The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth

Advance praise for The Constitution of Knowledge

Long one of the country’s wisest and most honest voices, Jonathan Rauch has written a hugely valuable and necessary book, an illuminating exploration of the flight from fact. If, as the Gospel of John put it, the truth shall set us free, then count Rauch among the liberators.

—JON MEACHAM,

historian; author of His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope

Liberty, of course, requires constant vigilance, but who would have thought until recently that the idea of truth needed defending? Sadly, we now see that it does, but happily, Jonathan Rauch has come to the rescue of both truth and liberty in this thought-provoking, essential work.

—MITCHELL E. DANIELS, JR.,

president, Purdue University; former governor of Indiana

"Once waged primarily on the turf of government censorship, the battle for free speech and an open society has shifted toward the new terrains of social media, cancel culture, and rampant disinformation. Starting from first principles and applying them to headlines as recent as the storming of the U.S. Capitol in 2021, The Constitution of Knowledge provides the map we’ve been waiting for. In my forty years of work on behalf of the values our democracy depends on, I’ve seen a handful of landmark books come along. This is one of them."

—NADINE STROSSEN,

John Marshall Harlan II Professor of Law, Emerita, New York Law School; former president, American Civil Liberties Union, 1991–2008

Why can’t we have shared facts anymore? The most profound and useful answer is contained in this book. Jonathan Rauch shows us how it is that societies ever come to know things. It is only after we appreciate the miracle of knowledge production (the constitution of knowledge) that we can understand the tragedy befalling us now, as key institutions and practices decay. This book is a magnificent integration of psychology, epistemology, and history. It is a joy to read—deep insight after deep insight, embedded in playful writing, about one of the most important problems of the 2020s.

—JONATHAN HAIDT,

Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership, NYU-Stern School of Business; author of The Righteous Mind; co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind

The digital age was supposed to bring about the blessings of unlimited knowledge fueled by radically egalitarian free speech allowing everyone to access, share, and learn from freely available information to the benefit and progress of all. Instead, an epistemic crisis supercharged by viral disinformation and indifference to truth has bred deep cynicism about the benefits of free speech and the liberal ideals that underpin this increasingly unpopular idea. In his unputdownable new book, Jonathan Rauch provides both a surgically precise diagnosis and a promising cure for the ailments that torment the twenty-first century with its crisis of authority, distrust, and rampant tribalism. We ignore Rauch’s warning and prescription at our own peril.

—JACOB MCHANGAMA,

founder and CEO, Justitia

The Constitution of Knowledge

A Defense of Truth

JONATHAN RAUCH

BROOKINGS INSTITUTION PRESS

Washington, D.C.

THE BROOKINGS INSTITUTION

For my father

Oscar C. Rauch

In loving memory

Write if you get work.

Contents

1 A Terrible Statement Unless He Gets Away with It

Chaos and conformity have caused an epistemic crisis

2 The State of Nature: Tribal Truth

Bias, groupthink, and the epistemic war of all against all

3 Booting Reality: The Rise of Networked Knowledge

Outsourcing reality to a social network is humankind’s greatest innovation

4 The Constitution of Knowledge

The operating system of the reality-based community

5 Disinformation Technology: The Challenge of Digital Media

Making the online world truth-friendly is difficult but doable

6 Troll Epistemology: Flood the Zone with Shit

Disinformation is an old enemy with new weapons and powerful friends

7 Canceling: Despotism of the Few

Coercive conformity is corrupting the reality-based community

8 Unmute Yourself: Pushing Back

Defending the Constitution of Knowledge requires confidence and counter-mobilization

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

1

A Terrible Statement Unless He Gets Away with It

Chaos and conformity have caused an epistemic crisis

In the public square of Athens, a homely, snub-nosed, bulgy-eyed old man encounters a homely, snub-nosed, bulgy-eyed young man. Hailing the young man and remarking on their resemblance, Socrates begins a conversation with Theaetetus and sets out to determine whether they also resemble each other in their love of philosophy. Theaetetus protests that he is no great intellect; philosophical puzzles make him quite dizzy, wondering whatever they can mean. Ah! Then you are a philosopher: This sense of wonder is the mark of the philosopher, insists Socrates. Philosophy indeed has no other origin.

With that, in a conversation imagined by Plato 2,400 or so years ago, the old man commences to lead his new friend on an expedition into the densest thickets of epistemology. What is knowledge? What is error? How does error arise? Why is error even possible? Each question would seem to have an obvious answer, yet each obvious answer collapses upon examination.

