Cancel culture has been incubating for some time; some of its roots are to be found in the much earlier “political correctness” phenomenon. But political correctness — calling your garbage man a sanitation engineer, for instance — was a far cry from the Marxist absolutism of today’s cancel culture. Today, lives and livelihoods are at stake. Universities and work places instill fear into their employees and students for new cultural crimes — misgendering, microaggressions, triggering — and cadres of DEI enforcers ensure that transgressors are presumed guilty and punished accordingly.
Worse yet, elite university leaders are instilling and enforcing this intolerance, this rejection of free speech, and Gen Z students are taking that mentality into the work place. Where universities were once lonely bastions of extremist thought, the 21st century elite food chain — Ivies to elite companies or law firms or financial firms — now reinforces and socializes first amendment rejectionism into what was once called “the real world.”
Journalism schools now teach similar principles to their students. Where once the top J schools of the United States emphasized documenting the world as it exists, most now drill into their students the notion that their job is a quest for “truth.” This quest then translates into the “reporting” we find at The Washington Post, New York Times, and CNN.
Heaven forfend that news is sullied with balanced perspective (“diversity” does not mean ideological diversity, ever), unpalatable realities, or the views of “flyover” America… And thus we end up with political candidates labeling half the nation as “deplorable.”
Out guests this week are Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott.
Greg is the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and a passionate defender of free expression. He was the author, with Jonathan Haidt, of The Coddling of the American Mind. Rikki is a research fellow at FIRE, host of the Lost Debate podcast, and a columnist at the New York Post.
Lukianoff and Schlott are the authors of the new book, The Canceling of the American Mind: Cancel Culture Undermines Trust and Threatens Us All―But There Is a Solution
HIGHLIGHTS
Tell us about The Canceling of the American Mind?
GL: around 2014, we saw a very noticeable measurable uptick in the number of people losing their jobs for speech that otherwise would be protected by the First Amendment. People were getting fired just for cracking jokes off the clock, which is not normal in American history. And there was an uptick of professors getting in trouble around 2014 that wasn't too bad. But 2017 and after, it really accelerates. And I'd say since 2017, we can't find an era in American history outside of the 1930s, and by the way, there was no concept of academic freedom really in the 1930s that had any legal force whatsoever, of this number of professors losing their jobs.
Why is this happening?
RS: Part of it is the fact that social media just allows for these pile-ons in a completely unprecedented way. And also all of us have such an extensive digital footprint in the way that appointee to the editor-in-chief of Teen Vogue could have something that she tweeted when she was 16, resurface that she's already apologized for, just as a specific example. But it's the combination, I think, of a long and gradual shift away from free speech principles in a free speech culture that then had social media introduced on top of that. So these pile-ons and just digital mobs could form around people. And then on top of that is a generation that's grown up only knowing a post free speech, social media-filled world where we've lost sight of those values, where it's much more simple and effective to take down your ideological opponents by attacking them ad hominem or doing offense archeology and finding something terrible that they'd said in the past or perhaps not even terrible, depending on your own point of view.
We saw this in the ousting of James Bennet at the NYTimes. How have these Gen Z lynch mobs formed?
RS: It certainly is not just that they weren't taught to value difference of opinion and free expression on college campuses, but they were actively taught that they get social points and credit if they tear people down or at the forefront of an activist campaign. And I think it's worth noting that at a place like the New York Times, a large proportion, if not majority, of the people who end up becoming new hires are from Ivy League schools or schools in the very cream of the crop, top echelon.
GL: We have a whole chapter in Canceling the American Mind on what happened to journalism. And to me, a lot of First Amendment people come from a journalism background. I was a student journalist. we thought this was something that really put free speech into your blood if you were.... But a lot of us, since we defend a lot of student newspapers at FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression where I work.
We started talking to younger journalists and there was this idea where the goal of journalism was activism. It was saving the world, not describing it. And it's like, "No, no, no." Describing the world is plenty hard and if you believe that you're coming in to save the world, that's going to actually lead you to pick and choose what you report, to shade what you report. That's an arrogant position to take on. I feel like a lot of these fancy journalists are basically teaching this.
How much of this is linked to the mind virus of “oppressors vs the oppressed”?
GL: The ideology that we talk about in both coddling and canceling is one of the reasons why I am not particularly optimistic about the idea that DEI administrations can or should be saved… when it comes to some of the other laws that were passed to try to eliminate the DEI bureaucracy, we had people being like, "Oh my God, this is harming the academic freedom of these schools to have these DEI bureaucracies." And I'm like, "You do know that DEI bureaucracies are often a threat to academic freedom and free speech on campus."
