'Coddling' and 'Canceling': A Tale of Two Titles

The ‘Coddling’ documentary is now on AppleTV & Google Play! ‘Canceling’ is a year old, but the Conformity Gauntlet just keeps getting tougher…thanks AAUP!

Well, folks, I’ve got some good news and some bad news.

The good news is that The Coddling of the American Mind Movie will be available on AppleTV, Google Play, and other streaming platforms beginning today!

I can’t thank the film’s producers Courtney and Ted Balaker enough for their work on this film, which is based on Jonathan Haidt’s and my book of the same name. It has the distinction of being the first ever film distributed on Substack, and has been screened in over 60 locations in four different countries.

It’s also very cool that the documentary’s wide release coincides with the publication date of “The Canceling of the American Mind,” my most recent book, which I co-authored with the brilliant Gen Z journalist Rikki Schlott. It’s wild that it’s already been a year since we released “Canceling,” and I couldn’t be prouder of it.

But unfortunately that leads me to the bad news…

Cancel Culture and the Conformity Gauntlet have gotten worse

The first bit of bad news (yeah, sorry, there’s more than just one thing) is that Cancel Culture has worsened in the last year since the release of “Canceling.” As Rikki and I detail in the book, Cancel Culture is the measurable uptick, beginning around 2014 and ramping up in 2017, of campaigns to get people fired, expelled, deplatformed, or otherwise punished for speech that is — or would be — protected by the First Amendment.

As I’ve pointed out many times, in the last decade we have seen more than 1,000 campaigns to get professors punished for their First Amendment-protected speech. Nearly two-thirds of those campaigns succeeded, and almost 200 professors ended up being fired or forced out. And we know this is a wild underestimate, given that about one in six professors say that they have been punished or threatened with punishment for their speech, teaching, or research.

Unfortunately, this trend has continued, with 2023 being the worst year on record for campus deplatformings, with a record-setting 145 total attempts and 75 successes. Even more unfortunately, 2024 is almost certainly going to beat it. As of Oct. 15, FIRE has logged 134 attempts in our Campus Deplatforming Database for 2024, and there are still 2 1/2 months to go before the end of the year.

The other bad news is that ideologues continue to tighten their grip on our universities. Regular ERI readers will by now be familiar with the Conformity Gauntlet, which is the name Rikki and I gave to the system of hurdles and barriers set up in academia to keep dissenters from succeeding. The Gauntlet begins with an unfavorable situation on campuses for viewpoint diversity, with the ratio of left-leaning versus right-leaning professors reaching the point of near-total left-wing domination. Then of course you have speech codes, Bias Response Teams, and hotlines that allow students to report professors and each other for wrongthink.

The result of all this is a system where anyone who doesn’t toe the ideological line has about as much of a chance of making it in higher ed as Galactus does of fitting into a Mini Cooper.

Well, thanks to a recent statement from the American Association of University Professors on “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Criteria for Faculty Evaluation,” those odds just got even worse. My FIRE colleague Robert Shibley discussed the AAUP’s statement at length on FIRE’s blog last week, but the basic gist of it is this: The AAUP supports mandatory DEI statements in hiring as long as those requirements are voted on by faculty members. Or, as I put it on X last week:

If you haven’t read the thing, you should. It contains some seriously Orwellian language. For example, it says the AAUP “does not consider it a violation of academic freedom per se when an appropriate larger group, such as a faculty senate or a department, collectively adopts an educational policy or goal and evaluates individual faculty members’ performance by reference to them even though they dissent.”

What does that sound like, if not a free-floating ability on the part of faculty members to never hire another dissenter again? This, in addition to the AAUP’s reversal of its stance on academic boycotts earlier this year, signals an unfortunate worsening of everything Rikki and I examined, diagnosed, and warned against in “Canceling.” Orthodoxy marches self-confidently forward. 

And there’s also the information we gleaned from North Dakota State University’s American College Student Freedom, Progress and Flourishing Survey, which my colleague Adam Goldstein and I wrote about recently. The survey shows, among other things, that an increasing number of students want the ability to report their professors for having opinions that those students believe are wrong. This is even when those opinions are, in fact, backed up by data — such as the idea that biological sex is a scientific fact (Carole Hooven) or that there is no evidence of anti-black bias in police shootings (Roland Fryer). As I mentioned above, there are already plenty of resources on campus that are tailor-made to facilitate this kind of behavior.

Now, the AAUP continues to fight for the ability to mandate DEI statements, which are unavoidably political litmus tests, and pretend they are compatible with academic freedom because it's voted on by faculty. As if majority opinion makes dogmatism in higher education acceptable.

At this point we have to ask, just how much conformity is enough? It seems like 100% is the goal at this point.

SHOT FOR THE ROAD

Getting back to good news for a moment, there were a lot of wonderful things that happened this past year — including the launch of this Substack, as well as the “Coddling” documentary and the “Canceling” book. But one of my absolute favorite things is that my visit to Los Angeles for the premiere of “Coddling” led to a wonderful conversation with my hero, the Monty Python legend John Cleese!

I encourage you to check it out — right after you watch the “The Coddling of the American Mind” documentary, streaming on AppleTV, Google Play, and other platforms today!