Perhaps knowledge is correct perception of the world? But perception varies between individuals; it varies, too, within individuals. A wine which tastes sweet when I am well may taste bitter the next day, when I am ill. There are dreams and hallucinations, all imaginary yet seeming real. Each of us is a parade of changing perceptions, but our shifting personal palimpsest can never be the same as knowledge, as reality.

Well, then, perhaps knowledge is true judgment, true belief? But we may hold random or ignorant views which merely happen to be true; we may guess or conjecture and be proven right through pure luck; yet lucky guesses are surely not the same as knowledge. Our own confidence in our beliefs is no good, for we may feel sure but be in error.

Perhaps, then, knowledge is true belief or true judgment plus an account, an explanation. That seems more like it. But no, Socrates spins us around again. How can we judge the truth of the account without also knowing the truth of the subject of the account? If the account is based on a distinction, for example, and if the distinction is comprehensible and persuasive, then we must already have knowledge of the thing we are explaining: otherwise the distinction would not enlighten us. Relying on an account traps us in circularity: we cannot have knowledge without an account, but we cannot have an account without knowledge.

So, Theaetetus, says Socrates to the younger version of himself, neither perception, nor true belief, nor the addition of an ‘account’ to true belief can be knowledge. Replies the young man, presumably confirmed in his belief that philosophy is dizzying, Apparently not. And here the conversation ends abruptly in defeat, leavened only by Socrates’s assurance that at least the two of them are clearer on what it is they do not know, and therefore will be humbler and more agreeable to their companions.

So much ratiocination, so much spadework, leading nowhere? Perhaps. And surely disappointing. But tomorrow morning, says Socrates, let us meet here again.¹ The conversation will continue. Not, tragically, for Socrates; he would soon be executed for impiety. But the conversation outlived him and continues to this day. At age eighteen, as a college freshman, I encountered Theaetetus with a jolt. I sensed that it asked an important question, yet it provided no answer. Instead, it was an exercise in relentless deconstruction, in gentle but ruthless analytical demolition. Plato’s message came through in bold relief: this business about truth, about distinguishing reality from error—it is not easy, and if you think otherwise, go away!

And yet, as Plato instructs us, our analytical ruthlessness is not nihilism or a waste of time. It teaches rigor and humility, the foundations of the truth-seeking attitude. If Socrates could not on this occasion define or explain knowledge, he could nonetheless demonstrate its spirit. The most important words of the dialogue are those five words at the end. Let us meet here again: acquiring knowledge is a conversation, not a destination. It is a process, a journey—a journey we take together, not alone. Others are always involved. Knowledge is not just something I have; more fundamentally, it is something we have.

Here, implicitly at least, Plato anticipates the richest and most advanced insights of today’s philosophy of science. Yet, in his grand political treatise, The Republic, Plato would take a very different view of knowledge than the one Socrates implies: the ideal regime invests an authoritative leader with the power to distinguish truth from falsehood. That governing model, whenever implemented, proved to be a wrong turn, one which contributed to centuries of human grief. Today, we can say that it was Theaetetus which pointed the way forward, even if more than two millennia would pass before the path it blazed was rediscovered.

In my own way, as a young man, I set out on Theaetetus’s journey. After college I became a journalist and, as such, dedicated myself to finding out what is true and to telling stories which enlighten and instruct. Good journalism, like philosophy, and like science, begins with curiosity, with wonder. Then come the hypothesis, the thesis, the seemingly plausible account. Then come the efforts to test that account against the world, by asking still more questions; and then, often, comes the moment when the hypothesis lists or collapses and my head, like Theaetetus’s, spins. And then, if I am lucky, out of the dizziness comes a stronger hypothesis, something closer to truth; or, if I am not as lucky, out of the dizziness comes a reminder to be humble in the face of reality’s caprice.

