Category: Cancel Culture

FIRE gives awards for the Ten Worst Censors of 2024; Harvard gets sixth Lifetime Censorship Award

February 13, 2024 • 9:00 am

At midnight last night, FIRE (The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) put up its list of the “10 Worst Censors of 2024”.

Part of the intro:

Each year, FIRE names and shames the worst-of-the-worst silencers, bowdlerizers, and steamrollers of free speech.

This year, we’ve included five free speech villains whose chilling misdeeds happened off of  college campuses. Thelist belowincludes people guilty of many forms of censorship  including raiding a small-town newspaper, punishing a middle schooler for wearing eye black at a football game, canceling students and professors for their views on the Israel-Hamas war, and retroactively censoring famous authors without their consent. The 13th annual Lifetime Censorship Award went to Harvard University, a university as censorial as it is famous.

Previous lists were limited to campuses, but no longer: off-campus censors were also in the running.  The list below is in no particular order, and there’s a longer explanation of each ranking at the website given at the top.

I was particularly interested in the Razzies given to the California Community Colleges (for requiring faculty to pledge allegiance to DEI) and Texas A&M (a state school) for its pattern of firing, deplatforming, and censorship.

Last but not least, Harvard University will receive FIRE’s sixth Lifetime Censorship Award, reserved for those colleges that deserve special recognition for their commitment to censorship. The school earned the award for landing at the bottom of FIRE’s annual free speech rankings, threatening the New York Post with a defamation lawsuit, driving out lecturer Carole Hooven for arguing that biological sex is real, and rescinding a fellowship for form

I wanted to show you why Harvard got the lowest ranking; and the ranking was assigned well before Claudine Gay and the Presidents of MIT and Penn were excoriated for their testimony before a House committee:

Harvard University came in dead last on this year’s College Free Speech Rankings — achieving a worst-ever score. When asked about Harvard’s abysmal ranking during her congressional testimony in December, then-Harvard President Claudine Gay said she didn’t think the ranking was “an accurate representation” of Harvard’s respect for free speech. But all one needs to do to understand Harvard’s disrespect for free speech is look at its record of censorship.

Only a few weeks before Gay’s testimony, Harvard hired self-advertised “media assassins” to threaten the New York Post with a defamation lawsuit and “immense” damages if the paper published a story alleging Gay plagiarized some of her scholarship. So much for placing “a high priority on freedom of speech” — or freedom of the press for that matter. Gay resigned on Jan. 2, after more than 40 allegations of plagiarism came to light.

Long before Harvard threatened news outlets with litigation for their reporting, it punished faculty and students for their speech. School administrators drove out lecturer Carole Hooven for arguing that biological sex is real. It rescinded a fellowship for former Human Rights Watch Executive Director Kenneth Roth over his purported “anti-Israel bias.” It effectively fired an economics professor for an op-ed he published in India. It canceled a professor’s course on policing following student uproar. It fired professor Ronald Sullivan from his deanship after students protested his role on Harvey Weinstein’s criminal defense team. It bizarrely demanded students take down a Nicki Minaj flag because the community could find it “offensive.” And the list goes on.

Even outside speakers invited to campus aren’t safe from Harvard’s censorial glare. In 2022, feminist philosopher Devin Buckley was disinvited from an English department colloquium because of her views on sex and gender. Her talk was supposed to be on the separate topic of British romanticism.

Harvard students clearly feel the chill. Students report low administrative support for free speech and low comfort expressing ideas, placing the school near the bottom of FIRE’s College Free Speech Rankings in both individual categories. Unfortunately, Harvard students themselves may also contribute to the problem. If the efforts to oust Sullivan and cancel the policing class aren’t evidence enough, an alarming 30% of Harvard students think using violence to stop a campus speech is acceptable in at least some circumstances.

For its long track record of censorship, Harvard is receiving FIRE’s Lifetime Censorship Award. It joins Georgetown University, Yale University, Syracuse University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and DePaul University in receiving this “honor.” It’s past time Harvard truly commits to its ostensible truth-seeking mission and the principles of free speech and academic freedom that make it possible. But that may be wishful thinking, the triumph of hope over experience.

The new President of Harvard hasn’t yet been chosen, but I suspect it will have to be another black woman lest Harvard be criticized for, well, Sarah Haider talks about this in her nice new analysis of DEI, including a tweet:

This is why there were numerous calls to replace Claudine Gay with another black woman. The honor was bestowed on Black Womanhood, the political category, not on the black woman herself. This illustrates one important sense in which modern tokenism is unlike its predecessor: far from being objected to as a sign of contempt and condescension, tokenism today is demanded by activists.

Hill is a professor of CUNY and a “television personality”.

Censorship in science: a compilation of references

December 24, 2023 • 9:45 am

If you’re interested in STEM subjects, it’s salubrious to follow the Heterodox STEM Substack site, where you’ll see takes on science that are sufficiently heterodox that they’d be hard to publish in regular journals. Also, there are useful summaries of the literature, including as this one on scientific censorship published today by Anna Krylov and Jan Tanzman.

Their article has an introduction, a report on the increase in scientific censorship, and then a useful list of articles about the nature, causes, and effects of that censorship. If you don’t think the practice exists, or is exerted only minimally, have a look at the piece and the papers it cites.

Click on the screenshot to read:

The introduction:

We have prepared a compilation of recent articles documenting present-day censorship in science and explaining the mechanism by which censorship in science operates.

Recently, science journals and publishers have opened a new and disturbing chapter in the history of scientific censorship: the censorship of scientific articles that are alleged to be “harmful” to a particular group or population, a practice that violates the guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). The practice began with scientific journals retracting articles in response to the demands of online mobs, but has since been codified into policy by various editorial boards and scientific publishers.

