Most professors comfortable teaching touchy topics

The past academic year featured intense protests around Israel’s war in Gaza, congressional interrogations of university presidents, new state restrictions on teaching about race and other topics, and faculty members being publicly investigated and punished for their speech and teaching. While it remains unclear just what kind of impact this has had on professors’ sense of academic freedom, new data provides some insight.

The recent report, from researchers at Ithaka S+R, says—perhaps counterintuitively—that most instructors “do not report feeling unsafe or uncomfortable discussing or teaching sensitive topics.” Moreover, “across a number of markers, we find that faculty are not raising concerns about their academic freedom.” The findings are based on an online survey Ithaka S+R fielded in February and early March. Respondents were U.S. faculty members with teaching responsibilities at four-year institutions.

Nonwhite, non-cisgender respondents did report higher levels of concern than their peers. Still, researchers wrote that “when looking at responses disaggregated by various institutional and individual characteristics, we find that a large majority of faculty do not avoid teaching or discussing controversial topics.”

Though the survey window predated some of the most serious campus conflicts involving pro-Palestinian protests, the report notes that anti–diversity, equity and inclusion legislation had already been passed or enacted in 12 states. “Additionally, two months earlier, university presidents had been questioned by a Congressional committee about their responses to antisemitism on campus.”

Ithaka S+R, a nonprofit research outfit and consultancy, analyzed academic freedom survey results from 2,605 faculty members, for a response rate of about 2 percent. So the numbers aren’t nationally representative, and researchers note that their sample “skews white (72 percent), 45 years and older (77 percent), and tenured (49 percent).”

‘A Snapshot’

Ioana Hulbert, the report’s lead author, called the study a “snapshot” of an issue that Ithaka S+R hopes to study more in the future.

Despite the survey’s limitations, its main findings may not be off base. Ashley Finley, vice president of research and senior adviser to the president at the American Association of Colleges and Universities, said the results from AAC&U’s own forthcoming, nationally representative faculty survey broadly echo Ithaka S+R’s conclusion that most faculty members aren’t feeling unsafe or uncomfortable talking about or teaching controversial topics. Finley said the finding surprised her but added that that’s why studies are critical—to check assumptions.

Finley’s organization, along with the American Association of University Professors—which together produced the landmark 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure—teamed up with the University of Chicago’s NORC (formerly the National Opinion Research Center) to survey faculty members from mid-December through mid-February of this year. The groups are aiming to release their study, which involves professors across all types of colleges and universities, this fall.

Taboo Topics

Even as Ithaka S+R’s top-line findings don’t suggest that academic freedom is broadly chilled, the results are nuanced. For example, while the majority of faculty respondents don’t avoid teaching or talking about vaccines, climate change, DEI or LGBTQIA+ and other issues, the report says, “a fifth of respondents indicated they avoid discussing the conflict in the Middle East and abortion and/or contraception.”

Instructors in the sciences and medical fields tend to drive avoidance behaviors on the topics polled, “seemingly supporting the idea that certain socio-political issues are outside the scope of their classes in those fields.” Yet these faculty members also “report higher levels of avoiding talking or teaching about climate change, vaccines, and abortion and/or contraception, topics that are both under the purview of the natural sciences and also have a socio-political/public or health policy dimension.”

On race, the survey found that 8 percent of instructors of color said they felt physically unsafe on their campus, and 8 percent felt unable to teach some topics due to concerns for their physical safety. In both cases, that was double the rate for white instructors. Due to sample size issues, the report sorts instructors by race into two groups: white and nonwhite.

Location appears to matter, too: More than a fifth of instructors in states with restrictive DEI policies said they “cannot teach topics due to state policies” or “due to employment or professional success concerns.”

By gender, compared to cisgender men and women, the report says that “greater percentages of nonbinary and instructors of other gender identities report feeling unsafe at their college or university, and that there are topics they cannot teach due to physical safety or employment/professional success concerns, or due to state or university policies.” At the same time, “women (10 percent) and nonbinary individuals and those of other gender identities (11 percent) were less likely to avoid discussing LGBTQIA+ [topics] compared to men (17 percent).” Men, meanwhile, were more likely to avoid discussing DEI.

Hulbert cautioned that how these faculty members feel could shift, possibly for the worse. In one open response, for example, a faculty member told the researchers, “I am very lucky to work in a state that values diversity and free expression at the legislative level. That could change next time we vote in state-level elections.”