However, my personal struggles to find the right questions and assemble mosaic tiles of information to tell the tale coherently—while necessary for journalism—are not in fact journalism. A crackpot, a loner, a conspiracy theorist will engage in the same steps, yet is not a journalist. I became a journalist by being forced outside of myself. From my very first steps into the world of journalism, first on my college newspaper, then as a summer intern at National Journal magazine in Washington, D.C., and then in the newsroom as a cub reporter for the Winston-Salem Journal, I was thrust into contact with the world outside my own head. Apart from the lonely process of writing a first draft, I could do nothing on my own. Facts were gathered from interviews and sources; analysis was checked with experts; every sentence was edited, copy-edited, and often fact-checked; tipsters suggested story ideas, sources waved me off bad leads, and challenges to my claims percolated in conversations within the newsroom and outside of it. The sense of having joined something much greater than myself, and of swearing allegiance to the exacting standards of a great tradition, made the enterprise of journalism appealing and compelling to me even on the days when the practice of journalism seemed grinding and routine (which was often).

There were some things, I learned, that we—we, as professionals—do: prize accuracy; seek a comment from a person before publishing something about her; prefer on-record information; consult multiple sources with varied viewpoints; abjure jargon, long-windedness, extravagance, and opinion (except in sports writing, which seemed to require all of the above). There were other things, I learned, that we do not do: pay for information, accept gifts from sources, betray confidentiality, tolerate meddling from the ad department. As a young journalist, I was being rebuilt, reshaped, into a worker ant in humanity’s hive-mind, humans’ most important and beneficent creation. Without realizing it at the time, I was being inducted into a community, the reality-based community—the same community into which Socrates was inducting Theaetetus so long ago. I was learning the Constitution of Knowledge.

An Epistemic Crisis

When Americans think about how we find truth amid a world full of discordant viewpoints, we usually turn to a metaphor, that of the marketplace of ideas. It is a good metaphor as far as it goes, yet woefully incomplete. It conjures up an image of ideas being traded by individuals in a kind of flea market, or an image of disembodied ideas clashing and competing in some ethereal realm of their own. But ideas in the marketplace do not talk directly to each other, and for the most part neither do individuals. Rather, our conversations are mediated through institutions like journals and newspapers and social-media platforms; and they rely on a dense network of norms and rules, like truthfulness and fact-checking; and they depend on the expertise of professionals, like peer reviewers and editors—and the entire system rests on a foundation of values: a shared understanding that there are right and wrong ways to make knowledge. Those values and rules and institutions do for knowledge what the U.S. Constitution does for politics: they create a governing structure, forcing social contestation onto peaceful and productive pathways. And so I call them, collectively, the Constitution of Knowledge.

The world I was trained for seems, in hindsight, a long way off, in some respects more unfamiliar than Socrates’s Athens. In science, in journalism, in politics, and in daily life, truthfulness is for the most part a civic norm, not a legal requirement, and the twenty-first century put it under severe pressure. Most shockingly, a president of the United States gleefully shattered every known record for lying. One might be tempted to write off all politicians as liars, but no prominent figure in American politics had lied nearly as brazenly, wantonly, and prolifically.

Even more telling, perhaps, than his contemptuous attitude toward facts was his contemptuous attitude toward corrections. In 1690, the first newspaper in North America went to press. Called Publick Occurrences, it was soon stamped out by censorious authorities. Still, it made an impression, partly by declaring its mission on its front page:

That something may be done towards the Curing, or at least the Charming of that Spirit of Lying, which prevails amongst us, wherefore nothing shall be entered, but what we have reason to believe is true, repairing to the best fountains for our Information. And when there appears any material mistake in anything that is collected, it shall be corrected …²

The idea of accountability to truth, and thus of a responsibility to correct the record, was a threshold idea in the establishment of mainstream journalism, and it remains foundational today. In 2017 several leading journalists at CNN reported that a confidant of President Trump was linked to a dicey Russian hedge fund. The story turned out to be wrong. CNN retracted it, apologized for it, and forced out the journalists responsible for it after determining that they had breached CNN’s standards. One response would have been to tweet out some statement like: Kudos to CNN for caring enough about truth to correct its story and clean house. That’s Real News! What the president tweeted out, however, was this: Wow, CNN had to retract big story on ‘Russia,’ with 3 employees forced to resign. What about all the other phony stories they do? FAKE NEWS! And this: So they caught Fake News CNN cold, but what about NBC, CBS & ABC? What about the failing @nytimes & @washingtonpost? They are all Fake News! In the president’s worldview, by holding itself to account, the network had proved not its integrity but its corruption—and, indeed, the corruption of the entire news industry.