Censorship is objectionable on both philosophical and pragmatic grounds. On the philosophical side, the notion that that the public must be protected from dangerous or harmful knowledge is at odds with liberal Enlightenment values, according to which knowledge is power, which the public is capable of using responsibly. On the practical level, by hiding selected facts, censorship distorts our understanding of the world, thereby undermining our ability to solve challenging problems. Censorship also leads to distrust in science. When scientists hide selected facts to promote their political agendas, the public rightfully perceives them as politically motivated agents rather than objective and trustworthy experts.

Despite the long history of scientific censorship and its current prevalence, the mechanisms by which censorship operates, the agents who impose censorship and their motives, and the ultimate costs of censorship have not been systematically investigated. A recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) by Cory Clark and 38 co-authors, Prosocial Motives Underlie Scientific Censorship by Scientists: A Perspective and Research Agenda (Clark et al. 2023), takes a stab at this issue. The paper lays out important questions regarding the nature and consequences of censorship and puts out a call for systematic research on the subject.

One of the paper’s co-authors, psychology professor Steve Stewart-Williams, summarizes the evidence for the current wave of scientific censorship and self-censorship, as well as the rise of censorious attitudes among scientists, which motivated the paper:

  • Increasing numbers of scientists report being sanctioned for conducting politically contentious research.
  • Retractions of papers have become more and more common over the last decade, and at least some of these appear to have been driven primarily by concerns other than scientific merit. One group of scholars even retracted their own paper, not because it was scientifically flawed, but because it was being cited by conservatives in ways the authors didn’t approve of.
  • Several lines of research suggest that studies reaching politically unpalatable conclusions may have a harder time negotiating the peer-review process than they would if the conclusions were in the opposite direction. As the paper notes, “When scholars misattribute their rejection of disfavored conclusions to quality concerns that they do not consistently apply, bias and censorship are masquerading as scientific rejection.”
  • Recent surveys suggest that many academics support censuring or censoring controversial research, with support being strongest among younger scholars.
  • Unsurprisingly, recent polls also suggest that many academics now self-censor on even mildly controversial topics.
  • A large number of academics express a willingness to discriminate against conservatives when it comes to hiring, publications, grants, and promotions. Unsurprisingly, conservative scholars are particularly likely to self-censor.
  • A growing number of journals have explicitly committed to judging scientific papers not just on the quality of the research but also on their (supposed) social or political impact. “In effect,” note Clark et al., “editors are granting themselves vast leeway to censor high-quality research that offends their own moral sensibilities.”

Table 1 of Clark et al. presents the following taxonomy of censorship:

As the Table shows, and as Luana and I emphasized in our paper on the ideological subversion of biology, this wave of censorship differs from previous ones because scientists and science journals themselves are involved in censoring. We’re muzzling ourselves!

The intro continues:

. . . Motivated by publication of this foundational paper (Clark et al. 2023), we have compiled a virtual collection of scientific papers, viewpoints, and op-eds that document the modern rise of censorship in science. Our list is most likely incomplete and we encourage readers to add relevant references in the comments.

There follow a list of 38 papers, with some commentary by Anna and Jay. It’s an extremely useful compilation of discussions about how scientific truths are prevented from coming to light, usually because they are politically unpalatable or present data and conclusions that make people uncomfortable in a “progressive” climate.

To be a wee bit self-aggrandizing, I’ll show two examples given by Anna and Jay of useful scientific critiques that had a hard time finding a home (I helped write one of them). I’m familiar with both, and the first one (not mine) is a doozy. The first one is discussed in the paper by Reichhardt et al. (2023), Resistance to Critiques in the Academic Literature: An Example from Physics Education Research,  Eur. Review 31 547, 2023.

The authors present a rebuttal of a paper recently published in the physics education journal Physical Review—Physics Education Research. The paper, which is titled Observing Whiteness in Introductory Physics: A Case Study, arguably sounds more like a hoax than an actual paper with content relevant to physics education. But the rebuttal treats the paper seriously and offers a substantive, professional, and detailed critique. The rebuttal, which was submitted to the same journal as the original paper, was rejected by the editors. The main reason cited for the rejection was that the rebuttal was “framed from the perspective of a research paradigm that is different from the one of the research being critiqued”—indeed, the authors used scientific methods to debunk a postmodernist paper. The communication between the authors and the journal revealed the true nature of rejection.

The second example is the story of how a paper with the seemingly mundane title In Defense of Merit in Science (Abbot et al. 2023) wound up being published in the Journal of Controversial Ideas. The story is narrated by Coyne and Krylov in The ‘Hurtful’ Idea of Scientific Merit, an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal (for a non-paywalled transcript see Our Wall Street Journal Op-ed: Free at Last!, published by Coyne on Why Evolution is True).

The reference list gives a lot more, some of which cite papers like the “whiteness in physics one” which are so off the rails that they instantiate the last thing Luana and I wrote:

Unless there is a change in the Zeitgeist, and unless scientists finally find the courage to speak up against the toxic effects of ideology on their field, in a few decades science will be very different from what it is now. Indeed, it’s doubtful that we’d recognize it as science at all.

How the New York Times lost its objectivity and credibility

December 17, 2023 • 9:30 am

Anybody with cerebral neurons who reads the New York Times surely sees that it’s not only moved leftward, becoming “progressive” rather than liberal, but has also become less objective, allowing its editorial stand to seep into the news coverage, which is supposed to be objective.

