Your speech is freer than you think

In most cases, academics are risking more by self-censoring than by speaking up.

I am speaking at the USC Censorship in the Sciences Conference at 2pm Pacific time (3pm Mountain time) today. Tune in here. These are my planned remarks.

Thank you all having me, and especially to Anna (Krylov) and the other organizers of this conference.

When deciding what to talk about, I kept thinking: “I’m going to be in a room full of some of my favorite contrarians—some my intellectual heroes. What can I say that will challenge even them?”

Here goes: your speech is freer than you think. As bad as censorship is in academia, self-censorship is worse, and it does more damage. Academics self-censor because we are risk averse. But I’m here to tell you that the rewards to speaking up are bigger than we think, and the risks to not speaking up, and maintaining the status quo, are also bigger than we think.

Yes, academia really does have a censorship problem

Before I go any further, let me say: I agree that academia has a real censorship problem.

There’s a big hard-left censorship problem, mostly coming from on campus, and a smaller but growing hard-right censorship problem, mostly coming from off campus.

Greg Lukianoff, Rikki Schlott, and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or FIRE, have shown that the past decade in academia has been much worse than McCarthyism, by the numbers. Here is the comparison in terms of firings and the fraction of scholars self-censoring their written work:

You can also see how generally messed up academia has been over the past ten years with a simple thought exercise.

Consider these two ideas:

One of these ideas is supported by majorities of every racial group. One of these ideas is opposed by majorities of every racial group. One of these ideas is a mandate of federal civil rights law. One of these ideas, and others related to it, got thousands of people killed since the summer of 2020, who were disproportionately poor and black.

One of these ideas was un-sayable in large swaths of academia for years, for example getting geoscientist Dorian Abbot uninvited from a prestigious lecture at MIT.

Which do you think is which, in each case, and what does that say about us?

Of course, I could have picked on many other bad ideas that woke academia mainstreamed over the past decade—ideas that have, ironically, harmed the most disadvantaged communities in America’s blue cities the most. At the same time, we were, also ironically, telling people that impact matters more than intent. Backlash against these ideas and their harms helped Trump get elected and gave him a big mandate to reform higher education.

But Trump is the least of our problems. We’re losing the public.

As you can see in the graph on the left, academia’s so-called Great Awokening—measured here by the prevalence of DEI in NSF grants and attempted cancelations from the left (but there are many other measures that show the same trend)—coincides with declines in public trust and enrollment, especially in the humanities—the epicenter of woke ideology. The graph on the right shows that this is not a coincidence. “Political agendas” have become the number-one reason Americans don’t trust universities, where “political agendas” means one of: “indoctrination/brainwashing/propaganda”, “Too liberal/political”, “Not allowing students to think for themselves/Pushing their own agenda”, “Too much concentration on diversity, equity and inclusion”, or “Too socialist”.

So our house is on fire, and FIRE (the organization) estimated in 2022 that almost 60% of academics are self-censoring in their scholarly publications and almost 80% are self-censoring in their public writing, talks, or interviews.

Our job as academics—our fiduciary duty, as Jonathan Haidt would say—is to discover and publicly tell the truth, and most of us are too afraid to do it. Many who aren’t afraid seem to want to double down on the status quo.

Fellow academics: if you don’t see the major, existential risks in continuing to self-silence and continuing to allow higher ed to alienate the public and their elected representatives, then you don’t have a big enough imagination.

Continuing to self-silence carries much bigger risks than we realize.

Academia rewards risk taking

But here’s the good news. For most of us: speaking up carries much smaller risks, and much bigger rewards than we realize.

In grad school, my PhD advisor used to say, “If you’re lucky, you’ll be known for one great idea by the end of your career.” His point was that the progress and the rewards of science are in many ways driven by a small number of the very best ideas. If you’re lucky, you’ll have one of those ideas.

Statistically speaking, the impact and rewards of academic research have a heavily right-skewed distribution. Upside risks are much larger than the downside risks, which means that risk-taking is rewarded, on average. For example, the distribution of citations in most fields is lognormal, as the graph on the left shows. So, if you had a choice between a paper guaranteed to have the 50^th percentile in citations or an equal chance of the 25^th and 75^th percentiles, the risky option would be the better bet, on average.

Where do you find the great ideas? The calculated risks? The questions that will define careers?

As Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg said in a famous commencement address, “go for the messes—that’s where the action is.” In other words, look for the questions that aren’t just important, but are also understudied.

But if a question is important, why wouldn’t people be studying it? There are many possible reasons that I won’t bore you with, but one common reason is that people are afraid.

Today, scholars are afraid of woke cancel mobs, or increasingly censorious backlash against wokeness from conservative governments and donors. But the path to academic greatness has always run through pissing off powerful people.

I like to tell my graduate students: If you want to do paradigm-shifting research, you’ll need the courage to break someone’s paradigm. That person will probably be powerful and upset. It’s not just academics wading into controversial social and political issues who benefit from developing a thick skin.

So, if people are too afraid to speak important truths and pursue important research questions, what an amazing opportunity!