In much the same spirit, in 2018 the president and the Republican National Committee touted something they called the Fake News Awards. What the president and the committee did not note was that of the eleven supposedly fake news items, at least seven had been promptly corrected by the outlets which had published them. In other words, the president and the committee knew the reports were false because the outlets had said so. Two of the faulty reports, according to the Washington Post, had prompted suspensions or resignations (the CNN report was one of them). Two were merely tweets, also corrected. Another was an opinion piece. Apparently, scouring the mainstream media for fake news, the president and his political team could find nothing worse. (Perhaps they lacked time to glance at the acres of inaccuracies rolled out by conspiratorial right-wing outlets.) In any case, the moral they drew was the same: correcting error is a sign not of integrity but of crookedness.

The president’s behavior may have been compulsive, delusional, or pathological, to one extent or another. But it could not have been anything other than intentional. In 2013 someone using the handle @backupwraith tweeted: I firmly believe that @realDonaldTrump is the most superior troll on the whole of twitter. Trump quoted the tweet with the comment: A great compliment! In 2018 CBS News’s Lesley Stahl recounted asking Trump, during his presidential campaign, whether he planned to stop attacking the press. He said, ‘You know why I do it? I do it to discredit you all and demean you all, so when you write negative stories about me no one will believe you.’ The White House did not deny Stahl’s account. Why would it? Trump and his troll army had, by their lights, every reason to be proud of what they were doing.

And they did know what they were doing. We know Trump knew, because he had warned us. In 2004, in an interview with NBC News’s Chris Matthews, Trump was asked to reflect on the Republican presidential convention, which had just ended. In that year’s presidential race, a challenge for Republicans was that their candidate, President George W. Bush, had safely sat out the Vietnam War in the Texas Air National Guard, whereas his opponent, Senator John Kerry, had won a Silver Star, a Bronze Star, and three Purple Hearts for valor in combat. A group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth waged a successful propaganda campaign challenging Kerry’s wartime record. That was the context in which the following exchange occurred:

Trump: I sat through the convention in New York. And they did a great job, the Republicans. But maybe the greatest spin I’ve ever seen on anything is, it’s almost coming out that Bush is a war hero and Kerry isn’t. I think that could be the greatest spin I’ve ever seen.

Matthews: Because?

Trump: Well, the whole thing with the Swift Boat group, which obviously is being done by Bush and Bush’s people, happened to be brilliant. They’ve taken all of that war hero thing away from Kerry and they’ve almost given to it Bush. And Bush, frankly, was not serving. That we know.

Matthews: … Let me ask you about perhaps what you might call unnecessary roughness in politics. This week, Dick Cheney, the vice president, a very tough guy, said that if we elect, the American people elect Kerry, that we’re basically going to face ourselves with the threat of a devastating [terrorist] attack. He is saying vote Democrat, you’re going to get attacked.

Trump: Well, it’s a terrible statement unless he gets away with it.

A terrible statement unless he gets away with it. Trump was hardly the first politician to lie. Yet as president, more than a decade later, he went far beyond an ordinary political hit job like the Swift Boat campaign. In the scale and brazenness of his lying, many people sensed something different from ordinary political spin and exaggeration, something with more sinister aims and more disorienting consequences: something from the world of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. Trump and his media echo chambers were normalizing lying in order to obliterate the distinction, in the public realm, between truth and untruth. They were practicing the hallowed (if infamous) art of disinformation. They lied in trivial ways, when there was no point in lying except to show contempt for truth, as when Trump claimed rain had not fallen on his inauguration. They lied in grandiose and fantastic ways, as in their months-long disinformation campaign claiming to have won an election which Trump had demonstrably lost (a campaign which ended only when he was impeached for inciting a violent insurrection). They lied without distinguishing between truth and falsehood or between big lies and small lies, because their goal was to denude the public’s capacity to make any distinctions at all.

