It’s absolutely not. The balance of power has shifted toward the students in recent years (for better or worse). If a professor is able to “punish” “contrarian views,” it is only to the extent that the rest of the students get behind it.
But I also think the punished views are at most socially punished in all but outlier cases. Having worked in higher ed for a bit and then transitioned into tech, I can say that students are over quick (on both left and right) to chalk up a bad score (read: “b” when I thought I deserved an “a”) to a biased attitude toward content rather than a substantive objection to the quality of argument. One thing that is true of humans in general: we will more easily find the holes in the arguments we disagree with, and what’s more, most students have similar ish ideas (especially the “contrarian” ones), so after two years of teaching a class on (say) the history of the civil war or gender in 18th century literature, the arguments are going to be familiar enough that you can just pattern match on them.
It's more than that. And it's not just a "last 20 years thing", it probably goes back to the beginning of the 20th century, if not before.
There is a subtle selection bias going on. Like-minded people congregate together. A college professor will favor students who are agreeable to his politics, and will offer encouragement and extra effort. Those students are likely to go into academia themselves (and those who don't act as casual/amateur recruiters out in the private sector, to that university and even to the professor). Balances shift, glacially. At some point, it becomes perceptible enough that some students actively avoid those professors, programs, and universities. It's polarized (the polarization was noted decades ago, before our current mess).
The side that favors this process gives its biggest shit-eating grin, says that there is no such thing, and if there is, isn't it the other side's fault? The other side grumbles about how they're just indoctrinating kids (and you can find evidence of the grumbling going back at least through the 1960s, but picking up steam in the 1980s).
It's very real. It's not a good situation. It's not very "diverse". It leads to warped perception from both camps. One now thinks it is the champion of reason and logic, of science (and it's not). The other side grows to distrust those very same things (we'll all feel the damage from that, if it's not already happening).
> The other side grumbles about how they're just indoctrinating kids (and you can find evidence of the grumbling going back at least through the 1960s, but picking up steam in the 1980s).
People have been complaining about schools indoctrinating children for thousands of years. Nothing is actually new.
God and Man at Yale was published in 1951. Red Scare nonsense got lots of faculty members fired for being communist sympathizers in the 50s. Students were shot and killed by the national guard in the 60s.
The fun thing is that none of that makes claim that they weren't communist sympathizers. Saying anything about bad regarding soviet internment camps was likely to get you some very funny looks in more than a few circles well into the 80s. The people that knew about them, and knew how things were over in the USSR would literally drop down to a whisper when discussing these things at the dinner table even in private company.
Was it right to fire the professors? Debatable. Were they communist sympathizers? Most likely, considering the influence of the USCP and the money that Moscow was pumping into it.
Remember, until the late 40s, or even the early 60s, Socialism, and it's final "logical conclusion" Communism was regarded as potentially sound political and economic theory by a majority of intellectuals, and most definitely Hollywood. (To be fair, Hollywood was pretty staunchly pro-soviet from the 20s onwards).
