terrible and we’d all be better off dead. Bold stuff!
But this boldness has its limits. It doesn’t typically extend to interactions with our colleagues. We want them to like us, and so we work to avoid their disapproval. We don’t want to make trouble.
I started thinking about this when I read the reactions to this recent paper. Cory Clark and her co-authors first interviewed 41 professors (including me) to get a list of taboo topics in psychology, and then did a more quantitative survey of 470 other professors, asking questions about self-censorship. Here’s their summary of what they found.
Professors strongly disagreed on the truth status of 10 candidate taboo conclusions: For each conclusion, some professors reported 100-percent certainty in its veracity and others 100-percent certainty in its falsehood. Professors more confident in the truth of the taboo conclusions reported more self-censorship. Almost all professors worried about social sanctions if they were to express their own empirical beliefs. Tenured professors reported as much self-censorship and as much fear of consequences as untenured professors, including fear of getting fired.
(The list of taboo statements included “Biological sex is binary for the vast majority of people,” “Racial biases are not the most important driver of higher crime rates among Black Americans relative to white Americans,” and “Transgender identity is sometimes the product of social influence.” Perhaps not surprisingly, almost all of them had to do with sex or race.)
Professors’ boldness doesn’t typically extend to interactions with our colleagues. We want them to like us, and so we work to avoid their disapproval. We don’t want to make trouble.
When this paper was released, it got a lot of play on social media, and many people asked: Why are professors such cowards? Why are even tenured professors, people with the most secure jobs on Earth, so unwilling to speak their minds?
There is a story from the psychiatrist and blogger Scott Alexander that nicely sums up how professors think. He tells of a professor who signs a political statement in his department that he clearly disagrees with. When asked why he signed it, the professor said that he expected everyone else in his department would sign it, so it would look really bad if he didn’t.
But why did the professor think everybody else would sign? His answer:
Probably for the same reason I did.
Noam Chomsky is one of the great troublemakers in academe, and he has wondered why his colleagues aren’t more like him. He blames schooling. To become an academic, you have to do very well in high school and college, and this selects for a certain sort of submissiveness. In Chomsky’s view, as put forward in his book Understanding Power, “the whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent … and who don’t know how to be submissive. … [The schools] reward discipline and obedience, and they punish independence of mind. … Most of the people who make it through the education system and get into the elite universities are able to do it because they’ve been willing to obey a lot of stupid orders for years and years.”
Put crudely, if you are the sort to say fuck you to your professors, refuse to do assignments that you see as stupid, or even push back in milder ways, you’re not going to get perfect grades and glowing recommendations. And so you’re unlikely to get into a top graduate program, which means you’re not likely to end up in academia.
Is it the case that only docile people make it through the educational system with nothing but gold stars? Or does the educational system influence the personality of certain people, making them docile? Maybe both? Nature and nurture, baby!
Chomsky might be right. But students who wish to pursue nonacademic pursuits such as medicine and law also benefit from a spotless academic record. If academics are more docile than doctors and lawyers, then we need to look elsewhere for an explanation.
The explanation I like better has to do with the nature of academe and the importance of not pissing people off.
Let me tell you about a search committee I was once on. We were looking at senior candidates, and someone’s name came up — a person of considerable accomplishment. And then a member of the committee said something like, “I hear she’s difficult. Not really a good colleague.” And we all moved to the next person, because we had a lot of names, so why waste our time on someone that we weren’t all enthusiastic about?
If you’re a colleague of mine at any of the universities I’ve ever worked at, you might think that you remember that meeting. You probably do, because this has happened in every senior search committee meeting I’ve ever been in. Sooner or later, we end up talking about how likable the candidates are — to put it in more professional terms, about what sorts of colleagues they are — and, sooner or later, someone will express their concern that one of the candidates wouldn’t be a good personal fit with our department, and they’re dropped from consideration.
Is it the case that only docile people make it through the educational system with nothing but gold stars? Or does the educational system influence the personality of certain people, making them docile? Maybe both?
This sort of negative screening is less likely to happen for junior searches, where we’re looking at graduate students and postdocs, because such candidates aren’t as well known. Here, the cues to collegiality come mainly from the letters; it’s a rare letter that doesn’t talk about how nice the candidate is, about their warmth, generosity, and so on. Young people are more vulnerable to negative screening when they come up for tenure, because by then, they are better known.
The point here is not just that it’s good to be liked. I’m sure that helps, but I’ve seen people secure great jobs due to their accomplishments as scholars and scientists, even if they weren’t especially popular. Instead, the point is that it’s bad to be disliked — even by a small proportion of people. If 90 percent of the field adores you and 10 percent will describe you as “difficult,” you’re likely screwed, career-wise.
What does this have to do with bravery, troublemaking, and self-censorship? Well, some academics really don’t like people who don’t share their political and moral views. And so the pressure not to be disliked translates into pressure to self-censor.
The negative effects of having unconventional views aren’t limited to search committees. A 2012 study of about 800 social psychologists found that conservatives (about 6 percent of the sample) fear the negative consequences of revealing their political beliefs to their colleagues, and so they shut up about them. They are right to do so. The same study finds that many of these nonconservative colleagues, particularly the more liberal ones, tended to agree that if they encountered a grant or paper with “a politically conservative perspective,” it would negatively influence their decision to award the grant or accept the paper for publication. They also tended to agree that if they had to choose between a conservative candidate and a liberal candidate, they would select the liberal one. And it gets worse:
At the end of our surveys, we gave room for comments. Many respondents wrote that they could not believe that anyone in the field would ever deliberately discriminate against conservatives. Yet at the same time, we found clear examples of discrimination. One participant described how a colleague was denied tenure because of his political beliefs. Another wrote that if the department “could figure out who was a conservative, they would be sure not to hire them.”