Observing events, an assortment of commentators and academics thought they saw a threat to the underpinnings of the liberal order itself, and not just from Trump and his political allies but from a whole industry of trolls and foreign actors and even bots and algorithms. In threatening to erode the forms of intellectual trust and cooperation that are required for democratic life, and in making the determination of ‘truth’ more and more obviously a consequence of brute power alone, our current practices threaten democracy itself, wrote Sophia Rosenfeld, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania, in her book Democracy and Truth: A Short History. In reports and books with titles like The Misinformation Age and Truth Decay and Post-Truth and The Death of Truth, scholars explored aspects of what all agreed was uncharted territory, at least in the United States.³ Politicians and pundits—everyone from senators and two former secretaries of state to leaders of the intelligence and law-enforcement communities—sounded alarms that American civic life might be losing its grip on reality: its ability, that is, to tell truth from untruth or even believe there is a difference. We have a risk of getting to a place where we don’t have shared public facts, Ben Sasse, a Republican senator, said in a 2017 interview with CNN, voicing the prevalent concern. A republic will not work if we don’t have shared facts. Michael Hayden, a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, sent a distress signal when he wrote (in the New York Times): These are truly uncharted waters for the country. We have in the past argued over the values to be applied to objective reality, or occasionally over what constituted objective reality, but never the existence or relevance of objective reality itself. The battle lines, Hayden perceived, made for some strange bedfellows. In this post-truth world, intelligence agencies are in the bunker with some unlikely mates: journalism, academia, the courts, law enforcement, and science—all of which, like intelligence gathering, are evidence-based.

An arcane multisyllabic word began cropping up in the public discourse. "At its heart … the current crisis belongs primarily to the realm of epistemology, or how we know what we know, wrote Rosenfeld (italics added). The esoteric term, previously a staple of philosophers but little known outside the ivory tower, had found a new mainstream application. In 2020, former President Barack Obama stated the matter starkly: If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false, then by definition the marketplace of ideas doesn’t work. And by definition our democracy doesn’t work. We are entering into an epistemological crisis."⁴

A Chill Wind

The crisis had many elements, but two seemed central to its character. One was the deployment of disinformation on an unprecedented scale by Trump, his troll armies, foreign governments, conspiracy mongers, and a conservative media ecosystem which was increasingly detached from reality-based norms. That attack came predominantly, though not exclusively, from the right. Peculiarly, it received an assist from the left, in the form of an attack on epistemic liberalism which came to be known as cancel culture.

Canceling, like trolling, was not unique to one part of the ideological spectrum; many conservatives were politically canceled for opposing Trump. Still, it was predominantly the left which had the cultural power to police speech and weaponize shaming. Young-adult books are being targeted in intense social-media call-outs, draggings, and pile-ons—sometimes before anybody’s even read them, reported New York magazine’s Kat Rosenfield in 2017.⁵ One first-time novelist withdrew her book from publication under pressure from an online mob who had not actually read it.⁶ A prominent television writer told me that he and his industry were routinely censoring themselves. His creative choices, he said, were constrained by unwritten rules; for example, female characters always had to be strong and secure. You just learn to channel your imagination along certain paths, he said. You feel the pressure. Everybody’s aware of it. Social media is watching everything you do.

As a member of a sexual minority and a longtime gay rights (and free speech) advocate, I was especially discouraged to see an unrepresentative but outspoken minority of transgender activists resort to social intimidation. In Britain, reported The Economist in August 2019, any discussion of transgender issues is explosive. In the United States, wrote Robby Soave in his 2019 book, Panic Attack: Young Radicals in the Age of Trump, many of the loudest trans voices, particularly on social media, routinely decry all criticism of their activism as not just wrong but a form of assault. He quoted one professor as saying, They do manage to terrify people into silence. Targets of such campaigns could become socially radioactive. They could lose their reputations and their jobs or businesses, and also many of their friendships and social connections. Socially and professionally, they could be, as the new term had it, canceled.

For sure, self-censorship is part of living together (we call it courtesy)—but not when it impedes honest conversation and criticism in university intellectual life, where honest conversation and criticism are the whole point of being there. In the 2010s an unmistakable turn in that direction had happened. Jonathan Haidt, a prominent social psychologist at New York University (whose work is an inspiration for this book), said in an interview with the radio host Bob Zadek in 2018:

In 2015, call-out culture spread much more rapidly around the country. I would say that it is everywhere to some extent. Students are much more defensive and much more afraid of disagreeing with the dominant view. The nature of college as a free place with free-flowing discussion, where you can be provocative and challenge the dominant people or ideas, is weaker than it was just four or five years ago.

Ordinarily, one might have hoped that coercive pressure to conform with particular viewpoints would meet resistance from academia, and sometimes it did. What was worrying, though, was that, at least as often, figures in the academic world led and justified canceling campaigns—and their most frightened targets were often their academic peers. I’m in my mid-forties, a stranger named Holly emailed me, and have always considered myself a liberal, but it’s getting harder and harder to associate with this absurdity. I’m currently in grad school in Denver and I’m betting there are fewer places on earth more ridiculously left-wing than colleges right now. The terms seem to change by the week and it’s completely exhausting. People don’t want to say anything because everyone’s so goddamn scared of offending someone.

