Recently in this space, professors Richard Cherwitz and Kenneth Zagacki responded in kind after I replied to Cherwitz’s complaint about the creation of an institute within UT Austin that would promote individual rights and civic virtue, constitutionalism and the rule of law and free enterprise and markets.

He bemoaned the Civitas Institute’s existence because he believes it would “eliminate programs designed to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion” and promote a conservative political agenda.

I explained that colleges and universities are already rife with hard-left content and professors who push it, so the establishment of one college at UT Austin with a traditionalist outlook should be a welcomed counterbalance to the steep leftward tilt in academia.

In their response, Cherwitz and Zagacki were determined to deny the left’s dominance in higher education by claiming that traditional and conservative viewpoints enjoy bounteous representation in academia.

Such a claim withers in the cold, broad shadow of data that evinces the opposite conclusion.

Professor Eric Kaufmann of the University of London conducted research for the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology that assessed viewpoint discrimination on college campuses in America, the U.K., and Canada. The results were disheartening but not unexpected.

According to Kaufmann, both hard and soft authoritarianism are pervasive in academia.

In the U.S., one-third of conservative graduate students or academics have been disciplined or threatened with discipline for their views. Meanwhile, 75 percent of conservative academics in the social sciences and humanities in the U.S. and Britain say their departments are a hostile environment for their beliefs. In the U.S., fully seven in 10 conservative academics in the social sciences or humanities say they self-censor.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression found that fewer than half of college students surveyed knew that the First Amendment protects speech they deemed hate speech. More than half supported disinviting guest speakers whose views they dislike.

The left’s newest insidious tactic isn’t to disinvite speakers but to submit them for review to prevent them from being invited on campus in the first place. In this way, the leftist echo chamber is secure from encroachment by heterodox views.

Perhaps the political climate at UT Austin, where Professor Cherwitz taught for many years, is more temperate than at other universities. Alas.

The Federalist’s Margot Cleveland writes that the Global Disinformation Index’s (GDI) report blacklisting conservative news outlets as the “riskiest” disinformation media companies was researched and written by students at the University of Texas at Austin’s Global Disinformation Index Lab (GDIL).

Cleveland’s article notes that in February, the Washington Examiner’s Gabe Kaminsky authored a multi-part series titled “Disinformation Inc.” In his first installment about self-styled “disinformation” tracking organizations, Kaminsky reported the GDI’s rating of American news outlets was skewed, with the top 10 supposed “riskiest” outlets being conservative. In contrast, the top 10 “least risky” outlets leaned nearly entirely left of center.

Equally damning was that the government-funded National Endowment for Democracy granted GDI more than half a million dollars between 2020 and 2021. The State Department’s Global Engagement Center likewise awarded the GDI $100,000 in taxpayer funds in 2021.

The GDI approached UT Austin’s GDI lab with the goal of completing the report before the midterms. In recruiting students for the project, GDIL boasted the “work will be immediately valuable” because GDI wants “this to make waves ahead of the midterms,” suggesting the shared goal was to affect the 2022 election.

The student workers were undertrained, and the lab manager had to step in while she and the students hastily completed reviews of media outlets. After the debacle, UT Austin retained the surplus funds GDIL was paid for the project.

Kaminsky exposed so much left-wing corruption at UT Austin’s GDIL that there isn’t space here to recount it all.

If professors Cherwitz and Zagacki still avow Panglossian faith in academia’s imagined impartiality, they are either living blissfully unaware in an ideological bubble or are willfully ignorant.