Not the case at all. We have plenty of people working on projects that might be perceived as woke. The main thing we’re keen to avoid is accusations of cancel culture or right-leaning views being censored — that’s what I mean by bad headlines.
So in particular, if you were interviewing for a position in front of a higher-up in the department and your first words to them indicated that you might be very likely, as a teacher, to say the kind of thing that would generate a "Woke Academia Gone Mad" headline, they might choose not to hire you?
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Unless I'm misunderstanding it, this sentence kind of amazes me. As an example of how much your current institution respects ideological diversity, you mention that the institution has deliberately fostered a chilling effect on speech where it's common knowledge that speech perceived as being too woke will be frowned upon by the higher-ups... and where those higher-ups are themselves acting as a result of a chilling effect deliberately created by the government to minimise the presence in academia of an ideology it does not like? And this seems to you like ideological diversity?
I mean, that makes sense if you define 'ideologically diverse' to mean 'friendly to right-wing viewpoints', but not if you have a more reasonable definition of what that should mean.
I mean, you probably should have guessed that, yes. You probably shouldn't lead with "Hire me, I'll be a constant annoyance to you for years to come." The question of whether you can get hired despite viewpoints that might make them look bad, if you otherwise have a stellar resume, is distinct from the question of whether you can get hired with the opening pitch "I'm gonna make you look terrible in the press, k?"
I don't have much direct experience with US academia and how it compares to European academia, but this sounds reasonable to me, yes. When I meet Americans older than 50, they are always amazed that I go to the bar with people I work with all the time; they seem surprised that anyone anywhere in the world still does this.
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