This tendency became blindingly obvious when, on June 30, 2020, Republican Senator Tom Cotton published this op-ed in the paper (click to read):

In the wake of protests, both peaceful and violent, ignited by the death of George Floyd, Cotton called for the use of the military to help quash violent riots (note: not peaceful demonstrations):

The pace of looting and disorder may fluctuate from night to night, but it’s past time to support local law enforcement with federal authority. Some governors have mobilized the National Guard, yet others refuse, and in some cases the rioters still outnumber the police and Guard combined. In these circumstances, the Insurrection Act authorizes the president to employ the military “or any other means” in “cases of insurrection, or obstruction to the laws.”

It was not a rare opinion then, and was part of opinion editor James Bennet’s drive to publish editorials from all sides of the political spectrum to stimulate readers’ thought. That is, after all, what op-eds are for. In fact, in February of that same year, Bennet oversaw the publication of an op-ed by Sirajuddin Haqqani, the deputy leader of the Taliban, about what his group wanted to do in Afghanistan. Haqqani is on the FBI’s “most wanted” list, and one could argue that giving him a platform was far more inflammatory than giving one to a junior Senator from Arkansas.

But that’s not how it played out.  The Cotton editorial sparked a huge pushback among NYT staffers, who claimed that the piece in fact put them in danger, a claim I’ve never understood. There was also pushback on social media.  And although both the publisher of the paper, A. G. Sulzberger, and executive editor Dean Baquet had initially approved of the Cotton editorial. But as the public’s and staffers’ outcry grew their spines turned gelatinous.  Bennet (who had been at the NYT before, then left to be editor of the Atlantic, and then returned to the paper to head the op-ed section), refused to apologize, and so he was fired.  This showed the spinelessness of a paper whose mission was, in fact, to stimulate thought by publishing a variety of viewpoints. Besides losing Bennet, the paper also lost Bari Weiss, who was also demonized after tweeting about the division between the “old guard” of liberals and the young “progressive” staffers.

The paper added a long and cowardly apologia for Cotton’s op-ed that you can see atop the piece. It says, among other things,

After publication, this essay met strong criticism from many readers (and many Times colleagues), prompting editors to review the piece and the editing process. Based on that review, we have concluded that the essay fell short of our standards and should not have been published.

They blamed a “rushed and flawed” editing process, but that was not the case. The real reason is that staffers and social media, heavily weighted by the opinions of blacks (after all, they constituted many of the protestors after Floyd’s death), scared the editor and publisher.

After getting his pink slip, Bennet became a writer for The Economist, and now he’s ignited another conflagration by publishing a huge (17,000-word!) piece in his magazine. His mammoth but fascinating piece not only explains and defends his actions, but severely indicts the Times for polluting its news coverage with progressive opinion. His piece is one of several articles in the magazine examining the media, and there’s also a brief summary of it in the issue. You can read Bennet’s piece for free by clicking on the link below, and The Economist‘s short analysis on the screenshot below that.

You can also find Bennet’s piece archived here. It’s a must-read for anyone who’s interested in journalism but also reads the NYT. It will take you maybe two hours, but what else is there to do on a rainy Sunday morning? And the payoff is immense. Never again will you read the NYT the same way. The premier paper in America, the “good gray lady” who publishes “all the news that’s fit to print” is in fact soiled by bias and the injection of opinion into the printable news.

Below is The Economist‘s brief summary of the piece, but gird your loins and read the long version above.

Although Bennet is justifying his own actions, it’s hard to find anything he did wrong, and the way the paper treated him, along with his discussion of the paper’s bias and how it got that way (hiring young and experienced readers from places like HuffPo, for instance), is absolutely believable. Bennet did what he was hired to do.  But the paper remains biased, which is playing out right now in the Times‘s news coverage of the Hamas/Israel war. It’s hard to find an article in the news section that is not implicitly critical of Israel or suggesting that maybe the war should end with Israel withdrawing back into its boundaries and Hamas left un-destroyed. (You can, of course, find the source of this slant by reading the paper’s op-eds.)

But I digress. Here are just a few telling quotes from Bennet’s piece:

The Times’s problem has metastasised from liberal bias to illiberal bias, from an inclination to favour one side of the national debate to an impulse to shut debate down altogether. All the empathy and humility in the world will not mean much against the pressures of intolerance and tribalism without an invaluable quality that Sulzberger did not emphasise: courage.

. . . . . One of the glories of embracing illiberalism is that, like Trump, you are always right about everything, and so you are justified in shouting disagreement down. In the face of this, leaders of many workplaces and boardrooms across America find that it is so much easier to compromise than to confront – to give a little ground today in the belief you can ultimately bring people around. This is how reasonable Republican leaders lost control of their party to Trump and how liberal-minded college presidents lost control of their campuses. And it is why the leadership of the New York Times is losing control of its principles.

and perhaps the most telling quote in the piece:

For now, to assert that the Times plays by the same rules it always has is to commit a hypocrisy that is transparent to conservatives, dangerous to liberals and bad for the country as a whole. It makes the Times too easy for conservatives to dismiss and too easy for progressives to believe. The reality is that the Times is becoming the publication through which America’s progressive elite talks to itself about an America that does not really exist.

This is how bad it got:

The bias had become so pervasive, even in the senior editing ranks of the newsroom, as to be unconscious. Trying to be helpful, one of the top newsroom editors urged me to start attaching trigger warnings to pieces by conservatives. It had not occurred to him how this would stigmatise certain colleagues, or what it would say to the world about the Times’s own bias. By their nature, information bubbles are powerfully self-reinforcing, and I think many Times staff have little idea how closed their world has become, or how far they are from fulfilling their compact with readers to show the world “without fear or favour”. And sometimes the bias was explicit: one newsroom editor told me that, because I was publishing more conservatives, he felt he needed to push his own department further to the left.

