☆ Why cancel culture’s exploded at local colleges (two words: activism + administration) (1/5)
Scrapped speeches. Ousted professors. Whole campuses biting their tongues. We discuss, below, how replacing scholarship with illegitimate advocacy has bolstered ideological discrimination—via recruitment, hiring, and internal pressures. An Opp Now exclusive with SJSU prof emeritus Elizabeth Weiss and University of Austin prof David Puelz.
Opportunity Now: In your view, how and why does ideologically-driven cancel culture happen at local universities?
David Puelz: I think cancel culture happens slowly and then suddenly. It has to do with the governance structure of institutions, and it has to do with well-meaning conservative faculty (who are becoming a smaller and smaller contingent on campus).
Let’s say your university has a hiring structure in place. If you bring in even one faculty member with a coercive ideology—e.g., an illiberal, someone against free expression—then they’ll start to chill the speech of all of the hiring committees they're on. They’ll bring in another faculty member who shares that closed-minded coercive ideology, and then another one, and another one, etc.
It’s interesting: looking back at UC Berkeley in the ‘60s, you had conservative professors standing up in defense of communist and Marxist professors. But then, you go 60 years into the future, and those same professors are throwing conservative faculty under the bus. Clearly, there's only one direction that the dynamics of the system go once you start hiring coercive professors who aren't actual scholars, but who are committed to a shut-down-the-speech credo.
Elizabeth Weiss: I’ll add that universities have been liberal for a long time, but the new cohort (the last 20–30 years) has been progressively not just liberal but very much activist. And you get this phenomenon of “activist scholars” who aren’t dedicated to real scholarly research.
You have to hand it to them—railing against the system and proclaiming social justice messages are much easier than, you know, actually doing anthropology. So part of it is this watering down of scholarship.
DP: And when scholarship is deteriorating, you have to fill that void with something else meaningful, right?
It's all quite clever. In particular, the rejection of statistical evidence works in their favor to uphold whatever unsupported ideologies they have. Because if they say, "Actually, you do need quality evidence and to carefully probe issues"—then all of their “scholarship” falls apart. The only way they can survive is by claiming that merit, the scientific method, and any type of statistical evidence are racist or should be downweighted. Railing against the system, indeed.
EW: Also, you mentioned the hiring of ideological mini-me’s. Another potential consequence of this is the youngest professors ganging up into a bloc and targeting other faculty with different viewpoints. This happened to me at San Jose State during my cancellation. I would propose a completely non-controversial speaker—just straight anthropology stuff–and all the young faculty would vote “no.” Every time.
Here, it goes beyond ideology. It’s also this idea of, “I’m going to root out evil.” And they saw me as evil.
DP: Yes, there’s a phrase in corporate America that goes something like, “As hire As, and Bs hire Cs.” You get a couple of Bs hired into a faculty cohort, and then they start hiring very unqualified, unscholarly folks; and it snowballs from there. The university system has become so imbalanced because of this. Ideology has replaced rigorous and creative scholarship.
ON: We wonder, too, if university administration plays a role in this snowball effect?
EW: Oftentimes, some of the least intellectually qualified scholars become administrators and push through a variety of DEI initiatives.
DP: The perfect example of this is Claudine Gay, recent president of Harvard—almost zero scholarship, plagiarist, etc.
EW: Plus, the class of administrators has grown unbelievably over decades, which intensifies their impact.
DP: It’s sad because the folks who are interested in free speech and who don't want censorship let these coercive people into the institutions, thinking they’ll play by the same rules—but instead they start shutting everything down.
I’ll put it this way: most colleges don't want to run “like a business.” So they start overhiring administrative staff. And typically, those administrators are much more focused on activist tasks than running the institution well.
The prognosis from there isn’t great. Once the college starts heading in that direction with those administrators, it’s hard to turn back. It’s a 100% probability—a massive avalanche. Cancel culture guaranteed.
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