Woke women are pushing America left. And they will be doing so for generations to come if the rise of progressive female faculty on campus continues its current trajectory.

Samuel Abrams, professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, analyzed a new survey from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression of approximately 1,491 college faculty members at four-year colleges and universities in the U.S., noting significant gender gaps related to free expression and academic freedom.

“We have noticed that there are too many professors who are afraid to speak freely, and some try to silence dissent,” he said in a phone interview. “The question is, who is doing that? We know it is more likely to be people in the humanities than sciences. Also, those people tend to be younger faculty, those who have come up in the last decade or so doing social justice work and activist scholarship. Another division is that women are far more likely than men to say it is appropriate to silence dissent and want DEI litmus tests, some of which have been thrown out in quite a few states as being biased. This is very dangerous.”

Women make up 47% of full-time faculty members, up from 32% in the fall of 1991, according to a 2020 analysis by the American Association of University Professors. According to the FIRE survey , female faculty are more comfortable with students shouting down a speaker, with 49% responding it was “never acceptable” compared to 61% of male faculty. And while 19% of female faculty preferred to protect against hate speech even if it restricts speech not intended to be hateful, only 8% of male faculty favored this.

When it comes to DEI trainings, female faculty were more supportive of them. A majority (53%) of male faculty responded that the administration should take no action when asked about professors who refused DEI training, compared to 33% of female faculty.

The bottom line is that compared to male faculty, female faculty are not helping the cause of free expression and academic freedom. Their attitudes likely affect teaching in the classroom and, in turn, influence the next generation of female leaders.

“We see that higher education has become the domain of women,” Abrams continued. “We see more and more women going through Ph.D. programs and entering higher education. Many of them come through harm studies programs and are scholar-activists. They are not purely academics.”

These faculty aren’t necessarily getting alternative viewpoints in their friend groups. According to the FIRE survey, female faculty seem to have a less intellectually diverse set of friends: 84% of female faculty reported that half or more of their friends have the same party identifications or leanings as them, compared to 74% of male faculty.

Ultimately, the report concluded, “Intolerance seems … to be linked to more general societal patterns that are most prominent among young, liberal, and female faculty members.”

Parents concerned about the messages that Hollywood or Democratic politicians such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) are sending young women might encourage those women to look to female faculty on campus as mentors. If those professors can’t model how to freely express themselves and have civil discussions with people with diverse viewpoints, these young women should turn elsewhere.

As more and more progressive women become faculty members, we are likely to see free expression and academic freedom suffer on campus. College students and Americans should beware.

This piece was originally published by the Washington Examinerhttps://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/faith-freedom-self-reliance/woke-female-faculty-threaten-free-speech-on-campus.