The Times’s failure to honour its own stated principles of openness to a range of views was particularly hard on the handful of conservative writers, some of whom would complain about being flyspecked and abused by colleagues. One day when I relayed a conservative’s concern about double standards to Sulzberger, he lost his patience. He told me to inform the complaining conservative that that’s just how it was: there was a double standard and he should get used to it. A publication that promises its readers to stand apart from politics should not have different standards for different writers based on their politics. But I delivered the message. There are many things I regret about my tenure as editorial-page editor. That is the only act of which I am ashamed.

Trigger warnings on conservative articles! And an admission from the publisher that, yes, the paper had a political double standard—and that was okay!

Here’s Bennet’s vision for an ideal paper:

. . . . there has been a sea change over the past ten years in how journalists think about pursuing justice. The reporters’ creed used to have its foundation in liberalism, in the classic philosophical sense. The exercise of a reporter’s curiosity and empathy, given scope by the constitutional protections of free speech, would equip readers with the best information to form their own judgments. The best ideas and arguments would win out. The journalist’s role was to be a sworn witness; the readers’ role was to be judge and jury. In its idealised form, journalism was lonely, prickly, unpopular work, because it was only through unrelenting scepticism and questioning that society could advance. If everyone the reporter knew thought X, the reporter’s role was to ask: why X?

, , . followed by his view of where the paper now stands politically:

Illiberal journalists have a different philosophy, and they have their reasons for it. They are more concerned with group rights than individual rights, which they regard as a bulwark for the privileges of white men. They have seen the principle of free speech used to protect right-wing outfits like Project Veritas and Breitbart News and are uneasy with it. They had their suspicions of their fellow citizens’ judgment confirmed by Trump’s election, and do not believe readers can be trusted with potentially dangerous ideas or facts. They are not out to achieve social justice as the knock-on effect of pursuing truth; they want to pursue it head-on. The term “objectivity” to them is code for ignoring the poor and weak and cosying up to power, as journalists often have done.

And they do not just want to be part of the cool crowd. They need to be. To be more valued by their peers and their contacts – and hold sway over their bosses – they need a lot of followers in social media. That means they must be seen to applaud the right sentiments of the right people in social media. The journalist from central casting used to be a loner, contrarian or a misfit. Now journalism is becoming another job for joiners, or, to borrow Twitter’s own parlance, “followers”, a term that mocks the essence of a journalist’s role.

. . .  This contest over control of opinion journalism within the Times was not just a bureaucratic turf battle (though it was that, too). The newsroom’s embrace of opinion journalism has compromised the Times’s independence, misled its readers and fostered a culture of intolerance and conformity.

According to Bennet, the paper’s politics have also invaded, with the publisher’s and editor’s agreement, the “cultural section” and the Sunday Magazine, which are apparently allowed to inject opinion into what seems to be news—without any explicit labeling of the sites as “opinion.”

In the end, as you might have predicted, Cotton’s op-ed “harmed” nobody. The cries that the printed word can cause harm are nearly always bogus unless they involve libel or false advertising. “Causes harm” is the new phrase for “this offends me.” Bennet sums up the fracas in one final paragraph, arguing that the op-ed accomplished exactly what such pieces are designed to do:

After all, we ran the experiment; we published the piece. Was any Times journalist hurt? No. Nobody in the country was. In fact, though it is impossible to know the op-ed’s precise effect, polling showed that support for a military option dropped after the Times published the essay, as the Washington Post’s media critic, Erik Wemple, has written. If anything, in other words, publishing the piece stimulated debate that made it less likely Cotton’s position would prevail. The liberal, journalistic principle of open debate was vindicated in the very moment the Times was fleeing from it. Maybe if the Times would put more trust again in the intelligence and decency of Americans, more Americans would again trust the Times. Journalism, like democracy, works best when people refuse to surrender to fear.

Here’s Bari Weiss, whose own NYT job was collateral damage from l’affair Cotton, discussing with Megyn Kelly that fracas, Bennet’s article, and the ideological capture of the NYT.  I’m happy that Weiss has made a success with her Free Press site, which is increasingly attracting good writers and articles. This discussion is a good 11-minute chaser after the long piece, and adds Weiss’s own take from working at the paper.

Finally, today’s Sunday Times of London has its own short and generally sympathetic piece on the article. It also gives a few quotes from Bennet that supplement that article.

Click to read the archived article:

A short quote by Bennet in the piece above:

In spite of last week’s cri de coeur, Bennet is reluctant to return to the culture war barricades. “I’m anxious about re-engaging on these questions. I took a pretty severe beating at The New York Times, enough of a beating that I kept thinking, ‘God, I must have done something horribly wrong.’” But he insists: “I thought and still think what I did at the newspaper was right — and I need to have the courage of my own convictions.”

He is not — to many people’s disappointment — planning to write a book about his experience. But he would like to try to help a new generation of journalists recapture the spirit of empathy and open-minded inquiry that he thinks is all too rare these days in many newsrooms.

His first piece of advice is get off social media. “It has been terrible for journalism. It started well as a source of ideas — a digital conversation — but it pretty quickly became a weapon for enforcing orthodoxy. On social media you don’t want to endure the punishment of expressing dissent, or, God help you, a heterodox opinion. But originality — revealing or saying something new — is the whole point of the news business.”

His second recommendation is: “Do your reporting away from your computer. Get out in the real world, talk to people face to face. Only sit at your computer to write your story.”

I’m only half joking when I say that all serious newspeople should be banned from both reading and posting on social media. The lure of the clicks and likes is poison for journalism.

My own view?  I dislike the NYT but read it because it’s still the best source of national and international news around, and because some of its writers are provocatively heterodox (McWhorter, Pamela Paul, etc.). The Washington Post is hopeless, and as far as I can see it’s on the road to extinction.  Associated Press? Biased. Reuters? Biased. The Wall Street Journal has a news section less infected with its own politics (conservative) than does the NYT, but I do read some conservative op-eds to get a view of the other side. But too many of its articles are financially oriented.

