Censored Messages
I have been on a journey for over four years to explore what I call the equity agenda. Along the way I have found that the advocates of diversity, equity, and inclusion are highly prone to censorship. It's hard to know how to respond to censorship because it's not obvious who you can file a complaint with. But it has been happening enough that I have decided to start documenting acts of censorship against me.
Below are links to email messages of mine that have been censored recently.
- Message to diversity-allies on 3/31/2022 with a list of land acknowledgments used in CSE courses
- Message to AAUP on 3/18/2022 about a Wall Street Journal article
- Message to AAUP on 2/27/2022 about AAUP mailing list censorship
- Message to AAUP on 2/23/2022 about a prominent article about land acknowledgments
- Message to AAUP on 1/12/2022 about a land acknowledgment I included on my course syllabus
- Message to AAUP on 10/30/2021 about treatment of anarchist graffiti versus racist graffiti
- Message to AAUP on 1/18/2021 about listening to conservative voices
- Message to diversity-allies on 9/6/2020 about President Trump's ban on critical race theory training
- Message to diversity-allies on 5/28/2019 about Wilfred Reily's book on hate crime hoaxes
Let me provide a little background for those who might be interested. I first got involved in exploring how diversity issues were being handled at the Allen School in August of 2017. I had read about how James Damore was fired from Google for writing a memo about the scientific evidence for differences between men and women. He was responding to several diversity workshops developed at Google. I found that we were about to start offering a workshop based on the very same Google "bias busting" workshop. Two of our advisors had been sent to CMU to attend a workshop on their bias busters workshop.
The CMU workshop sounded good at first glance. They say that, "the program has an academic tone, focusing on summaries of research evidence into which discussions of experience are woven." But as I explored the research they cite, I was appalled to find that they included only research that fit their narrative and they never criticized the research, even when it is of highly questionable value. I was unable to convince our advisors to abandon this workshop, so I wrote up my objections in a web page that I never ended up advertising publicly. For those who are interested, you can find it here.
I have done a lot of work in this area since then and I have observed two consistent forms of censorship coming from the advocates for the equity agenda:
- They are narrative driven. They aren't seeking truth, they are seeking confirmation. As a result, they censor any story or speaker or research that doesn't fit their preferred narrative of oppression.
- They actively work to silence voices that oppose their worldview and their preferred solutions. They describe it as not "platforming" the opposition. They don't see this as violating the idea of a marketplace of ideas because they think that their opponents have too much of a voice already which means that justice requires silencing them so that we can finally center the voices of marginalized groups.
When challenged about censorship, the moderators of the UW AAUP mailing list mentioned that, "We ask people who post repeatedly to consider taking a breather to allow for others to contribute to the discussion." I submitted five messages in the six months from September 2021 through February 2022 and three of them were rejected. In the same time frame, Professor Amy Hagopian who is a moderator posted 29 times. She might want to consider her own advice about taking a breather or at least allow occassional contributors like myself to post at least once a month.
last updated 04/07/2022