Your lips are most definitely sealed

Censorship is a rising threat on campus but its effects can be very difficult to measure, says Judith Vidal-Hall.

The history of censorship in the world of scholarship has a long pedigree. If we start with the 3rd-century BC Qin emperor who determined to rewrite history to his own glory and destroyed all previous texts he considered subversive, then it goes back the best part of two and a half millennia. In the West, the censure of Socrates for the "impiety" of his thought and his "corruption" of the youth of 5th-century BC Athens set a trend in political correctness that, some might argue, has returned to stalk the campus.

The official conversion of the Roman world to Christianity in 320AD is the biggest setback to academic life the West has experienced; the so-called Dark Ages induced by the barbarian invasions some two centuries later was nothing by comparison. The murder of the philosopher-mathematician Hypatia of Alexandria by a Christian mob in 415AD set the teaching and development of science and mathematics back a millennium at least; the closure of the great library of Alexandria, the repository of scientific and mathematical texts from East and West, completed the disaster.

The ascetic-ideologue Augustine of Hippo summed up the climate around the turn of the 5th century: "Whatever knowledge man has acquired outside Holy Writ, if it be harmful, it is there condemned; if it be wholesome, it is there contained." It was an attitude to science and learning that persisted well into the 15th century during which time, according to some commentators, "there was no mathematician of note in the whole Christian world". More than a century later, Galileo Galilei's fight with the Catholic Church was entirely about its attempt to control the academic agenda and his to assert academic freedom. The scholars of the Muslim world fared better: the freedom with which they worked is evidenced by the tributes paid to their discoveries by their more circumscribed Christian contemporaries.

And where there is censorship, there is also self-censorship. It does not take the post-Communist confessions of a former Soviet hack to establish the enduring symbiotic relationship between the two. How else can we explain, for instance, the intellectual silence that fell for the first 1,000 years of Christendom? It takes the sight of only one disobedient academic subjected to the less than sympathetic attentions of the Inquisition to deter thousands more from indulging in the luxury of incorrect thought.

It is no different now. The punishments are less draconian, but it is the same motive that drove Galileo's contemporaries to urge him to caution - and self-censorship - and to curb their own intellectual excesses that drove Soviet journalists into silence, that drives academics today to eschew one field of research rather than another and to trim their syllabus to the prevailing opinions.

But there is no evidence for such an assertion. There never will be: you can't see self-censorship; it's the absence, the negative. It's the evidence of hundreds of manuscripts that were pulled from drawers and under beds where they had been hidden for decades when Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost offered the first glimpse behind the state of fear that was the USSR. We shall never know how many manuscripts were never written.

It was so much clearer back in those bad old days: they censored, we didn't and we could play heroes and villains. But for every Solzhenitsyn, there was a Pravda journalist or professor who knew that self-censorship was the road to survival. Dissidents the Medvedev brothers have revealed the extent to which academic research in the sciences was directed by the state. The wise did not engage in ideologically unsound research; if they did, they did not publish results in the only available - state-owned - academic journals. As late as 1986, at the height of Gorbachev's thaw, the depth of academic self-censorship about what happened at Chernobyl was profound. Only now are we discovering how profound the silence was as scientists sought to protect their position.

Much the same is true today in China, possibly the most censored country in the world. While some would argue that academics have more freedom to publish than their counterparts in the media, this is less than the truth: it depends what you're working on. Economics and the social sciences are dangerous areas. A damaging report on the state of rural China under the current economic dispensation in Beijing was first suppressed and, when published clandestinely, led to the exile of its author, He Qinglian, a former teacher and editor of the Shenzen Legal Daily . This is not an isolated case, but there can be little doubt that fear of a similar fate drives fellow academics into silence.

What is more difficult to understand is the preoccupation with academic self-censorship in the West today. In 1994, in the wake of the collapse of the USSR, the US jurist Ronald Dworkin wrote of the need for a "new map of censorship". It was not simply that censorship had shifted ground, more that freedom of expression was beginning to lose out in the most surprising manner, and not just from "freedom's oldest enemies - the despots and ruling thieves who fear it" - but also from "new enemies who claim to speak for justice not tyranny, and who point to other values we respect, including self-determination, equality and freedom from racial hatred and prejudice, as reasons why the right of free speech should now be demoted to a much lower grade of... importance".

