Even before the Jan. 6 fiasco, I avoided voting for Donald Trump because he seemed autocratic. Nothing in Trump’s recent behavior leads me to rethink that.
Further, there are things I like about Vice President Kamala Harris, who was once a tough-on-crime prosecutor.
Yet I can’t vote for the vice president because her administration, and many in her party, want to fire me for my political views. For this college professor and John McCain Republican, democracy cannot mean professional suicide. I won’t vote for my own termination.
To earn support from me and other centrists, Harris will have to come out in favor of free speech, not just for Hamas sympathizers, but for the thousands of normal conservatives and centrists increasingly barred from higher education. Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott show empirically in “The Cancelling of the American Mind,” ideological purges have felled more professors than Sen. Joe McCarthy’s 1950s red scare.
I’m Republican but not very partisan. I worked for the Clinton administration, like my city’s Democratic mayor, and received some Democratic endorsements both times I ran for school board. In 2020, I voted, albeit reluctantly and perhaps mistakenly, for Biden.
Yet I’ve recently had reminders of why I fear many Democrats, especially California Democrats like Harris who have little experience working across party lines.
In her just-published, deeply disturbing “On the Warpath: My Battles with Indians, Pretendians, and Woke Warriors,” former San Jose State University Anthropology Professor Elizabeth Weiss detailed how her state government drove her out of academia.
Weiss’s crimes were questioning California state regulations allowing Native American activists — including “pretendians” not part of any recognized tribe — to veto archeological research contradicting Indigenous religious beliefs that tribes have always occupied their claimed territories. As Weiss wrote in “The Objective Standard,” the Biden administration has extended such regulations nationally.
Weiss also offended activists by showing that, like most humans, some Indigenous peoples practiced unsavory activities such as war and slavery. Until Weiss filed a Title IX complaint, California even imposed tribal demands forbidding “menstruating personnel” (women, like Weiss) from handling archeological artifacts.
By comparison, neither California nor the Biden administration would ever allow Christian creationists to block scientific research on evolution because it might contradict the Book of Genesis. (Of course, now that the precedent is set, someone on the right might try.)
Just last week, to settle a wrongful termination lawsuit, California’s Kern Community College agreed to pay nearly $2.3 million to History Professor Matthew Garrett, fired for daring to question his campus’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies. As Garrett testified early in the lengthy case, “I can’t stop you from making this process painful for me and my family. You have driven me onto welfare. You have robbed my children of Christmas.”
Restrictions of free speech and scientific inquiry increasingly define academia in California. As James Paul and I note in “Other than Merit: The Prevalence of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Statements in University Hiring,” eight of 10 University of California campuses require pro-DEI statements for applicants for faculty jobs, likely barring anyone who opposes racial quotas.
That would include me, and most Americans of all races. Even the Washington Post editors, who are not exactly MAGA backers, warn that required DEI statements erase freedom of speech.
In March, the Biden administration doubled down on restrictions on free speech and free inquiry on campus, reissuing Obama-era Title IX rules that allow a single university bureaucrat to serve as prosecutor, judge and jury.
The rules also enable investigations of subjective offenses, as happened to Northwestern University professor Laura Kipnis when she wrote an essay criticizing the investigation of another professor. Kipnis’s article allegedly caused an “unsafe climate.” In short, Democrats have created a situation where speech and research that offends leftist activists can bring punishment from leftist university bureaucrats.
Anti-speech regulations are eroding pluralism in my industry and in society. Analyzing large-scale surveys, political scientist Eric Kaufmann found over a third of conservative professors and doctoral students face sanctions for their views. So do one in 10 liberals, who are often censored by those farther left. Off-campus, 48 percent of Americans report that they self-censor at work — more than three times the percentage of the McCarthy era.
As political scientists Jeff Spinner-Halev and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse write in “Respect and Loathing in American Democracy,” pluralistic democracy requires mutual respect and exchange.
I respect Democrats. In exchange my vote, Democrats will have to bar required DEI statements, create a U.S. First Amendment Commission patterned after the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, and generally protect endangered centrists and conservatives in higher education. Those are my terms; they are not negotiable.
With nearly half of Americans self-censoring and many resenting it, there may be millions of free-speech voters in states like Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Michigan. Please, Vice President Harris, don’t make us vote for Trump.
Robert Maranto is the 21st Century Chair in Leadership in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, a former school board member, and a founding member of the Society for Open Inquiry in Behavioral Science. His views do not necessarily reflect those of any university, agency or organization.
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