Econ 101 tells us that if supply of something is low and demand is high, society will pay a high price for it.

Think of Jordan Peterson, who may be persona non-grata in academia, but who literally gives talks in NBA basketball stadiums and jokes that he “figured out how to monetize social justice warriors”.

Or think of Bari Weiss, who was pushed out of the New York Times for her fairly moderate and popular political views, and who now runs a news start-up, The Free Press, with over a million subscribers—higher than the vast majority of print news outlets in the United States. There are countless other examples of people who have taken their courage and common sense to the bank, including several people in this room.

Examples from my career

Here are a couple of much less dramatic examples from my career.

Starting in early 2020, I, my collaborators Roger Pielke Jr. and Justin Ritchie, and a few others pointed out that an extremely unrealistic emissions scenario was by far the most widely used in climate change research and was often called ‘business as usual’.

The graph on the left (source) shows how much higher this scenario’s carbon dioxide emissions are, in red, than more realistic ‘business as usual’ scenarios, in purple. The graph on the right shows that this unrealistically hot scenario is the most mentioned scenario in the last two IPCC climate change impacts reports.

This scenario has such high emissions because it assumes that the world in 2100 will be an ultra-rich and equal economic utopia, despite being unlivably hot in the tropics because of climate change, and yet will be so unconcerned about climate change that there are fewer climate policies and worse economics for renewables than we have today. The scenario forecasts 2-3 degrees Celsius more warming by 2100 than more plausible scenarios do. So, the large number of studies that used this scenario to forecast climate change impacts were probably exaggerating the impacts.

Needless to say, our claim was very embarrassing for climate science.

Before our first paper on this came out, I remember some of my graduate students asking me: “Won’t this give ammunition to people trying to dismiss climate science?”. “Won’t this invite blowback from the climate community, especially against me—someone who at that point hadn’t worked much on climate change?” (I started my career working on fisheries and endangered species.)

In a way, my students were right to be worried about these things.

For example, our work was cited by the controversial “Climate Change Flyers” released at the end of the first Trump administration. It was also cited by famous climate contrarian groups like the Heartland Institute that sometimes do spread misinformation about climate change.

I also got some blowback.

I was occasionally called names like ‘fossil fool’ online—Twitter was still woke back then, and I don’t have the screenshots because the people fled to Bluesky. Graduate students from other research groups in my department¹ said I was spreading misinformation and trashed me behind my back to my own graduate students. My collaborator Roger Pielke Jr., who admittedly had a longer list of thoughtcrimes and pushed our view a bit more pugnaciously than I did, got harsher blowback.

But the upside was much greater than the downside, for me, I would argue for Roger (though I’ll let him speak for himself) and for the others who made similar points.

Our work was cited by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, several pieces of Congressional testimony and the World Bank, to name a few. Our work seems to be influencing the plans for scenarios in the next IPCC report, which, by the way, shows that climate science has pivoted in response to the evidence we presented, to its great credit. My papers on this are some of the most cited of my career. When I go up for tenure, I have no doubt that this work will count positively towards my case.

Don’t worry: My research has pissed off the right sometimes too.

For example, last January I published evidence that climate change costs Republicans votes and it probably cost Trump enough votes in 2020 to tip that election against him, all else equal.

This time, the Heartland Institute blogger, who had previously praised me for my work on scenarios, called me a Democratic party shill.

Some of my other hot takes:

- “Woke” social justice posturing is probably costing the climate movement public and legislative support.

- Major economic forecasts are probably too optimistic on growth and inequality.

- Elon Musk’s polarizing online presence is turning people off of buying Teslas (Flores, Burgess et al. under review).

- But Musk deserves the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on advancing clean technologies.

I’ve found that being an equal opportunity offender protects you in a weird way. Not only have I not been canceled, the past couple of years have been some of my best of my career for press coverage, citations, and speaking invitations from groups all across the political spectrum.

When you show that you are not on a team, that you care about the truth more than you care about politics, and that you are open to changing your mind, my experience so far has been that people begrudgingly trust and respect you, even if they don’t like you or agree with what you’re saying.

You can have important conversations with audiences that you might not have reached otherwise. For example, I gave a talk last fall to a conservative business group which mentioned our scenarios research. In the Q&A, someone told me that he didn’t think human-caused climate change was real. I was able to tell him: “Look, I told you that we got the scenarios wrong. If we were wrong about human-caused climate change, I would have told you! But we’re not wrong, and here’s why.”

Whistleblowing

If all this climate change stuff is too tame for this audience, I’ll also mention that I tried my hand at whistleblowing recently. In June, I wrote in The Chronicle of Higher Education about an illegal race- and gender-based faculty hiring program at my previous university, CU Boulder, which might have been the main way faculty were hired for two years. A handful of people criticized me on social media, but I got many more emails and social media posts filled with praise and thanks from all over the country.

No one at CU retaliated against me (so far). I had extensive documentation; I had previously reported my concerns through proper internal channels; I gave CU’s head of issues management a heads up beforehand and got her to confirm key details on the record; and, most importantly, federal law and three-quarters of the American public agree with me that race- and gender-based hiring (and retaliation against whistleblowers) is wrong. So, if there had been a fight, it would have been an easy fight for me to win, either in the court of public opinion or in an actual court.

