A study examining censorship in science

Report summary

• The analysis reveals the censorship of 486 academics (2000-2023), driven by political reasons, most notably leftist identity.
• Academic self-censorship is common due to fear of retaliation. Social sciences and humanities are the most affected fields.
• Proposed solutions include greater transparency in peer review and auditing processes to combat ideological censorship at universities.

One Analysis on censorship in science, published on Monday (20), in the United States, which included the cases of 486 academics whose freedom of expression and academic freedom were restricted between 2000 and 2023, concluded that left-wing identity is the dominant political position among censors today. The research is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS, a popular publication associated with the US National Academy of Sciences) points out that gagging is often done by scientific peers themselves, motivated by self-protection, corporatism, and “social concerns for the well-being of human social groups.” “, which can also be called “politically correct.”

The authors define censorship as “measures aimed at preventing certain scientific ideas from reaching the public,” which excludes simple refusals to publish low-quality material, for example, from the list. Threats of convictions and fears of funding cuts or expulsion from professional societies are enough for many scientists to avoid unpopular conclusions in which they themselves believe, leading to a scenario in which almost all scientists practice self-censorship.

The number of articles that were retracted (that is, those that were discredited by the journals in which they were published) also increased. Although this sometimes happens justifiably, due to statistical errors, there are known cases of regression due to alleged harm to protected groups. An example of this is an article published in November 2020 in the magazine Nature Communications By three scientists from New York University in Abu Dhabi. They concluded that women who are mentored in science by male mentors perform better in their scientific careers than those who are mentored by other women.

Following allegations that the conclusion was biased against women, the authors retracted their paper just one month after publication. in NB
They said they had a “firm commitment to gender equality.” They claim that there is a technical problem with co-authorship (the joint presence of the names of two scientists on a research paper) being an imperfect indicator of a mentoring relationship, but they still believe in some of the results.

Control sources

Left-wing graduate students are the master censors. More than three-quarters of the “cancellation” attempts during this period came from within the academy itself, half of them initiated by undergraduates.

The analysis concluded that professors of the social and human sciences are at the same time the most supervised and the most controlled, compared to their colleagues in the natural and exact sciences. At the same time as words for violence were expanded to include more and more things – for example “bullying”, which was a systematic pattern of physical abuse and stalking but now involved a single use of a derogatory word against someone – increasingly more censorship occurred. In the academic world

Women, who are more likely to be risk averse and want to protect the vulnerable than men, are more likely to consent to censorship. The rise of identitarianism has increased the list of people about whom negative comments cannot be made. All of these factors support the analysts’ hypothesis: that “pro-social” motives are the main forces behind censorship of science today.

Scientists who work at American universities and are experienced have job stability in what is called the “tenure” method (similar to the position of assistant professor in Brazil), which makes it difficult for them to be fired. However, this privilege is in numerical decline and does not protect against sanctions such as funding cuts and expulsion from professional associations.

Since the Renaissance, friendly fire has become more of an external imposition

Among the team of 39 researchers involved in the analysis, the most famous are Steven Pinker, a psychologist at Harvard University, and John McWhorter, a linguist and columnist for the magazine The New York Timesand Glenn Lurie, an economist at Brown University, all of whom criticize the identity shift on the left.

The article demonstrates that analyzes of the limits on scientific research that are scientific in themselves are rare. The historical approach to the problem, which often compares the dark past with enlightened modernity, is not without bias. For example, Galileo Galilei’s condemnation of his argument that the Earth revolves around the sun is remembered as an instance of church resistance against science, but it is rarely pointed out that his main persecutors were Aristotle’s professors, the equivalent of scientists at the time. .

Marcelo Hermes Lima, a professor of biochemistry at the University of Brasilia who has been tracking the quality and quantity of research published in Brazil for years, said. Al-Shaab newspaper “Censorship in science is absurd and unacceptable.” For him, the phenomenon uncovered by PNAS “is part of this new trend to silence those who think differently in order to ‘save the population.’ This has been happening in politics for decades, and now it is happening in science. He has promoted public lectures to reconsider In the Galileo case.

Polls among American, British, and Canadian academics indicate that 9 to 25 percent of professors support censorship campaigns, and that as many as 43 percent of doctoral students support campaigns to dismiss academics who present controversial results. Even more troubling is that many openly abandon the high collective value of nondiscrimination in academia when it comes to conservatives: some openly say that it is right to discriminate against people with conservative beliefs in selecting jobs, promotions, grants, and publications. In the interest of self-preservation, conservative academics and scholars engage in self-censorship.

The pattern observed among students is repeated among university professors: those most likely to be censors are younger, more left-wing and female. There is also frankness among them: a majority of leading social psychologists have said that if a significant genetic contribution to psychological and behavioral differences between women and men were discovered, it would be bad for the press to cover this hypothetical fact. The press would be better off lying by omission or telling a “noble lie” about this.

What needs to be done to improve universities and scientific publications

The analysis published this week suggests some alternatives to the problem of censorship in science: One is to downplay the importance of reviewers’ anonymity in the process of examining scientific articles, known as “peer review.” This process, which was adopted by almost all scientific journals only in the second half of the twentieth century, suffers from a series of problems and has not been scientifically proven to be any more capable of preventing fraud and errors than other editorial processes. If review were at least as open as possible, transparency would make it difficult for dishonest and ideologically motivated reviewers to undermine the publication of articles due to non-scientific commitments.

Another suggestion is to check out the gym. Precisely because of the ideological obsession with protecting selected groups, methods have been developed to detect bias and unfair discrimination in institutions, but academia still needs to examine itself regarding its own biases and discrimination against those who do not embrace its new guidelines.

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