Tag: self censorship

Goldwater Institute Helps Uncover Free Speech Concerns at the University of Arizona

Neil Jones
University of Arizona

A recent report shared that there may be issues concerning free speech on the University of Arizona campus following the disclosure of bias complaint documents.

“Colleges throughout the country have set up anonymous reporting systems where students inform on their peers to campus authorities, creating social justice activists who blow the whistle on their classmates’ politically incorrect social media posts or professors who fail to use the most up-to-date ‘wokeisms,'” According to a press release from the GI. “Now, the Goldwater Institute has uncovered what the University of Arizona tried to hide: an Orwellian campus reporting apparatus that fosters a culture of fear over free speech.”

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Goldwater Institute Grills the University of Arizona After Refusal to Release Public Records of ‘Bias Reporting’ on Campus

Neil Jones

The Arizona-based Goldwater Institute this week contacted the University of Arizona (UA), demanding it grants a reporter’s public record request for copies of complaints filed under UA’s Bias Education & Support Team (BEST).

“College campuses should be places of free and open exchange, where students can respectfully discuss opposing viewpoints and think critically about the major issues of the day. But instead, progressives are using bias response teams to implement their own, illiberal agenda across the country,” wrote Goldwater Institute Legal Programs Manager Kamron Kompani.

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Commentary: The Death Spiral of Academia

Arizona Sun Times Staff
Library with several people at library tables, working.

On March 1, Eric Kaufmann published a remarkably detailed and comprehensive study of bias in academia, “Academic Freedom in Crisis: Punishment, Political Discrimination, and Self-Censorship.” Kaufmann’s writing is a product of California’s Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, a small think tank set up to do research forbidden in today’s Academy. His research uncovering rampant leftist political bias in publication, employment, and promotion in the academy—and discrimination against anything right-of-center—qualifies as that kind of work.

In the academy, the free interchange of competing ideas creates knowledge through cooperation, disagreement, debate, and dissent. Kaufmann finds that the last three are severely suppressed and punished. This repression’s pervasiveness may be a death sentence for science, free inquiry, and the advancement of knowledge in our universities.

I am led to that dire conclusion because there doesn’t appear to be any way for universities to prevent it. No solution can arise from within the academy, as it self-selects lifetime faculty that are largely left-wing, making promotion of dissidents highly unlikely. Kaufmann demonstrates profoundly systemic discrimination by leftist faculty against their colleagues who disagree with them politically.

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