 

h/t: Rosemary, Pyers

Top Hitchens Quotes

December 15, 2023 • 1:00 pm

The good news is that the doctor gave me a clean bill of health. Here’s something to get the weekend started.

Steve Stewart-Williams now has a Substack site (everybody does–I feel left out!), but he’s a good guy and it’s worth looking at (subscribe if you want to read it regularly). Here’s one of his posts that you can see for free: his choice of the top ten quotes by Christopher Hitchens. I’ll give just two, as you need to see them all. Click on the screenshot to read:

Two from Hitch to get you started. Most of you will have heard of these, but the first one may be his most famous (it has a Wikipedia page):

“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.” (This is now known as Hitchens’ razor, and is an extremely useful intellectual tool.)

“If someone tells me that I’ve hurt their feelings, I say, ‘I’m still waiting to hear what your point is.’ I’m very depressed how in this country you can be told, ‘That’s offensive!’ as if those two words constitute an argument.”

Go see the other eight. And you might have a look at his new post “Scientists censoring science,” discussing a recent paper on that topic written with a bunch of coauthors.

Jon Haidt on a new book, the silence of university leaders, self-censorship, and America’s loss of confidence in higher education

October 19, 2023 • 9:30 am

UPDATE: See a positive review of this new book (as well as a related one by Yacha Mounk) at The Economist.

This week, Jon Haidt’s short Substack piece (click on title screenshot below to read it), does four things: he introduces a new book, explains why University leaders remained largely silent (or waited a few days) before giving public reactions to the Hamas attacks on Israel,  gives some of Jon’s thoughts about why self-censorship has spread beyond the campuses, and shows data indicating that Americans are losing confidence in higher education. I’ll give a brief bit on each of these, with Jon’s words indented.

a. The new book.  The Canceling of the American Mind, by Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott, came out just two days ago, is selling well on Amazon, and has gotten good preliminary reviews. The title is a mirror of Lukianoff’s previous book with Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind, which was quite influential (see my summary here and be sure to read the authors’ Three Great Untruths that have infused modern college students).  This new book is largely about “cancel culture.” Haidt wrote the foreword.

Lukianoff is of course the president of FIRE, and Rikki Schlott is an author, journalist, and podcaster (one of her podcasts on cancel culture is here).

Haidt on the book:

An important book comes out today: The Canceling of the American Mind, by Greg Lukianoff (my co-author for The Coddling of the American Mind) and Rikki Schlott. Greg and Rikki explain the long history of efforts to silence people by threatening them with social death, unemployment, or physical harm for questioning orthodox beliefs or proposing heterodox theories. They show how today’s version of cancel culture, which first arose on American college campuses around 2014, spread out from universities to many other fields including journalism, medicine, psychotherapy, and even the hard sciences. Greg and Rikki show the devastating effects of cancel culture on institutions that require viewpoint diversity to function, with universities being the pre-eminent example. (Cancel culture causes the condition I called “structural stupidity” in a 2022 Atlantic article.) They show how cancel culture takes a different form on the right, running through legislatures that try to dictate what can’t or must be taught in K-12 schools and even at universities.

It’s definitely a book I’ll be reading. A cute gif from Schlott’s site:

b. The curious silence of university leaders. 

The Canceling was a darn good book when I read a draft last spring, in order to write the Foreword for it. It’s an even better book now that the world has been treated to the shocking spectacle of so many university presidents remaining silent, or issuing only vague and cautious comments, in days after the October 7 terrorist attack on Israel. Their collective reticence stood in stark contrast to the speed with which so many had offered expressions of solidarity or shared grief whenever an election or court case went the “wrong” way in the years since 2014. (In general I think universities should embrace the “Chicago Principles” and commit to institutional neutrality. See Jeff Flier’s recent application of these principles to the current situation. But if university leaders made so many pronouncements on “controversial” issues before October 7, then they should have made a strong one on October 8.)

Why did so many leaders take so long to say anything strong or (seemingly) heartfelt about the largest mass slaughter of Jews since the holocaust? Why did so many wait a few days to see which way the wind was blowing before augmenting their initially tepid statements?

I see nothing to suggest antisemitism; I see everything to suggest fear. The kind of fear that Greg and Rikki explore and explain in The Canceling of the American Mind.

. . .  have spoken with many university presidents since 2015. Most of them have good academic values. They are trying hard to lead institutions that are becoming “ungovernable,” as one president said to me. I have also spoken with the leaders of museums, professional associations, and non-profit organizations. They face the same challenges from their politically active employees who use social media like a “dart gun” to intimidate leaders into making rapid pronouncements on the issues the activists care about, and to intimidate leaders into silence about issues and events that contradict their preferred narrative about victim groups and oppressor groups.

Of course my own position is that universities should be officially institutionally neutral, making no pronouncements on politics, ideology, and morality unless they’re on issues that directly affect the working of the school. The University of Chicago statement, which basically says “There’s a war on; people are concerned; here’s the resources where you can get help,” can be seen here.

If it were official policy for universities to avoid taking stands on stuff that didn’t concern them directly, there would be no need for suspicious administrative silences, balled-up statements that get walked back, and donors stopping their contributions.

We need a country-wide push for institutitional neutrality of the Chicago type, yet so far only three universities have implemented it. For some reason they can’t adopt this reasonable position, designed to avoid free speech being impeded by fear of hurting your prospects at school. This leads to self-censorship  Do universities really NEED to weigh in on politics and ideology, especially if it chills speech? I see no reason why, and this week’s parade of college presidents repeatedly “clarifying” their positions is a strong argument for institutional neutrality.

