‘Your life has no value. Kill yourself’: Mobs inflicting lasting mental anguish on academics

A new survey from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression reveals the massive damage inflicted by hate campaigns that are launched against academics across America when they say something of which “the mob” disapproves. FIRE surveyed more than 600 academics listed in its Scholars under Fire database who were sanctioned or targeted from 2020 to 2024, and 209 responded. “Nearly all (94%) who participated in the survey described the impact of their experience as negative. Roughly two-thirds (65%) experienced emotional distress, and significant chunks reported facing harrowing social setbacks, such as being shunned at work (40%) or losing professional relationships (47%) and friendships (33%),” the organization reported. “For some, the consequences were severe. About a quarter of the scholars who completed the survey reported that they sought psychological counseling (27%), and 1 in 5 lost their jobs entirely (20%).” Nathan Honeycutt, the organization’s manager of polling and analytics, said, “Cancellation campaigns are often wrapped in the language of preventing ’emotional harm.’ But our survey shows that it’s the mobs themselves that inflict lasting mental anguish on academics, many of whom still suffer the consequences long after the controversy subsided.” The report found the attacks to be one-sided, citing large numbers of professors, one in three, who say they have “toned down” their statements for fear of causing controversy: “These concerns are especially pronounced among politically moderate and conservative faculty members, who report self-censoring more frequently than they liberal and progressive colleagues. “They also express greater worry about damaging their reputations or losing their jobs. In the 2024 faculty survey, for instance, more than half of conservative respondents reported at least occasionally hiding their political beliefs from peers in order to protect their careers. It remains unclear whether this climate of fear is primarily driven by the threat of cancellation itself or by the broader unwillingness of faculty to defend foundational principles of free expression,” the report said. The database from which FIRE drew contact includes a list of those who faced calls for sanction for their speech from 2000 to now. “This database includes almost 1,700 documented sanction attempts, including a record number this year, with 300 of these attempts resulting in faculty terminations. Most of these incidents have occurred over the past decade.” One professor wrote, “Due to the extreme amount of hate mail and voicemails I received, I had a campus police officer posted outside my class for a period of time and an escort to my vehicle. My husband was constantly worried about my safety, we rarely went places in public, and my mother was harassed online by complete strangers.” Another found an email message: “You are unintelligent. You are poorly educated. You are nauseatingly fat and hideous. Your life has no value. Kill yourself.” The study found that 94% of respondents reported negative impacts including reputational damage, PTSD and/or job loss. They reported their families frequently were caught in the fallout, and there was a chilling effect. “”Overall, scholars were split on whether they’d speak similarly again. Along ideological lines, liberals were more likely to report their speech being chilled (i.e., that they were less likely to say similar things in the future), while conservatives were more likely to indicate they were not detracted (i.e., that they were as much, if not more likely, to say similar things in the future),” the survey found. Further, “Public silence sends a message about what views are acceptable and safe to express, effectively narrowing the range of ideas deemed reasonable to discuss on campus. This may result in topic avoidance in teaching and research, especially on contested or policy-relevant issues.” Of the respondents, 65% reported emotional distress, 53% lost sleep, 47% lost professional relationships, 40% were shunned at work, 29% had family members with collateral damage, 27% sought counseling, and 20% lost jobs. One of the problems that was revealed, FIRE said, was that “Nearly all institutions of higher learning promise academic freedom and free speech rights to their scholars. But many of the targeted scholars reported that they received no support from precisely the institutions and individuals who were supposed to have their backs in moments of crisis and controversy. Only 21% reported that they received at least a moderate amount of public support of their faculty union, for example, and a paltry 11% reported that they received public support from administrators.” FIRE said its report “also found a noticeable partisan gap in the level of public support reported by scholars. Larger proportions of conservative than liberal faculty reported that they received support from the general public (55% vs. 37%). But far fewer than their liberal peers reported that they received public support from their faculty union (7% vs. 29%) or their university colleagues (19% vs. 40%).” “Support for academic freedom should never depend on the views being expressed, but our survey shows that’s exactly what’s happening,” said FIRE research advisor Sean Stevens. “If faculty unions and institutions of higher learning won’t stand by scholars in their moments of crisis, they can’t claim to stand for free speech and inquiry.”