The point is: my experience has been that wading into an area of research or thought that has clear importance or mainstream appeal, but is being self-censored in hyper-progressive academia, comes with large upsides, and risks that I would characterize as annoying, not existential. This is especially true in 2024, as opposed to, say, 2020.

Who gets cancelled?

I recognize that many people have had worse experiences than mine, including several in this room. Some people do get canceled, and looking closely at recent cases in the FIRE database reveals what the important “career-risk comorbidities” are, which may rationalize using more caution than I have used:

- Being employed at a private school with explicitly strict limits on speech, like a religious school.

- Being an adjunct or at-will employee on a short-term contract.

- Being on the job market or between jobs. It is much easier to get away with not hiring someone for a legally or ethically dubious reason than to fire someone for a legally or ethically dubious reason.

- Having a marginal tenure or promotion case. Again, it is much easier to vote against someone with a marginal case for a sketchy reason than it is to dubiously deny tenure to someone with a slam-dunk case and invite a lawsuit or bad publicity.

- Having actually violated a university policy, in addition to the speech offense. For example, if a university selectively prosecutes someone for sleeping with undergrads because they don’t like his speech, that only works on people who have actually slept with undergrads.

- Being in a university or department at risk of closure or major funding cut, which makes it harder to protect a controversial academic.

- Having a take that—while being constitutionally protected in most cases—is extremely unpopular or taboo in society, not just in hyper-progressive academia. For example, someone canceled for questioning affirmative action is going to have a much easier time finding a large audience outside of academia and making their institution look silly, than someone canceled for sympathizing with Hamas, calling Jews roaches, or attending the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally, to name three real examples from 2024 that resulted in firing.

People with these career-risk comorbidities are of course entitled to freedom of speech and academic freedom, even if I don’t like their speech or their sexual proclivities with their students. And academia needs to be a safe place for boundary pushers—that’s the main reason tenure exists. But I admit that people with these comorbidities may be self-censoring rationally.

I also understand why some people are afraid to get into the public arena so visibly that they have to worry about physical threats, doxing, and the like. Again, there are people in this room with harrowing stories of this nature.

But that’s not most people—and it’s certainly not the professor wondering whether it’s ok to speak up in a faculty meeting about DEI statements or protected-class discrimination. A former colleague told me recently about a tenured professor who created an anonymous email address to raise such concerns tepidly with a search chair. I’m sorry, but that’s pathetic. And if that’s the standard our senior faculty continue to set, we’re in big trouble.

Being an administrator is of course another comorbidity, since most administrative positions are at will and have fewer free speech protections.

But administrators don’t have my sympathy for their cowardice. If you don’t have the courage to lead, don’t sign up for leadership positions.

Among rank-and-file tenured and tenure-track faculty members, though, the vast, vast majority of us have none of these comorbities, and so we have much more freedom and much more incentive to speak up than many of us realize.

Academia has a risk-aversion problem

Why, then, are academics so afraid? According to FIRE’s survey, they are most afraid of “damaging their reputations”—which I imagine includes being criticized online and in media, losing friends and collaborators, not being invited to ‘in-crowd’ parties and workshops, being frozen out by sympathetic but cowardly friends. The risks I called annoying a minute ago. And I have experienced most of these things, so I get how annoying they are.

But I encourage my colleagues to remember the even larger benefits of speaking up on the other side of the coin, for both your career and your integrity.

Our integrity is our most precious asset. If we relinquish our integrity to ideology or fear, then we don’t deserve the public’s trust, their respect, or their money.

Academic institutions also need to incentivize and transparently reward courage more.

As much as academia rewards risk taking, academia tends to attract risk avoiders. Jobs with high job security, low pay variance, and teaching professions all tend to attract risk avoiders. Risk avoidance is associated with the Big Five personality trait neuroticism. In undergrad, some studies have found neuroticism positively associated with performance. If you’re afraid of failure, for example, you study harder.

But studies find neuroticism negatively associated with performance in research. My guess is that this is at least partly due to risk avoidance. There are lots of good reasons humans evolved to avoid risk. We were prey for most of our species’ history. But this instinct is maladaptive in contexts like research where the upside risks dominate. (And I have nothing against people who are high in neuroticism. I am one of you.)

But we should keep in mind when we hire graduate students and faculty: Courage is a good thing. We should be hiring rigorous truth tellers, not people pleasers or people we want to hang out with.

In closing, I am energized by this gathering addressing the problem of censorship in science. I hope this week has inspired more people to join the fight for free speech and academic freedom, and I am cautiously optimistic that we will win.

But remember: freedom of speech accomplishes nothing if we don’t have the courage to use it.

Thank you.

1. January 13 update: To be clear (in response to some apparent misunderstandings online), “my department” here refers to the department I was in at the time (~2020-2022), not my current department or university. As I have written about previously, University of Wyoming and our College of Business (where I am now) has an exceptionally healthy speech climate, from what I’ve seen so far.