Of course if a school has a history of making such pronouncements, they are obliged to condemn Hamas for what it did to Israel, and to speak out about terrorism. But it’s best to avoid accumulating such a history, as then you have to weigh in on nearly every significant event.

c. The spread of self-censorship beyond campuses. 

In the five years since The Coddling was published, the disease has metastasized and spread far beyond universities. It now infects journalism, the arts, non-profits, K-12 education, and even medicine. Show me an organization where people are afraid to speak up, afraid to challenge dominant ideas lest they be destroyed socially, and I’ll show you an organization that has become structurally stupid, unmoored from reality, and unable to achieve its mission. In The Canceling of the American Mind, Greg and Rikki follow the story far beyond universities to show how deep the structural stupidity now runs. If we want to make our minds and our institutions work well again, we’re going to have to end the “crisis of self-censorship” that Rikki wrote about. This book [Lukianoff and Schlott] will tell you how we do that.

Can you think of “an organization where people are afraid to speak up, afraid to challenge dominant ideas lest they be destroyed socially” that has not become “structurally stupid, unmoored from reality, and unable to achieve its mission”?  I think this is a rigged question, actually, because if people are afraid to challenge dominant ideas, the organization has already become those things!

d. The waning respect for American universities. This is something that may hurt the Democrats in the next Presidential election.

The fact that higher ed lost the trust of most of the country before October 7 should have inspired soul searching and reform long ago. We can only guess how much lower the numbers have fallen since October 8, the day when so many university leaders failed to say or do anything.

Below is one graph showing this. (There’s another asking Americans whether colleges have a negative effect on the U.S.  In that one, Democrats haven’t changed much since 2012 but Republicans “yes” answers have gone up quite a bit. Independents weren’t surveyed).

The caption for this plot is “ Percent of U.S. adults with “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education. Source: Gallup (2023).“


 

Note that there’s a substantial drop in all three categories, but it’s very large (from 56% to 19% for Republicans, a drop of 66%!).  This is more or less a repudiation of “elitism” in that college create the “elite”, and the drop could play a role in buttressing Republicans next year.  Gallup doesn’t analyze why this has happened, but surely burgeoning left-wing authoritarianism (“wokeness”) plays a role, for universities are largely left-wing institutions. And the public, by and large, sees universities as absorbed with in this brand of crazy performative activity.

University of Edinburgh academics demand cancellation of book on sex and gender

October 12, 2023 • 11:45 am

One thing that seems clear, at least to me, is that Scotland is woker than England, for you see more stuff like this happening to the North of Blighty than from its south. But even if you disagree with my assessment, it’s hard to approve of the bad behavior of academics from the University of Edinburgh who are calling for the banning of a book on sex and gender. The article below comes is from the Times of London; click below to read, and if it’s paywalled you can find it archived here.


It’s a simple matter of ignorance and censoriousness, with the excuse that the book promotes “transphobia”—which means it has an honest discussion of trans issues.   An excerpt from the Times:

Academics at the University of Edinburgh have been accused of an “horrific” and “nonsensical attack” on free speech after calling for the launch of a book about gender politics to be cancelled.

Members of the University and College Union have written to an estimated 2,000 staff and research students calling for a protest at the event on Wednesday and told Sir Peter Mathieson, the university principal, it should be scrapped.

The union branch said essays in the book, Sex and Gender: A Contemporary Reader, reduce “trans people to an abstract anomaly or sinister cabal” and breached the Equality Act.

It told union members in a mass mailing of its “concerns about the launch of a transphobic book on campus” and said it would be holding a protest at the event. The claims were rejected out of hand by contributors to the book and by other academics.

UCU Edinburgh was previously criticised for preventing free speech after it twice supported demonstrations and stopped the screening of the documentary Adult Human Female, billed as a critique of “transgender ideology”.

Shereen Benjamin, a senior lecturer in primary education, and a contributor to the book, said the UCU’s claims were “outrageous”, adding that she was horrified by the email to academic colleagues.

Benjamin said: “The individuals in charge of the branch have used their position to try to suppress legitimate academic discussion where it challenges views they personally hold, by exploiting policies intended to make the university a decent, fair environment, and smearing anyone who disagrees with them.”

. . .In its letter to Mathieson, the UCU accused Benjamin, a founder of the Edinburgh branch of Academics for Academic Freedom, of “debunking” the rights of trans people.

I haven’t found the email from the Union, which is a student group, but the UCU Edinburgh is clearly deeply Pecksniffian, having stopped the screening of a movie that, while you may disagree with it, makes some good points and certainly doesn’t deserve banning. (You can see the whole movie free on Youtube.)

Of course if you say anything that’s not 100% in agreement with the assertions of trans activists, you’re going to get labeled a “transphobe”, even if you  simply disagree with the right of trans women to compete in women’s athletics. The way the ideologues control discourse is to make their opponents so fearful of being called names that the opponents shut up (it’s worked with critics of “indigenous ways of knowing” in New Zealand). If that fails, try to ban their books.

A form of this banning is the refusal of scientific journals to publish criticism of weak papers.  One example occurred when Colin Wright wrote to the editors of  Integrative and Comparative Biology asking if several of us could submit a critique of a dreadful paper they published, “Multimodal models of animal sex: breaking binaries leads to a better understanding of ecology and evolution” (see here and here for some criticisms).  Colin never got a response after writing the editors several times. This is reprehensible behavior on their part, and, worse, it’s their attempt to promulgate dubious science by simply censoring its opponents.  They want to avoid social media criticism: what a great excuse for suppressing scientific discourse!

But I digress. Edinburgh Uni has issued a statement saying what’s below, which is a bit self-contradictory:

Edinburgh University said it attached great importance to freedom of expression and academic freedom and “would not seek to influence any lawful events held on our campus”.

