Story of the week
Why I Quit the Tenure Track (The Atlantic) by Tyler Austin Harper
I began to develop a case of political vertigo. There I was, joining my colleagues in sifting through our curriculum like anti-racist truffle pigs; assigning an Afro Caribbean graphic novel, Marshallese ecopoetry, and the like to diversify my syllabi; and organizing a “Decolonization and Liberation”–themed MLK Day celebration meant to honor a civil-rights leader who had been assassinated while supporting sanitation workers agitating for basic labor rights. Meanwhile, the college was paying ungodly sums to corporate mercenaries to ensure that it could continue exploiting its most vulnerable employees. But if administrators felt the least bit sheepish about their hypocrisy, they didn’t show it.
This week in Expression
Tuskegee tells students to suit up and leave the durag at home by Dylynn Lasky
How the unraveling of Jason Arday’s career and the UK’s censorship collided by Sarah McLaughlin
Pete Hegseth wants the Pentagon press corps on a leash by Willa Mack
NYU’s crackdown on affinity graduations solves a problem that isn’t there by Elizabeth Maguire
Countries are hiding censorship in ‘cybercrime’ bills. A UN treaty could make things worse by Sarah McLaughlin
The treaty purports to improve international cooperation in addressing crimes taking place using computer systems — but cooperation is not limited to specific online criminal acts like fraud or phishing. Instead, the treaty pushes nations to share personal data that other nations request about individuals accused of committing “serious” crimes.
But there’s an important question here. What constitutes a “serious” crime? The treaty does little to define it other than clarifying that it’s a crime carrying at least a four-year prison sentence as a punishment. For billions of people around the world, speech is a crime that warrants a long prison term.
The romance of fair use and fiction by Ally Duong
This week in FIRE’s blog
International free speech stories of the week
Another concern raised by the organization is the creation of a new Digital Safety Commission, which would be responsible for interpreting and enforcing provisions dealing with harmful online content.
The report argues that platforms could face fines of up to $10 million or 3% of global revenue if they fail to adequately address content deemed to promote hatred, while leaving key definitions to regulators after the legislation is passed.
Reminder of the Week
In light of Tyler Austin Harper’s fantastic article in The Atlantic this week (see “Story of the Week” above) and all the many problems with higher education it raised, it’s worth a reminder that Rikki Schlott and I wrote a whole damn book about the scourge of Cancel Culture inside and outside American academia.
One thing worth remembering about The Canceling of the American Mind is why I felt compelled to write it in the first place. At the time, it seemed like virtually nobody with the resources to do it was willing to undertake a serious, data-intensive examination of just how bad Cancel Culture had become, particularly in higher education, and how historically unusual the situation was.
And this was exactly the kind of work academia should have been doing itself. Universities should have been able to examine their own institutions and ask “Is there actually a problem here? How serious is it? What does the evidence show?” Instead, large parts of academia seemed barely able to keep themselves from sneering at the very idea that there was a problem—even though an enormous number of people inside higher education knew perfectly well that there was one.
The data were extraordinary. In FIRE’s 2022 faculty survey, 16% of professors reported that they had either been disciplined or threatened with discipline for their teaching, research, academic talks, or non-academic expression. 29% said they had been pressured by administrators to avoid researching controversial topics.
And the evidence has only gotten stronger. FIRE’s much larger 2024 faculty survey found that 35% of professors had recently toned down something they were writing because they worried it would cause too much controversy. The comparable number among social scientists surveyed during the McCarthy era was nine percent.
Nearly four times the McCarthy-era rate.
That is a disaster. And remember: Nobody seriously pretends McCarthyism didn’t happen.
There is an additional problem when the institutions suffering from this kind of dysfunction are the institutions responsible for producing and policing knowledge. Higher education and journalism exercise enormous influence over what gets researched, what gets covered, what gets dismissed, what gets fact-checked, and ultimately what the rest of the country is encouraged to regard as true or false. That makes failures within those institutions unusually difficult to confront, because the institutions you are criticizing have disproportionate power to decide which criticisms get taken seriously in the first place.
That was one of the reasons we wrote The Canceling of the American Mind. To my knowledge, it remains the only book on Cancel Culture that attempts anything like this combination of data, historical comparison, case analysis, and explanation of how the phenomenon actually worked.
So if Tyler Austin Harper’s piece has you wondering how American higher education got here, or if you simply want to remember what actually happened during the period when much of the press was insisting that cancel culture was imaginary, exaggerated, or merely “accountability,” check out The Canceling of the American Mind.
I can’t wait until Spinal Tap gets a hold of Woke; their Woke will go to eleven.
If "cancel culture" was really about "accountability", then it's another example of authority resisting accountability, because it's not bidirectional. The cancelers aren't subject to--and are quite evasive of--measures to impose accountability on themselves.