A reader writes (I’ve slightly changed this to obscure his identity):

I’m a scientist in a mathematically-oriented field. I’d always been basically center-left politically, and remained so when I took my current position. Several years ago, a few of my colleagues were excited about being on Twitter, so I joined as well, and had a good time there although in hindsight I was pretty addicted. Over the next couple of years, swayed by the culture of academic Twitter, I drifted further towards the left. In my estimation the ‘woke’ belief system started to get really popular in 2014.

I was basically okay with the woke developments, but I would get annoyed when they attacked some of my heroes. For example, at that time, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris were among them, but their stridency against Islam meant that I had to be careful admitting that I was a fan. If I ever retweeted one of them, I’d have to be prepared to defend them or at least their right to their views.

Then a few incidents occurred where I noticed many senior colleagues publicly shaming folks with glee. The one that sticks out in my mind the most was the British biochemist Tim Hunt, who came under fire for supposedly sexist remarks. I distinctly remember a senior figure in my faculty calling him a rude word that I won’t repeat, and when the science broadcaster Brian Cox opined that Tim Hunt, a Nobel laureate, was actually a decent guy and maybe we should cut him some slack, another colleague’s response was that white men should STFU.

This upset me so much that I couldn’t stop thinking about it for months. I confided in a centrist friend that it was disturbing me and she recommended I read The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt, which I did. I thought I was edgy because Haidt is a centrist. By the end of the book, I decided I was, too, and thought that was edgy.

Fast forward a few years and a lot of reading, and I’m basically a conservative now, though probably a moderate one. I’ve also learned through experience that we do not remotely base our opinions on objective facts as much as we feel like we do. I have quit Twitter and when I occasionally take a look at it, I quickly remember why. I think that website has done a lot of damage. At work I keep my head down. I sometimes think of how I operate now as something like the academic equivalent of the Benedict Option. I work hard at my projects and try to do a good job teaching, and keep in touch with a few colleagues whose input I find most valuable.

I have tuned out of mainstream academic culture and have little interest in climbing the institutional ladder anymore because I want to avoid encountering the people who thought Sam Harris was too out there and that white men should shut up. I stopped attending a conference series I previously liked because the registration form now asks for your ethnicity and sexual orientation.

I’ve also started to notice how much the university has an implicit institutionalized left-wing worldview. This afternoon I walked down my corridor, and for fun I counted the number of posters and signs that were about a left cause or assumed a left viewpoint. I found 16 such posters in that one minute walk. On the way to class today I saw a display on the history of Computer Science and someone had posted photos of some women on it. Presumably the original display needed ideological correction.

Another fun game is to count the number of woke emails or items in newsletters that get distributed internally. It’s quite high — at least a few per day. While each thing in isolation is fairly trivial, there is a definite woke spirit and it is in the sciences as well as everyone else. For the moment I’m still happy enough with the positives of my job to put up with it. We’ll see what happens in the future

Jonathan Haidt is a founder of Heterodox Academy, a non-partisan, non-profit organization for academics of the left, right, and center, who want to protect the right to free speech and free inquiry within academia. Maybe this scientist who wrote me should get involved.

UPDATE: A reader named Valcour comments:

T

his is pretty much par for the course, even at a state flagship university in a conservative southern state. I now have faculty colleagues–mostly junior–who insist that every interview list must include women and people of color, even if they are not highly-ranked candidates on their merits. No women or POC in the top 15-20 candidates based on standard scholarly criteria? No problem–let’s move Candidate #17 up to the top three candidates and drop one of candidates deserving of an interview based on merit. It is blatant gender and racial discrimination, and its practice goes without critical comment. I regularly hear people being insulted and their views dismissed merely because they are white, male, or both. Discussions of topics representing legitimate scholarly inquiry are deemed inappropriate by favored groups, and as result discussions of the topics are shut down.

What this scientist describes occurs every day on college campuses around the country–even those in conservative states. Most of my colleagues are to the left, and most of my best friends in my department are liberals, but they are (for the most part) tolerant of different viewpoints and accepting of those with whom they disagree. It is the new breed of junior faculty member and new administrators who are intolerant, setting aside legitimate scholarly standards in order to prioritize wokeness and fetishize diversity.