Who's Canceling whom?

Wherein, yes, I engage in "whataboutism."

Dyanis Conrad has been a long-time professor at the University of South Dakota. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, she teaches a course there titled “The Foundations of American Education.” Conrad is Black, in a state that is overwhelmingly white. So, she says, it’s a bit of a challenge when she devotes some part of her class to talking about the reality of racism in the United States.

That challenge was immeasurably compounded when she was targeted last year by an anti-”woke” group in the state that accused her of teaching Critical Race Theory. Indeed, South Dakota, where two percent of residents are Black, has followed the lead of many other Republican-controlled states in passing new laws to legislate what can and can’t be taught in the state’s schools, including its public universities. Among the bills that the right-wing governor Kristi Noem has signed into law include those banning orientation programs that teach “divisive concepts,” related to race, gender and sex. And under pressure from the governor and the state board of regents, the state’s six public universities have all now closed their diversity offices. Conrad herself is leaving USD.

For years now, the term “cancel culture” has been a ubiquitous part of this latest round of American culture wars. And the term itself and its cognates - like cancellation - is almost exclusively applied to those deemed targeted by progressives. High profile professors at places like Princeton receive national attention if they are deemed cancelled, the victim of “woke mobs.” Of course, FOX News plasters the airwaves with nonstop outrage about progressives shutting down free speech the length and breadth of the land. But these cases, and the larger issue of “cancel culture” feature regularly in the New York Times, the Washington Post and elsewhere. And a professor who has fallen afoul of those “mobs” has an open door to tell their story in the pages of the Wall Street Journal.

This isn’t meant to dismiss or justify every instance in which a faculty member who questions prevailing liberal sentiment on elite college campuses about race and culture more generally is sanctioned for doing so. (Obligatory “to be sure” disclaimer here. Apologies to Freddie deBoer).

But the lack of proportion in national coverage of the sources of threat to open debate and inquiry in American classrooms is, quite simply, maddening.

Across the country, Republican-dominated state governments are proposing and passing evermore comprehensive restrictions on what topics can be taught. Some of these laws would mandate the withholding of funding for institutions that dare speak racism’s name. Or sanction schools for teaching “divisive topics,” like about the persistence of inequality in the United States (because, you know, today’s Republican elites are positively horrified by divisiveness). Others would allow interested parties to sue teachers directly.

Pressure on curricula is exerted in other ways as well. Last year, in North Carolina’s Johnston County, the board of commissioners threatened to withhold all $7.9 million in funding until the school district adopted a new ethics policy stipulating that classrooms must emphasize that “the United States’ foundational documents shall not be undermined,” and “all people who contributed to American Society will be recognized and presented as reformists, innovators and heroes to our culture.” According to the (Raleigh) News and Observer , “the policy says failure to comply ‘will result in disciplinary action up to and including dismissal.’ Under the gun, the school district quickly fell in line.

Some of these measures, like Florida’s notorious “Don’t say gay” law, have received tons of coverage. But the totality of the enterprise, which a UCLA study says might affect up to a third of the nation’s school kids, does not generate nearly the media stir that the phenomenon of “cancellation” does.

Among other things, that’s ironic. There was intense criticism from some quarters of Dave Chapelle for his recent Netflix special, in which he proudly branded himself as a skeptic on transgender identities. And there were calls for Netflix to pull the special, which brought the nation’s most visible “free speech” defenders out in force to decry that possibility (Netflix did not pull the special, by the way). But Chapelle is a comedy giant. He may have lost some fans in the recent brouhaha. But his audience is largely intact. The same is true for Joe Rogan, the podcast superstar who has also branded himself a skeptic on transgender issues and who has also been platforming Covid disinformation spreaders. Despite efforts to boycott Spotify, the platform that streams The Joe Rogan Experience, Spotify stood by its man and his hundreds million strong audience.

The tendency to cover dustups at the Harvards, Princetons and Stanfords of the world reflects an elite bias in coverage of higher education in the United States. But a consequence of that elite bias is that the focus on those institutions, which are liberal havens, is a profound distortion of the state of play of where in America the pressure to dictate what is said and taught is most intense and most consequential. Indeed, plenty of professors who espouse more progressive views are also being targeted by conservatives for sanction and dismissal at their universities, including at places like Concordia University in Chicago. Some of you may scoff at those names - after all, who cares who about universities no one’s ever heard of? Except that countless college kids are matriculating at those schools and places like the University of South Dakota, and the University of Tennessee.

You’d be hard pressed to develop what I’d regard as a reasonable perspective on any of this if you listened only to the highest profile critics of the progressive academy - people like Andrew Sullivan, John McWhorter and Jonathan Haidt (all of whose large platforms are fully intact). And there’s no liberal media outlet banging the drum about all these *government*-led efforts to shut down ideas they don’t like to match the relentlessness of the Journal, FOX, and the entire right-wing media ecosystem about the latest attack on free speech by woke mobs.

My own university is a highly instructive case of the larger forces I’m talking about. Its student body is largely liberal and it has a predominantly liberal professoriate, a place where a substantial minority of conservative students, according to a recent survey, say they feel a need to self-censor for fear of facing social opprobrium. Overwhelmingly, it’s worth noting, the students who do express that fear say it comes from their peers, not their professors, who these same students said generally created a welcoming and open environment in the classroom.

But whatever the campus “culture,” the university is overseen by a right-wing dominated Board of Governors and increasingly conservative Board of Trustees. Both those bodies are intruding in matters they have historically left to the campus. UNC made national headlines last year (we’ve made national headlines for lots of not great reasons the last ten years or so) when it attempted to hire into a tenured position, Nikole Hannah-Jones. Jones, of course, conceived and spear-headed the 1619 project, itself one of the major rallying cries for the nationwide right-wing attack I’ve described above. Though Jones’ would-be colleagues in UNC’s Journalism school enthusiastically endorsed her for tenure in anticipation of her hiring, the Board of Trustees sat on that recommendation for months (a maneuver that itself is *highly* unusual). Though they eventually relented, Jones decided not to accept the position (it’s one she’d obviously wanted. Among other things, she’s an alum).

Jones herself was not “canceled.” She ended up at Howard University, a boon to that great school. But as the controversy played out, two professors in the journalism school publicly criticized UNC for its handling of the matter. In particular, they raised questions about how much of a role Walter Hussman, who’d gifted the J-school $25 million and was opposed to Jones’ appointment, played in the slow-rolling of her hiring.

The university responded, later reporting revealed, by snooping through their email as well as perhaps two dozen other faculty, in order to determine whether they’d leaked the donor agreement that Hussman had signed (there’s no evidence that they had, and the agreement, in any event, is a public record).

Look, we all make choices about what to focus on. We care about what we care about. But insofar as people with platforms comment on the events around them, the fact is that they are articulating a set of priorities, a notion of how the world should be and the obstacles - presumably the ones worth expending energy writing about - to that better world. 

So, no, everyone needn't take up the same causes, or have the same priorities in what they write about. But if you really are going to cape, for example, for the Princeton professor recently fired after the reopening of an investigation into a previous inappropriate relationship with an undergrad, it's not only because you think he's being treated unfairly.

It's because you think his treatment is a disturbing sign of the times, one reflecting an abuse of power and a warping of our institutions, yet another example of our educational institutions shutting down free expression. Which means, I presume, that you care a lot about that larger issue. Which, for me anyway, raises the question: what about the systematic, coordinated nationwide political campaign against free expression you’re generally ignoring?