Increasingly, when I visited campuses in recent years, I would be approached by students—frequently first-years, not yet acculturated to university life—who expressed dismay about limits on acceptable thought. Left-of-center students felt just as besieged as right-of-center students. One Princeton graduate told me he had made it a rule never to discuss race, gender, or sexuality on campus—period. When I asked why, he replied, Because it’s all downside. His friend, a recent Harvard graduate, agreed.

Campus threats to freedom of expression were not new in the 2020s. University speech-codes had been on the books, and controversial, since the late 1980s. Off-campus threats to freedom of expression were even less new. My first newspaper boss liked to say that if the First Amendment were put to a plebiscite, it would lose. Chances are you have read quite a lot about those problems, and I have examined them in my own previous work, and so the object of this book is not to rehash what has already been hashed.

Something did seem new and different, though. In the late 1980s, when campus free speech became a national issue, challenges came predominantly from professors and bureaucrats championing speech codes and defending them with elaborate theoretical rationales. Although they did not give up, by the mid-2010s the complexion of the problem had changed. Both in academia and outside of it, the problem had come to look less like censorship and more like censoriousness, which is to say a combination of conformity and intimidation. Students said they worried less about speech codes than social pressure, mostly from their peers, not professors. In polls and in conversations, they reported being worried that one wrong comment might set off a firestorm of condemnation among peers or on social media, and they could never be sure what comment might be the trigger. They frequently told me that their professors, far from being tenured radicals, generally tried to encourage honest classroom discussions—yet unorthodox students still shrank from speaking freely for fear of inviting hostility. A law student I know recounted how a white male student became the object of a call-out campaign after other students overheard him using the phrase Do you understand what I’m saying? in conversation with a female African American professor. (Fortunately for him, she came to his defense.) An Ivy League teacher told me, I’ve found that if students have an opportunity to jump on someone, they usually take it. Sam Foer, an undergraduate I interviewed, transferred out of his private liberal arts college because white male students like him were ritually denounced on campus and online as Islamophobic, racist, misogynistic, and the like. People who were genuine liberals were being eaten alive by the radical wing of this campus culture, he told me. If a student so much as disagreed with a person of color, in such a way that a person of color could even manufacture an argument to call the other person racist, then they would do that. It instilled this feeling of being coerced into self-censorship: not being able to speak, even to have conversations, with our peers. That coupled with the treatment I was subject to, I just said, I’m out; it’s not worth it.

Polls showed he was not alone in feeling coerced into self-censorship. A poll conducted in 2017 for the Heterodox Academy project found that almost half of all students reported reluctance to discuss race and politics in the classroom; 41 percent were reluctant to discuss gender. A majority said they did not think their school frequently encouraged students to consider a wide variety of viewpoints and perspectives. Over the next three years, other polls suggested the temperature was only growing chillier. A poll for the Knight Foundation in 2019 found that more than two-thirds (68 percent) of college students say their campus climate precludes students from expressing their true opinions because their classmates might find them offensive.⁷ That result had become quite typical.

Faculty felt the chill, too. News stories abounded about incidents like one at Sarah Lawrence college: when a professor wrote a New York Times op-ed piece arguing that college administrators lacked ideological diversity, students mobilized to demand his firing (euphemized as tenure review), saying his presence on campus threatened their safety and well-being. A professor I met, who taught sociology at a university widely regarded as conservative-leaning, told me, Everyone is ‘careful’ on campus these days. Including me: I have not and will not discuss my research on affirmative action and diversity outside my own classroom. At one private university, a young neurobiologist told me she had dropped a module on autism from her course on brain development. A student had complained that the module might be interpreted as demeaning to the autistic. Her dean had dismissed the complaint, she told me. And, as I pointed out, dropping the material gave her no real protection because another complainant could just object to something else. Why, then, drop the module? Because, she said, she took the complaint as strike one. She lacked tenure protections and could not afford a strike two or three. Even world-famous faculty with tenure silence themselves. In a lecture at Case Western Reserve University in 2018, Haidt, the psychologist, said: "I don’t take any chances at NYU. I don’t say anything controversial. I can be controversial with you, because you can’t report me. You can’t do anything to me if I say something that offends you. But if I’m at NYU, there’s a sign in every bathroom telling students what number to