Why intellectual diversity is declining in universities

 NY Times: Why Journalists Have More Freedom Than Professors

But if you told an academic who feared cancellation — a young sociologist, let’s say, with views one tick to Yglesias’s right — that if she were to lose her chance at tenure or dramatically shrink the range of colleagues eager to work with her or lose various research and publication opportunities, “Well, you could always start a Substack,” you would be telling her that she could continue expressing her opinions while ceasing to be an academic. And while I am all for demanding courage and intellectual honesty and related virtues, people calling for those things need to recognize that they’re asking for bigger professional sacrifices and risks from some groups than from others.

This also suggests that university leaders who want to encourage those virtues need to do more than just refuse the formal modes of progressive ideological enforcement (trigger warnings, D.E.I. loyalty oaths) and try to discourage student mobs. They would need to offer some sort of reward structure for intellectual heterodoxy (centrist heterodoxy at least if not, God forbid, conservative), so that young academics especially feel like there are some obvious compensations to go along with the social and professional risks.

…

But in the near term, for the universities most protected by wealth and stature from outside influences, the incentives seem lined up to make academia more stifled-feeling, less intellectually diverse and more ideologically conformist than the world of professional journalism is likely to become.