The focus of their study was the effect of having conservative views, but I’ll add that there are nonconservative views that can get you into trouble as well. It does not help your career, for instance, to be seen as strongly anti-Israel. (See here for a case where a professor was allegedly denied tenure for his pro-Palestinian views and activities.)
In the paper on taboo topics, Clark and her colleagues report that while most professors are upset at the censorious nature of their colleagues, a minority believe that a proper response to someone who expresses a taboo view is “ostracism, public labeling with pejorative terms, talk disinvitations, refusing to publish work regardless of its merits, not hiring or promoting even if typical standards are met, terminations, social-media shaming, and removal from leadership positions.”
Given this censorious minority, the reasonable response is risk aversion. Don’t say anything that will piss off these colleagues — and that includes not making statements that they find politically or morally unacceptable. If you’re not careful in this way, you run the risk of not being hired, not getting tenure, and having your career damaged in all sorts of other ways.
Italked about this with a couple of friends, and they raised the issue of exceptions. There are professors in our field who are troublemakers, who pick fights with their colleagues over ideological issues, and who are known for their heterodox views.
These exceptional people fall into different categories.
1. They got jobs and tenure before they got controversial. It’s now difficult or impossible for them to move, but they made it in under the wire.
2. They aren’t in traditional arts and sciences departments, such as psychology, but instead are professors in other parts of the university, like business schools and law schools, where there is more tolerance for troublemakers.
3. They are geniuses. Chomsky is the best example here. Putting aside his political writings and activities, which landed him in jail more than once (how’s that for troublemaking?), he has made enormous contributions to linguistics and cognitive science. In my view, he’s the most important intellectual alive. He is also highly polarizing, worshipped by many in academe and hated by many others. So, I don’t know — maybe the rules change if you’re as smart as Chomsky?
These categories may overlap. Chomsky became an assistant professor in the department of modern languages and linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1957; he retired from his faculty position in 2002. Could he have left MIT for another top university if he wanted to? This might seem like a dumb question — for much of his career, he was one of the most cited scholars alive, and I know that many faculty members at other top universities would have killed to have him in their departments. But I do wonder if his many haters among faculty and administrators would have prevented any offer from being made.
Should more professors be troublemakers?
The answer is not an obvious yes. There is value in agreeableness, after all. Nothing gets done when people are constantly fighting. Research teams, in particular, benefit from a sense of shared mission, and there is a downside to intellectual diversity, particularly when everyone is highly vocal about their contrasting perspectives. It would be amazing to have a Chomsky in my department; I’m not sure how we’d fare if we had two or more.
I also believe that self-censorship is sometimes a good thing. If I had a colleague who was in favor of slavery or wanted to exterminate the Jews or thought women should not be permitted to work, I would hope that he or she would have the good sense to refrain from expressing these views. Some believe that certain topics that academics actually think about fall into this category. This article, for instance, argues that the harm that ensues when certain scholars debate trans issues is so severe that it outweighs any intellectual benefit that their views might have. I disagree, but it’s a concern worth taking seriously.
Still, I believe that academics err in the direction of being too censorious and too self-censoring. The taboo topics in my field aren’t at all like “slavery is good,” and would benefit from more open debate.
Should more professors be troublemakers? The answer is not an obvious yes.
Some think otherwise. When the paper on taboos was released, one prominent scholar was disgusted by its implication that there is something inherently wrong with self-censorship. “New paper argues researchers should NOT consider real world implications of their work,” she wrote on X, “presumably because the freedom to make empirically unfounded statements like women [are] ruining science with the rubbish brains evolution gave us is more important than preventing mass murder.”
I assume the particular taboo statement she was talking about is this one: “Men and women have different psychological characteristics because of evolution.” Now, first, note that this is not exactly the same as “women are ruining science with the rubbish brains evolution gave us.” And second, while I do agree that mass murder is worse than self-censorship (I’m more of a utilitarian than a free speech absolutist), I don’t see this as a fair description of the choice that academics face.
Just by the way, I’m surprised that this statement ended up on the list. My view is that, yes, some sex differences are due to evolution, particularly those that involve sexual preferences, nurturance, and aggression. Others disagree. Are certain views on this issue really taboo? If so, they shouldn’t be. I think I’m right (of course), but I don’t want to win the scientific debate because my opponents are afraid to express their views, just as I assume they don’t want to win because I’m afraid to express mine.
Ireally don’t know if professors are more timid than real-estate agents, accountants, nurses, and so on. If I’m right, our timidity arises from a fact about our profession — the career cost of offending even a small proportion of the people who are in power. But maybe this is also true for other jobs. If so, it’s a more general problem. Something is lost if real-estate agents, say, feel that they will be punished if they express their views on Israel-Gaza.
But it matters even more when it comes to professors. We are in the truth business, after all. The freedom to explore offensive ideas is so central to our profession that we have been given the protection of tenure — we can’t be fired, no matter what we say and who we piss off. It’s a great loss if we squander this opportunity and privilege.
Some will say the solution here is obvious: Professors should be braver. They should speak their minds regardless of the costs of doing so.
My solution is different. I think other professors should stop imposing these costs. We should be more generous toward those with whom we disagree, more receptive to the possibility that they are right, and, most relevant to the issue here, we should break the habit of punishing them.
How do we change academic culture to make this happen? I don’t know, so I’ll close with a sad little joke.
—How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb?
—Just one. But the light bulb must want to change.
A version of this essay originally appeared on the author’s Substack Small Potatoes.
A version of this article appeared in the October 31, 2025, issue.
We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.
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