Stephen Downes

This post (also in the Chronicle) is a response to a survey on taboos and self-censorship among U.S. psychology professors by Cory J. Clark and others. To be fair, I don't think the ten views studied are actually taboo, though the subject matter touches on cultural sensitivities in the U.S. at the moment. But the key statement from the study is that "almost all professors worried about social sanctions if they were to express their own empirical beliefs." To which I reply, I guess, "welcome to society". Or as Chomsky says (p. 111), "the whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent." We can all believe what we want, and in a free society, we can all express these beliefs. And professors have rather more latitude than most. But just as I don't see many corporations around here hiring avowed communists these days, I don't see institutions eager to hire people with antisocial views. And it is the nature of capitalism that people need a job in order to survive. As Apostolos K says, "most of the professoriate are low paid adjuncts with no security and oodles of precarity." You want full freedom of expression? Build a society where people don't live lives two paycheques away from homelessness. Or at the very least, join a union.