Academic freedom and the unknown: an exploration of perceptions, awareness, and policy regarding unidentified anomalous phenomena research

Brief

Yingling and Yingling (2024) administered a confidential Qualtrics survey (Feb–May 2022) to N=1,460 tenured and tenure-track faculty across 14 disciplines at 144 Carnegie R1 research universities. The central finding is a perception gap: faculty overestimate peer opposition to UAP research by a wide margin, 52.67% reported concern for their own tenure or promotion, yet only 7.4% said they would vote negatively on a colleague's tenure case for conducting such research (27.95% said 'Maybe'). Social stigma ran higher than professional risk, with 69.04% reporting some degree of concern about ridicule. Physics faculty self-assessed the highest disciplinary capability (95.82%) while simultaneously reporting near-universal ridicule anxiety, a tension the authors call out explicitly.

Metadata

Category

Stigma

Venue

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications

Type

Peer-reviewed

Year

2024

Authors

Marissa E. Yingling, Charlton W. Yingling, Bethany A. Bell

DOI

10.1057/s41599-024-03351-4

Access

Open access

Length

1.2 M

Programs

NASA UAP scientific investigation, Gillibrand Amendment, ODNI UAP office

Instruments

Qualtrics online survey

Data sources

faculty email directories at 144 Carnegie R1 universities, Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education, National Center for Education Statistics baccalaureate degree data

Tags

UAP-stigma, academic freedom, survey research, higher education, social science, peer perception

Key points

• 7.4% of faculty said they would vote negatively on a colleague's tenure case for UAP research; 27.95% said 'Maybe'; 61.92% said 'No', yet 52.67% reported concern for their own tenure or promotion, a perception gap of roughly 45 percentage points.p.1
• Concern for ridicule totaled 69.04% across all faculty, exceeding professional tenure concern by approximately 16 percentage points.p.1
• 66.24% of faculty reported their discipline was capable to some degree of evaluating UAP evidence or significance.p.1
• Physics (95.82%), philosophy (88.73%), anthropology (87.09%), and engineering (83.15%) most frequently reported evaluative capability; economics (59.7%), literature/English (54.46%), nursing (53.33%), and art and design (51.52%) most frequently responded 'Not at All' capable.p.1
• Nearly three in four physics faculty reported some degree of ridicule concern despite physics claiming the highest self-assessed disciplinary capability of any field surveyed.p.1
• The eligible population totaled 39,984 tenured and tenure-track faculty; the survey response rate was 3.9%, which the authors attribute in part to stigma suppressing participation.p.4
• 250 open-ended responses were coded into 14 thematic categories pertaining to research or teaching, each illustrated by at least three example quotes.p.1
• Religious studies faculty gave the highest mean importance rating for UAP to academic theories and knowledge (mean 3.97 on a 5-point scale), exceeding physics (3.67) and all science disciplines.p.5

Verbatim

• “Concern for ridicule totaled 69.04%.”

  p.1

• “Thus, academia has been caught in a tautology. Often scholars know little about this topic because peers have discouraged others from mentioning it seriously.”

  p.2

• “Faculty do not know what other faculty think.”

  p.2

• “The public cannot look to scholars for insight. Academia thus abandons a critical role it serves for the wider public.”

  p.2

Most interesting

• The gap between self-reported tenure concern (52.67%) and actual stated peer opposition (7.4% 'Yes' negative vote) spans roughly 45 percentage points, suggesting UAP stigma operates largely through imagined rather than documented peer hostility.
• Physics faculty simultaneously claimed the highest disciplinary capability to evaluate UAP (95.82%) and reported near-universal ridicule concern, the sharpest internal contradiction in the dataset.
• The 3.9% response rate from 39,984 eligible faculty is notably low even for unsolicited academic surveys; the authors explicitly flag stigma as a probable suppressor of participation.
• Religious studies faculty rated UAP as most important to academic theories and knowledge (mean 3.97 of 5), outscoring every science discipline including physics (3.67), a counterintuitive disciplinary ranking.
• The survey was fielded Feb–May 2022, bracketed by the first congressional UAP hearing in nearly 50 years (May 2022) and NASA's formal investigation announcement (June 2022), making it the first national faculty study conducted during active government disclosure activity.
• Whistleblower David Grusch, who held Top Secret/SCI clearances as a senior intelligence officer, alleged in June 2023 that evidence of 'materials of exotic origin' was withheld specifically from 'academia', a claim the authors document in their introduction as context for the study's urgency.