And this was in the US, land of the First Amendment and still the gold standard for free expression with virtually no restraints on even the most vile or contentious opinion. In any substantive sense, expression had not been an issue. Now restraint was being urged in the name of "political correctness", out of consideration for the other, for minorities, the injunction being not to offend. The road to self-censorship was being paved with the best of intentions: speech codes that were tantamount to prohibitions were imposed on many US campuses; debate was trimmed to the prevailing winds; students claimed to be "offended" by this or that attitude taken by a lecturer to secure either its banishment or the dismissal of said academic. Evidence of any resulting self-censorship on campus is anecdotal. But a number of reports from bodies such as the National Coalition against Censorship, the Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship or Acadfree (set up in North America to investigate self-censorship on campus) suggest that its presence was enough to arouse anxieties within the academic community at large.

And things have got worse in the decade since Dworkin's warning. The arrival of a neoconservative Government, the rise of the religious Right, the attack on the World Trade Center, the War on Terror and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq have brought the restraint we call self-censorship into the heart of the US academic landscape.

We shall never know the precise degree to which it is affecting research and scholarship, but in the days following September 11, 2001, lecturers who challenged the received version of the event were, like their media counterparts, warned of the dangers of straying outside the narrow bounds of patriotism. The 2005 case of Ward Churchill of the University of Colorado and, most recently, of Kevin Barrett, a lecturer at the University of Wisconsin, whose views on 9/11 led local politicians to demand their dismissal is the latest illustration of this trend in action.

In the opinion of some, the stipulations of the Patriot Act that legally enforce college librarians to report on "dubious" websites accessed by students is having a chilling effect. Creationist prohibitions on the teaching of evolution and geological history, let alone the doctrines of Darwin, are enforced in a number of states, as is teaching on sexuality, specifically homosexuality. How many in such situations are keeping silent to save a job, pay a mortgage, safeguard preferment or ensure continuing state funding?

The fears that drive the academic world are not so different from those that influence the worlds of the media, culture or the arts. There has been a good deal more research on these than on the sheltered campus world, but one survey appears to confirm their tentative conclusions. Forbidden Knowledge concludes that although science is shaped by formal regulations and policies, the constraints that determine decisions are mostly self-imposed and reflect social, political, cultural and financial - ie, funding - pressures. Among the most sensitive topics were human cloning, stem-cell research, weapons, race, intelligence, sex and addiction. But as the authors admit, it is unlikely we shall ever be able to quantify these constraints.

And this is not the whole picture: not everyone would agree that the academic establishment is running scared - or staying silent - in the face of political and religious agendas. It is worth noting that neither Churchill nor Barrett was dismissed as a result of the allegations against them and at least one academic at Harvard University is categorical in refuting any suggestion of self-censorship in the face of pressure from the Government or funders. "The Patriot Act?" she asks. "The library community complains, petitions against it and ignores it. Stem-cell research? Harvard founds new institutions with private money and goes ahead at full bore. Its (former) president says whatever he wants about women and science, Native Americans and African Americans - and turns his liberal faculty against him. The Kennedy School and Chicago professors who argued that US foreign policy had been outsourced to Israel haven't been disciplined in this very pro-Jewish place." She makes the same point as Stanley Fish in The New York Times : "Should academic freedom of speech mean freedom to proselytise as well as freedom to teach and study any subject under the sun?" It's a question that neither side in the, at times heated, debate has fully explored.

In the UK, the debate is less fraught, external intervention in universities less public. Such anxieties as there are about self-censorship focus largely on the potential impact of the changing nature of university and research funding or the revised anti-terrorist legislation. Yet while such trends, together with the alleged undermining of tenure, the "commercialisation" of higher education, the "marginalisation" of bargaining systems and unions, political and religious intervention and the application of quantitative measurement of performance and outcomes, are seen by some to threaten independent analysis and engender a culture of self-censorship, overt intervention such as that experienced in the US is not yet perceived as a serious threat in the UK.

Judith Vidal-Hall is the editor of Index on Censorship.