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I think your BAU and likely the particular department within the BAU is pretty unrepresentative. I'm a faculty member at a different BAU and it's really nothing like this at all.
I will second this comment. Comparing my actual personal experiences in what was supposed to be the most extreme possible environment to what I read on the internet is what made me completely distrust the "wokeness is taking over everything" narrative in the first place.
Same world, different screens? I don't know how to reconcile these two comments with my personal experience.
My spouse has been a tenured humanities faculty member at a BAU for 20 years, with several different stints across the country the decade before that. Between our own experience and that of dozens of friends in the academy, everything the OP wrote rang true to me, except the timeline at the conclusion (our institution is 5-10 years ahead of the OP's account).
I'd add that faculty social life is stultifying - it's not that you can't ever have real conversations with people about difficult topics, but it takes a long time to break through the suffocating blanket of conformity. Most social encounters start with progressive consensus-building about the issues of the day, and often can't move past that. It's worse if there are unfamiliar people in the group, or administrators.
These phenomena may not universal, but are, at a minimum, widespread. Above all, I'd love to know what your institutions are doing right that you don't see this.
We don't have so many examples, but on second thought maybe this is yet another example of academic experiences being dramatically different depending on which department you're in. Both you and the OP seem to mention experience with humanities departments, though I'm not sure where @Tomato is.
I'm in pure math and I've found that even with new people I can argue almost anything political as long as I tie it back to some common fundamental value and avoid saying certain poisoned words (the only annoying part is that "meritocracy" is both of these things at the same time). A lot of my stated policy preferences are extremely liberal, so maybe this gives me enough trust and legitimacy that people don't think I'm secretly hiding different values when I say something not in the consensus---I can argue that standardized tests are actually good for undergrad admissions and people do think I believe so for the "right" reasons. It helps a lot with the trust issue to point out examples where something exceptional is happening that changes your belief---I'll say I don't like the general GRE but undergrad admissions are different for this and this reason.
Now for some speculation on why there might be a difference between fields, I think it's pretty important that for mathematicians, their research area isn't really expected to give them any special insight into politics. If a liberal mathematician hears about a Trump supporting colleague, there's an easy out: "well, they're my friend so I know their heart is in the right place and I know they treat everyone in the department with equal respect, but they're just confused because of so and so biases. Anyways, none of us are really that good at thinking about politics anyways, remember the last time we talked to our friend in history/philosophy/etc.? Also, remember the Unabomber? That Serge Lang was an AIDS denialist? Trump-guy isn't really messing up so badly". For a humanist who's actually supposed to be an expert in people and culture, the out isn't so easy and the assumption might become that supporting Trump is a true implication of their values which therefore must be evil.
I somehow missed this response, but two months later, I need to recognize what an excellent line this is.
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Check the poster's username and history. They're a fish not noticing water.
This is not the kind of comment you can throw out without evidence. And if you do point it out with evidence, it should be done as lightly as possible in a non-antagonistic way.
You should know better.
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That's unfair: atokenliberal's username is a wry commentary on the average orientation of The Motte, plus his/her posting history demonstrates both a solid degree of self-awareness and a reasonable theory of mind of his/her political opponents.
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Out of interest, are you humanities or sciences? I didn't put this in the main post for vague OpSec reasons, but this particular post was a 75/25 split between a humanities department and a science department. I had separate meetings with the people in the science department, and they were lovely; much easier to get along with, not least because half of them were from outside the US (lots of East Asians, South Asians, and Eastern Europeans) and consequently less obsessed with tribal signaling. More generally, they seemed more interested in the content of my ideas than running me through procedure or testing for wrongthink. Sadly, I was told they had minimal influence on who got the job, given they were only paying a quarter of the salary, at best serving as a tiebreaker.
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I think you'd need to unpack the details of that assertion if it is to carry much weight.
What is there to unpack? I don’t experience the things he claims to experience. Nobody I know does. Colleagues at my uni and other unis make fun of having to write a diversity statement for Berkeley, and that’s all I’ve ever heard about this stuff irl.
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