A spokeswoman added: “Given the size of our community, it is inevitable that there will be differing views and opinions. We always encourage respectful debate and discussion, and we remain steadfast in our determination to facilitate a safe environment where challenging topics can be explored. We also firmly uphold the right of people to take part in peaceful and lawful protest.

But an environment that explores challenging topics will be perforce deemed UNSAFE, so how do they deal with that? But I do trust that Edinburgh Uni will take no steps to censor or ban this book. It’s always the students who make all the noise.

But is the book “transphobic”? Have a look at the description of the book and title page here:

The title page:

I don’t see anything obviously transphobic here, but of course the Pecksniffs can find something in this lineup of sex and gender criminals to foster banning the book. Where is ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio when we need him?  Sadly, he can’t stop the circulation of this book, because the kerfuffle is in the U.K.

PEN America highlights attacks from the Left on books

August 30, 2023 • 10:00 am

The recent “cancellation” of my children’s book about an Indian man and his cats—with the sole reason given that I couldn’t write about India because I was white—has made me extra sensitive to the absurdity of a lot of cancellations based on such claims of “cultural appropropriation.”  Now of course it’s possible to write an ignorant and demeaning book about another culture, and publishers don’t have to put out every book they get; but I plead not guilty to cultural appropriation, and, indeed, most of the examples given by Cathy Young below are cultural appropriation of the right type: the enrichment of cultures by incorporating material from other cultures.

The “sin” of cultural appropriation goes only one way, of course: you are not allowed to “write down.” That is, members of nonminority groups (read: white people, especially men) are not allowed to write about minority groups, even if those groups are not oppressed or the subject isn’t oppression.  But the reverse action—members of minority groups writing about dominant groups—seems perfectly fine. This I don’t understand. If members of one culture supposedly can’t understand members of another, or treat their issues with sensitivity, then the ban should go both ways.  Why is it okay if someone from India writes about an American man who owns sweet shops and takes in stray cats?

Thus the new post by the estimable Cathy Young (click the screenshot below to read, but subscribe if you read regularly)—about a new PEN America report on freedom to write and publish—struck home. The theme, according to Young (I haven’t read the PEN report) is the suppression of literature deemed harmful (often because of “cultural appropriation”), an action taken mostly by the Left. The Right gets rid of books they find offensive by simply banning them from libraries or removing them, but what the Left does, preventing publication of books in the first place, can be seen as more harmful. For in the latter case, the book simply isn’t available to anyone.

Many of these campaigns are fueled by social-media pile-ons, often by people who haven’t read the book they damn. But I’m getting ahead of myself. I’ll give quotes from Young about the tactics of the Left and some chilling examples of how they’ve worked.

First, what’s going on (Young’s text is indented).

WHETHER THERE EXISTS in American culture a left-wing illiberalism that threatens freedom of thought and expression under the cover of social justice has been a subject of heated debate in the past decade. At a time when right-wing authoritarian populism is on the rise, many people have viewed warnings about illiberal progressivism as a distraction. Liberal and centrist critiques of leftist intolerance, from the Harper’s magazine “Letter on Justice and Open Debate” in the summer of 2020 to prize-winning historian Anne Applebaum’s Atlantic essay on “the new Puritans” the following year, have been met with purported debunkings and derided as moral panic or whining from people who don’t like to be criticized.

Now, a major liberal institution that has championed freedom of expression for over a century—PEN America, formerly PEN American Center and part of PEN International, the writers’ association whose notable figures have included John Steinbeck, Arthur Miller, James Baldwin, Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, and Margaret Atwood—has issued a lengthy report that strongly comes down on the side of taking illiberal progressivism seriously.

Booklash: Literary Freedom, Online Outrage, and the Language of Harm, written by the PEN America research team with a trenchant introduction by playwright Ayad Akhtar titled “In Defense of the Literary Imagination,” is a thorough examination of the chilly climate in publishing and the issues and controversies that have created it. Booklash is particularly valuable because PEN America really cannot be accused of having a right-leaning or even centrist bias: the organization enthusiastically champions racial and gender diversity and has strongly denounced censorship moves from the right, such as red-state policies facilitating school library book removals.

Indeed, the report acknowledges the context of rising right-wing authoritarianism but unabashedly, and correctly, stresses that this context makes it more important to acknowledge troubling illiberal trends on the left. . .

Booklash isn’t too long, and should be read, as should its appendix or companion piece, the famous and short “Freedom to Read” statement adopted in 1953 by the American Library Association and the Association of American Publishers. (It’s been amended in the version Young gives, but I’ve linked to the original.) It’s a passionate endorsement of the duty of publishers to put out books espousing all viewpoints, even if many people find them offensive, and the duty of organizations to avoid censoring or banning as taboo those views they don’t like.

But back to Young.  Here are only a few of the examples she and the PEN report give of attempts to ban “offensive” views:

*Online hate campaigns directed at books deemed “problematic” for one reason or another have resulted in books being killed when already in the final stages of publication. A prominent recent example, from this past spring, comes from Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love. After she announced on June 6 that her next book, The Snow Forest, would come out early next year, it was strafed with one-star review bombs. Its attackers were outraged that a book set in Russia was coming out at a time when Russia is waging a brutal war of aggression in Ukraine. Never mind that it’s not a present-day story: The novel is a partly fact-based tale of a Soviet-era family fleeing into the woods to escape religious persecution. By June 12, Gilbert had had enough: She released a video saying that she was indefinitely “removing the book from its publication schedule.”

