Skip to content
ADVERTISEMENT
Sign In
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Virtual Events
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
  • More
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Virtual Events
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
    Upcoming Events:
    Hands-On Career Preparation
    An AI-Driven Work Force
    Alternative Pathways
Sign In
Photo Illustration showing a lab beaker with a target painted on the glass
Kevin van Aelst for The Chronicle

Science Has a Censorship Problem

The motives are benign. The effects are insidious.

The Review | Opinion
By Musa al-Gharbi and Cory Clark November 20, 2023

Censorship is widespread in academe and has grown worse in recent decades. Indeed, the expressive environment in higher ed seems less free than in society writ large, even though most other places of employment have basically no protections for freedom of expression, conscience, research, etc.

Almost everyone is opposed to censorship in the abstract, but when confronted with ideas they personally find offensive — arguments about the relationship between genes and inequality, for instance — people support censorship more often than their generic views would suggest.

To continue reading for FREE, please sign in.

Sign In

Or subscribe now to read with unlimited access for as low as $10/month.

Don’t have an account? Sign up now.

A free account provides you access to a limited number of free articles each month, plus newsletters, job postings, salary data, and exclusive store discounts.

Sign Up

Censorship is widespread in academe and has grown worse in recent decades. Indeed, the expressive environment in higher ed seems less free than in society writ large, even though most other places of employment have basically no protections for freedom of expression, conscience, research, etc.

Almost everyone is opposed to censorship in the abstract, but when confronted with ideas they personally find offensive — arguments about the relationship between genes and inequality, for instance — people support censorship more often than their generic views would suggest.

Many presume censorship is mostly driven by right-wing agitators, such as Fox News, or by lefty “kids these days” who don’t properly understand or value academic freedom. However, as we (and our co-authors) demonstrate in a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, censorship is more typically driven by scientists themselves.

Consider the results of a national survey of faculty members at four-year colleges conducted last year by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression: Sixteen percent of the faculty had been disciplined or threatened with discipline for their teaching, research, talks, or nonacademic publications. Depending on the issue being discussed, between 6 percent and 36 percent of faculty members supported soft punishment (condemnation, investigations) for peers who make controversial claims, with higher support among younger, more left-leaning, and female academics. Thirty-four percent of professors had been pressured by peers to avoid controversial research; 25 percent reported being “very” or “extremely” likely to self-censor in academic publications; and 91 percent reported being at least somewhat likely to self-censor in academic publications, meetings, presentations, or on social media.

The motives behind censorship are commonly misunderstood. Scientists sometimes censor one another because of power struggles or other unsavory reasons. Most of the time, however, benign motives are at play.

Editors are granting themselves vast leeway to censor high-quality research that offends their own moral sensibilities, or those of their most sensitive readers.

Many academics self-censor to protect themselves — not just because they’re concerned about preserving their jobs, but also out of a desire to be liked, accepted, and included within their disciplines and institutions, or because they don’t wish to create problems for their advisees. Other times, scholars attempt to suppress findings because they view them as incorrect, misleading, or potentially dangerous. Sometimes scientists try to quash public dissent of contentious issues for fear that it undermines public trust or scientific authority, as happened at various points during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Moral motives have long influenced scientific decision-making. What’s new is that journals are now explicitly endorsing moral concerns as legitimate reasons to suppress science. Following the publication (and retraction) of an article reporting that the mentees of male mentors, on average, had more scholarly success than did the mentees of female mentors, Nature Communications released an editorial promising increased attention to potential harms. A subsequent Nature editorial stated that authors, reviewers, and editors must consider the potentially harmful implications of research, and a Nature Human Behaviour editorial declared the publication might reject or retract articles that have the potential to undermine the dignity of particular groups of people. In effect, editors are granting themselves vast leeway to censor high-quality research that offends their own moral sensibilities, or those of their most sensitive readers.

It is reasonable to consider potential harms before disseminating scientific findings that pose a clear and present danger, such as scholarship that increases risks of nuclear war, pandemics, or other existential catastrophes.

However, the suppression of science and ideas, even with the best of intentions, often has significant adverse consequences. Censorship can durably limit our understanding of important phenomena and slow down scientific progress, causing people to struggle, suffer, and die needlessly. It can lead to misinformation cascades or null entire fields of research (because the people who would declare that the emperor has no clothes are locked out of the conversation), wasting enormous amounts of resources and effort that could be better directed elsewhere. Although scientists sometimes quell dissent to preserve their perceived authority, if this suppression becomes public knowledge, it tends to drastically undermine public trust in science.

To more effectively balance the risks of disseminating potentially dangerous information against the costs of censorship, we need to empirically and openly measure purported harms, rather than the current approach of largely relying on the often arbitrary intuitions and authority of small and unrepresentative editorial boards of journals.

