by Ethan Cai
Sarah Lawrence College professor Samuel Abrams wrote an op-ed addressing the issue of liberally-biased university administrators and in response, he tells Campus Reform, he received threats and vandalism to his office door.
The New York professor detailed what he believes to be a problem of the lack of viewpoint diversity on college campuses in a piece for The New York Times. While Abrams acknowledged that college professors are largely liberal, he claimed that the greater issue lies in the fact that university administrators are incredibly liberal.
Through a survey he conducted, the professor “found that liberal staff members outnumber their conservative counterparts by the astonishing ratio of 12-to-one. Only six percent of campus administrators identified as conservative to some degree, while 71 percent classified themselves as liberal or very liberal,” he wrote. “It’s no wonder so much of the nonacademic programming on college campuses is politically one-sided.”
Abrams cautioned students to think critically about what administrators are saying.
“Their ideological imbalance, coupled with their agenda-setting power, threatens the free and open exchange of ideas, which is precisely what we need to protect in higher education in these politically polarized times,” he said.
Following the op-ed, however, Abrams says he received threats to his safety and that his office door was vandalized.
Abrams sat down with Campus Reform to elaborate on the backlash to his piece.
“Most of my colleagues would prefer to see me disappear and be silenced rather than continue to talk about this,” Abrams said.
“Since the writing of the op-ed, I have received numerous threats to my safety, my family, accusations of sexual assault that went up around campus — there’s no grounds for any of these sorts of things,” he told Campus Reform. “Basically, as soon as students were angry and as soon as people didn’t like what I was writing, they hit the nuclear button. They basically say we’re going to try to trash this professor.”
Abrams, however, said that he is optimistic about the future and stresses the need for multiple voices to be expressed in a campus environment.
Campus Reform reached out to Sarah Lawrence College but did not receive a response in time for publication.
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Ethan Cai is a Campus Reform Intern and New Hampshire Campus Correspondent, reporting on liberal bias and abuse. He is a Freshman at Dartmouth College studying Quantitative Government Analysis with a minor in Economics.
Photo “Samuel Abrams” by Sarah Lawrence College. Background Photo “Sarah Lawrence College” by djrobgordon. CC BY-SA 3.0.
