Reddit reviews Compromising Scholarship: Religious and Political Bias in American Higher Education

> This map from 1991 is so much like the current maps from 2019, what does that tell us about the territories?

Well, the short answer I guess is "I don't know," but I can think of a couple of lines-of-inquiry that might be fruitful.

The first response that sprang to mind, once it became clear which direction your question was headed, was that thirty years is rather less time than you seem to think it is. It is not unusual for stable academic careers to last for more than forty years. I have a handful of active, non-emeritus colleagues today who became professors in the 1970s. And because many universities are public institutions, they are governed not only by a board of directors and faculty senate but also by state legislatures where things often change very slowly indeed. Harvard, to my routine dismay, is a major trend-setter in higher education, so if the bleeding edge of identity politics was being taught there in the 1980s, and students educated there in the 1980s started showing up in professorships across the country in the 1990s, and their students started showing up in professorships in the 2000s... well now instead of three black students accusing a professor of racial insensitivity, you have a faculty-and-administration-supported slandering of your local bakery.

So to say that "I can take a book published 30 years ago and just change the names around and it fits the current 'universities are going woke and it's destroying higher education' narrative perfectly" seems like a pretty serious exaggeration. Perhaps we could say that universities started going woke circa 1960... but today, they are arriving at the destination--or, stated differently, they are reaching the bottom of a slope we have spent decades denying they were even on. The patterns are similar, but the actual events are much larger and more damaging than they have been previously.

This last idea comes to me in part because I had a discussion rather like this one just ten years ago, with a colleague whose position was approximately "this is all just CW froth, as isolated cases are blown up and discussed ad nauseam." I had to agree that, empirically, most faculty at most universities seem to be getting along just fine. But it is widely agreed that most faculty at most universities are at least marginally politically aligned with the project, so it is hard to judge from the number of incidents just how much of an epidemic we're really facing. The severity of the problem, and the number of people who don't think there's even a problem, seems to be growing quite rapidly, even if the general shape of the problem is much as it has been for 30 years.

Another response that is somewhat related to the first is that the capture of both professional organizations and university administration seems to have accelerated substantially during the Obama years. The American Philosophical Association barely even functions as a philosopher's association anymore; they seem to exist mostly as a promoter of black, Muslim, and LGBTQ causes in professional philosophy. And many philosophy department job listings have recently (in the last five years or so) begun asking for "diversity statements" to be included alongside the traditional teaching and research statements. These statements are ostensibly supposed to explain how candidates will contribute to the diversity of the campus, but the reality is that absolutely nobody is interested in hearing that you will contribute diversity to the campus because Christian conservatives are underrepresented in higher academia. And everyone knows it.

Yet another response is--a bunch of critical race and gender scholars making waves in humanities departments might just not be the kind of thing that is worth worrying about, because in some sense that is just what critical race and gender scholars are supposed to do. But when you start seeing job postings for physics professors asking applicants to explain how their work contributes to global justice and racial equity, maybe you should be concerned even though there was little reason to be concerned about similar requests from Gender Studies departments.

And building on that, there are a lot more people going to college today than there were 30 years ago, both in absolute numbers and as a percentage of the population. So now, instead of history professors getting hit with complaints by students with too much time and imagination for their own good, you have fresh grads going out into non-academic positions with the attitude that people who don't share their politics shouldn't be allowed to have jobs. "Cancel culture" may have started in the Academy, but there was much less reason for people to care when it was limited to the Academy, which has for most of history been seen as a little weird and out-of-touch anyway.

I don't know how satisfactory any of these responses is, and (given the complexity of the world) I imagine that even put all together they represent a less complete account than I'd like. But hopefully they at least establish the plausibility of the claim that "problems of approximately this sort existed 30 years ago" is not obviously a good reason to be suspicious of a claim that "problems of approximately this sort are a serious problem today."

They also weren't wrong about the profound hiring bias against conservatives and Christians in academia. I grew up treating such claims as so much conspiracy nonsense, but oops, they were right!