ADVERTISEMENT

We should also improve accountability in peer review by making the process more visible. Reviews and editorial-decision letters could be provided in online repositories available to all scholars (with reviewer and editor names redacted if appropriate). Professional societies could make available the submissions, reviews, and acceptance/rejection decisions for their conferences (perhaps with identities redacted). This would allow scholars to discern double standards in decision-making that often mask censorship against unpopular views. As a consequence of this increased openness, editors and reviewers would very likely become more consistent and careful in their decision-making. Studies show that people behave in less biased ways when other people can more easily observe disparities, or when people might have to explain their decisions.

Scholars could increase accountability for peer-reviewers and editors by conducting more audits of journals in their fields. Scholars have long submitted nearly identical papers to journals, changing only things that should not matter (like the author’s name or institutional affiliation), or reversing the direction of the findings (all else the same), to test for systematic variance in whether the papers are accepted or rejected and what kinds of comments the reviewers offer based on whom the authors are or what they find. Up to now, studies like these have provided important insights into how censorship works and against whom it is deployed. However, if scholars were more consistent and systematic in auditing journals, it would become easier to compare journals against one another and highlight publications that are especially biased or objective in their decision-making.

Scholars could also conduct large-scale surveys of scientists who have submitted to various journals to evaluate perceived procedural fairness. Some journals (e.g., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) already survey submitters on relevant questions. However, to our knowledge, none currently share this information publicly. If journals were pushed to collect and publish this data more consistently, it would allow scholars to understand their colleagues’ perceptions about bias at various journals and may help scientists more effectively target their work to publications where it would get a fair hearing.

Collectively, measures like these would create new forms of competition among scientific journals. New metrics could be created based on these data to tie the reputations of journals, editors, and peer reviewers to the openness and fairness of their publication practices. Scholars who are doing important and groundbreaking work would most likely seek out journals that are credibly objective, while biased journals would probably see their reputations slide.

Just as institutional and cultural factors make censorship and self-censorship more pronounced, measures such as these would render censorship easier to perceive and more reputationally costly.

A version of this article appeared in the December 8, 2023, issue.
We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.
Tags
Scholarship & Research Political Influence & Activism
Share
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Facebook
  • Email
About the Author
Musa al-Gharbi
Musa al-Gharbi is an assistant professor in the School of Communication and Journalism at Stony Brook University and a researcher at Heterodox Academy.
About the Author
Cory Clark
Cory Clark is director and co-founder of the Adversarial Collaboration Project at the University of Pennsylvania.
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT

More News

Photo-based illustration of scissors cutting through a flat black and white university building and a landscape bearing the image of a $100 bill.
Budget Troubles
‘Every Revenue Source Is at Risk’: Under Trump, Research Universities Are Cutting Back
Photo-based illustration of the Capitol building dome topping a jar of money.
Budget Bill
Republicans’ Plan to Tax Higher Ed and Slash Funding Advances in Congress
Allison Pingree, a Cambridge, Mass. resident, joined hundreds at an April 12 rally urging Harvard to resist President Trump's influence on the institution.
International
Trump Administration Revokes Harvard’s Ability to Enroll International Students
Photo-based illustration of an open book with binary code instead of narrative paragraphs
Culture Shift
The Reading Struggle Meets AI

From The Review

Illustration of a Gold Seal sticker embossed with President Trump's face
The Review | Essay
What Trump’s Accreditation Moves Get Right
By Samuel Negus
Illustration of a torn cold seal sticker embossed with President Trump's face
The Review | Essay
The Weaponization of Accreditation
By Greg D. Pillar, Laurie Shanderson
Protestors gather outside the Pro-Palestinian encampment on the campus of UCLA in Los Angeles on Wednesday, May 1, 2024.
The Review | Conversation
Are Colleges Rife With Antisemitism? If So, What Should Be Done?
By Evan Goldstein, Len Gutkin

Upcoming Events

Ascendium_06-10-25_Plain.png
Views on College and Alternative Pathways
Coursera_06-17-25_Plain.png
AI and Microcredentials
  • Explore Content
    • Latest News
    • Newsletters
    • Letters
    • Free Reports and Guides
    • Professional Development
    • Virtual Events
    • Chronicle Store
    • Chronicle Intelligence
    • Jobs in Higher Education
    • Post a Job
  • Know The Chronicle
    • About Us
    • Vision, Mission, Values
    • DEI at The Chronicle
    • Write for Us
    • Work at The Chronicle
    • Our Reporting Process
    • Advertise With Us
    • Brand Studio
    • Accessibility Statement
  • Account and Access
    • Manage Your Account
    • Manage Newsletters
    • Individual Subscriptions
    • Group and Institutional Access
    • Subscription & Account FAQ
  • Get Support
    • Contact Us
    • Reprints & Permissions
    • User Agreement
    • Terms and Conditions
    • Privacy Policy
    • California Privacy Policy
    • Do Not Sell My Personal Information
1255 23rd Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20037
© 2025 The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Chronicle of Higher Education is academe’s most trusted resource for independent journalism, career development, and forward-looking intelligence. Our readers lead, teach, learn, and innovate with insights from The Chronicle.
Follow Us
  • twitter
  • instagram
  • youtube
  • facebook
  • linkedin