☆ Opinion: University cancel culture isn’t new, but it’s never been quite this severe (2/5)
Joseph Murray Ince (1806-1859) - The Great Court of Trinity College, Cambridge - 515482 - National Trust
In the second part of our Opp Now exclusive conversation, UATX prof David Puelz and past Heterodox Academy fellow Elizabeth Weiss explain how “political correctness” and other ideological compulsions have long been around—but today’s climate against free speech is pretty unprecedented. Would Dr. Weiss have been kicked out of SJSU 20, even 10, years ago?
Opportunity Now: Is cancel culture in colleges a relatively new phenomenon? Or have there always been traces of it?
David Puelz: It definitely seems worse today. I wonder if, because of social media and technology, every single cancellation or censorship just has a much greater magnitude now.
In the past, you’d debate certain ideologies and consider statistical evidence in support of one versus the other. And these debates would be confined to your faculty lounge. Now, this is happening online, for a wider audience. It spreads more quickly. And many people online prefer the catchy hot take to the rigorous (and slightly boring) hypothesis test. The former spreads like wildfire, and the latter—however rigorous—is lost in the viral ocean.
Elizabeth Weiss: I think the earlier version of cancel culture was political correctness. You’d get faculty whose research wasn’t “politically correct,” and they’d get certain challenges thrown at them, similarly to cancellation. But I do think it's gotten a lot worse.
I started at San Jose State in 2004. But I've been exposed to controversial professors since the late ‘90s. I was once married to John Philippe Rushton—Phil Rushton—who did race research that many folks found issue with. He got threats and all sorts of things, but we still went to conferences together. What’s more, I don't think he had a single conference talk cancelled. I've had three now.
ON: We’ve noticed that to avoid being cancelled themselves these days, many local universities will give in to the angry mob: punish free thinkers, cancel speeches, slap disruptors on the wrist—if at all.
EW: You know, it’s interesting. Back then, at conferences with Phil, there may have been more whispering (especially from student activists). But people still spoke with him. And he was never truly worried about losing his job as a tenured professor—though he was much more controversial than I am.
I’ve also met Napoleon Chagnon, who was attacked for his controversial research and thrown out of the AAA—the American Anthropological Association—but, as with Phil, he kept his teaching job. He was still going to conferences, and he wrote an excellent book about his cancellation called Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes — the Yanomamo and the Anthropologists.
So I’ve observed these kinds of things in the 1990s and 2000s, but there was still more civility. Less ad hominem attacks.
DP: I'm not sure if someone's done the study or who would do it, but there has to be some critical mass where, if you have a certain percentage of coercive individuals in your institution—beyond that percentage, it just blows up. It increases exponentially.
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