*. . . OTHER BOOKS, AS BOOKLASH DETAILS, were not literally canceled but endured some degree of suppression. Initial positive reviews in key industry outlets such as Kirkus Reviews have been downgraded; books have been rewritten under pressure; book tours have been canceled, as in the case of Jeanine Cummins’s bestselling 2020 novel American Dirt, a sympathetic treatment of Mexican migrants that was savaged as exploitative “trauma porn.” Aside from the impact on the targeted authors (Cummins seems to have completely withdrawn from public life), there is also the larger chilling effect on publishing. In the case of American Dirt, the report said, “Despite the book’s commercial success, the episode left many within the literary world with the impression that books perceived to trespass across racial or cultural lines could be risky and undesirable.” Indeed, the report cites conversations with authors and editors who would speak only on conditions of anonymity to describe this overall climate of intimidation as well specific incidents in which books were canceled or revised.

*In 2018, the Nation issued an abject apology for publishing a white poet writing in the voice of a black homeless woman. The poem was allowed to stay up, but underneath a contrite statement that read, remarked Nation columnist Katha Pollitt, “like a letter from re-education camp.”

*In June 2020, the young adult novel Ember Days by Alexandra Duncan was at the center of a bizarre drama with two layers of cancellation. First, the novel was withdrawn at Duncan’s request because of complaints about chapters written from the perspective of a woman with Gullah Geechee heritage (African Americans from the Lowcountry regions of Georgia, South Carolina, and Florida). Then, Publishers’ Weekly removed its story about the book’s withdrawal because of complaints that the story had led to “online abuse” toward Duncan’s chief critic, novelist Bethany Morrow, and replaced it with an apology and a pledge to ensure that “our articles will not cause harm in the future.” Obviously, the PEN America report couldn’t cover every such episode without massive sprawl, but these examples seem remarkable enough to merit a mention.

*Novelist, journalist, and Bulwark contributor Richard North Patterson recently wrote about the dispiriting experience of having his novel Trial “rejected by roughly 20 imprints of major New York publishers” despite having 16 New York Times bestsellers to his name. According to Patterson, many of the rejections came with glowing compliments but bluntly stated that the problem was race: the novel deals with racial injustice, and Patterson is white. (Trial was eventually published by a small press.)

There are many more examples, but you get the gist, and I bet you’ve heard of some of these before, like the American Dirt fracas described by Young in greater detail.

Now Young notes that the PEN America report, while conveying a strong message, is somewhat diluted by its occasional tendency to “balance their defense of intellectual freedom with their commitment to the values of social justice, bending over backwards to accommodate the latter.” While it’s okay to give a nod towards social justice, the “Freedom to read” mantra should extend to defending publication of all viewpoints, including those inimical to current versions of social justice.

Here’s Young’s indictment of the greater harm done by the Left than by the Right in censoring books. First, a quote from Jonah Winter, a children’s-book author who has been censored:

As [Winter] put it in a Dallas Morning News column:

Book-banning, the “cancel culture” of the right, doesn’t hurt a book or an author.

What hurts a book or an author is the far more effective cancel culture of the left, by which I mean the small but vocal subsection of illiberal ideologues who’ve commandeered both liberalism in general and the publishing world specifically, often using their power to attack well-meaning authors in the form of social media pile-ons and the resulting cancellations, both of which I’ve experienced.

And I’ll add this since it hits home: one of Winter’s books that was banned was a respectful biography of the great baseball player and humanitarian Roberto Clemente, outfielder for the Pittsburgh Pirates (I saw him play at Forbes Field), who died at 38 in the crash of a plane bringing relief to earthquake-devastated Managua, Nicaragua. Winter says this:

I’ve had two book contracts canceled because of my identity in relation to the subject matter. I am a white man. The irony of the big to-do being made over the banning of my Clemente book by conservative activists is that, were I to try and publish that exact same book today, I would not be able to get it published because of progressive activists.

And from Young:

There is another factor as well. When attacks on literary works come from the right, they are typically counteracted not only by progressive activists but by institutions that act as guardians of culture: public schools and teachers’ unions, libraries, universities, publishers, the mainstream media. When the attacks are from the left, the same institutions typically offer no objections, or even collude.

So what’s the solution? First, we have to recognize that if you’re on the Left like me, you have to indict your own side for this kind of ludicrous and harmful censorship. The cure begins with recognition, and that’s what PEN America has done.  Young also notes that Booklash has recommendations like preventing book-review websites like Goodreads from going after books that haven’t been read, or damning them on flimsy grounds. And publishers should issue “formal statements of principles.” (This is desperately needed.)

Young closes by arguing correctly that being on the Left does not conflict with arguing for free expression in books, nor does condemnation of censorship trivialize the arguments of social-justice advocates. It’s merely a way to enact the First Amendment through publication, for books are one of the most effective ways to make and to vet arguments:

Such a shift [in the present Leftist illiberalism about publishing] must also include much greater willingness on the part of authors and publishers to stand up to pressures, particularly when it’s a matter of just a few voices denouncing alleged bigotry and “harm” in works the vast majority of people from the supposedly injured group do not see as offensive. But this would also require challenging a key tenet of social justice progressivism: the belief that even to dispute a claim of racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. is in itself “problematic,” and in most cases actively harmful. Such claims must be examined skeptically, especially when suppression of speech or other expression is at stake.

Pushing back against left-wing illiberalism in publishing need not entail a general dismissiveness toward the existence of racial or gender-based injustice and prejudice in American culture, particularly given the recent rise of overt white supremacism, misogyny, and homophobia on the far right and their seepage into more mainstream right-wing discourse. What it does mean, though, is understanding that “canceling” books and authors for transgressing progressive moral codes does nothing to counteract injustice and prejudice. Instead, it inhibits and silences important conversations and trivializes the very evils it supposedly protests.

h/t: Steve