Yet the historical comparison is, in many ways, misleading. While political intrusions into academe are indeed much worse today — and likely to get even more repressive under the Trump administration — colleges in the 1950s avoided such measures not because they defended free speech but because they were already suppressing academic freedom. “There will be no witch-hunts at Yale because there will be no witches,” Yale President Charles Seymour announced in 1949. “We do not intend to hire Communists.” Three years later, a Yale survey of faculty noted that the ban on Communists continued with this ironic headline in The New York Times: “Yale Survey Finds No Red Influence or Threats to Academic Freedom.” That historical reality of self-censorship makes it difficult to assess accurate comparisons between McCarthyism and today, when many people are eager to announce how censored they are.
The basis of the latest round of claims about McCarthyism is a new survey of faculty by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which announced that “faculty members are four times more likely to self-censor than they were in the 1950s, at the height of the Cold War and McCarthyism.” The basis of the claim is a survey question asked of faculty in the 1950s that FIRE duplicated in 2024: “Have you toned down anything you have written lately because you were worried that it might cause too much controversy?” In the 1950s, 9 percent of faculty affirmed this; in 2024, 35 percent of faculty said yes.
Although the question is the same, the context has changed radically. For one thing, the amount of writing by faculty has increased exponentially. The average professor in the 1950s might have written a few letters and an occasional journal article or research paper. Professors today generate a seemingly endless stream of emails and social-media posts, and they produce much more published research, often on controversial topics. (The number of papers published by 21st-century academics is about 20 times what it was in 1950.)
Emails and social media, according to FIRE’s faculty survey, are by far the most common form of reported self-censorship in writing. A majority of liberals, moderates, and conservatives all reported self-censoring their emails and social media, about twice the levels reported for academic publications. And for good reason: On January 14, Millsaps College fired a tenured professor for writing an email to three students that described America as a “racist, fascist nation.” Professors who self-censor their email and social media today are not necessarily more repressed than professors of the 1950s: They just have more opportunities to express themselves in writing, and thus more opportunity to censor themselves as well.