And that in many of the cases that we're talking about, DEI administrators were involved in the shout downs in some cases in the cancel campaigns. So I think that right now there's a lot of hand-wringing about what the future of DEI on campus is, and I think there's no way forward without massively de-bureaucratizing a lot of these universities.
Once upon a time, these immature ideas stayed in universities, and were shed when kids entered the “real world.”
GL: This is something that Haidt and I saw coming and everybody at FIRE saw coming. That there was this idea that the real world will beat this out of these kids and they'll give up these goofy ideas once they graduate. I think that's true in a situation in which it's a small number of students who have these ideas. And in a situation where in earlier times that we weren't so in such an unhealthy way reliant for a lot of these elite institutions to hire from.
And to be clear, the relationship between cancel culture and other schools is its much worse in elite higher education. However, it is really bad in a lot of other non-elite places as well. But it is more exaggerated in, say the top 10 schools. And unfortunately, and this is something that I'm fascinated by, maybe it's just my own class background, but I only really noticed in the late nineties the weird extra premium we give to people who went to Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Yale, et cetera.
And I think maybe it became a very much a big status symbol to go to some of the fancies in a way that was, I think, exaggerated for a society that once had a certain healthy Bugs Bunny kind of anti-elitism. But once you actually start having entire sectors that are highly dependent on the fancies… [and leaders that themselves have come from these schools,] they're sympathetic to it already, or at least enough of them are. And then students show up with these very strong moralistic assumptions that given a lot of these institutions don't have a lot of political diversity to begin with, they have no natural immune system.
RS: I think it's also a matter of just the precedent that was set when this new generation of activist, young employees who grew up basically refining the tools of cancel culture on Tumblr, and then were just kind of cheered on by the administrators in college arrived at these corporations. And it just takes one like wacky person on Twitter to catch a corporation flatfooted for them to say, "Oh, sorry, we didn't mean to offend you."
How do we understand this explosion of antisemitism at a place like Harvard that has been crushing free speech for years, but suddenly embraces it to hate on Jews and support Hamas?
GL: [FIRE administers] the largest survey ever conducted of its kind, largest polling ever done on this topic, on whether or not you can speak on your campus. And the largest database ever assembled of professor cancellation, student cancellations, deplatforming, and speech codes, and Harvard got a negative score that we rounded up to zero. So the fact that they couldn't convince anybody that they were now great on free speech suddenly was completely just desserts on that.
When it comes to how to protect students from antisemitism, we've actually written about this at thefire.org. We have a whole guide essentially to things that are not okay and incitement to imminent lawless action is not okay; [it’s a] hard standard to meet though. But more importantly, threats are not okay. And that includes something like surrounding people, basically something that someone would reasonably understand that they're in danger of bodily harm or death. And discriminatory harassment, which is severe persistent and pervasive discriminatory behavior directed towards an individual or group. None of these are protected.
A lot of this activism, a lot of this oversimplified way of thinking is taught at some of these really elite schools. And even in orientation, it is emphasized and encouraged. I think actually you got to give a little bit of credit to Dartmouth University, which is under new leadership because they're not having a lot of these kind of incidents because they did the hard work of starting months ago to have very public, very open dialogue about Israel-Palestine issues. And that's one of the things that, actually, when you get people talking, some of this calms down. And when you don't have administrators rewarding you just on the basis of how radical you are in your heart and your actions, as long as the cause is approved by the administrators themselves, you can avoid a lot of this stuff.
There’s cancel culture growing now on the right as well?
GL: We have about three chapters in the book on cancel culture from the right. We've been accused by some on the right of engaging in mindless bothsiderism, and it's like, "No, we have three chapters in a book of 20-plus chapters talking about actual threats from the right." And why do we have that there? Because they exist. They are real. We're not saying they're proportional or they're as common, certainly not in higher education, but they do happen. So one of the things I point out is that in our data, about one third of the professors getting in trouble, it actually usually starts from a campaign, that it starts as a campaign on the right. It's something that a professor said something embarrassing to the university that gets into Fox News. And next thing you know that professor loses their job. Now that's a FIRE case. We are going to defend professors if they get in trouble, and students, if they have trouble for their speech, period, and in a genuinely nonpartisan way.
RS: On the right, I think we've seen so many people say that they're free speech advocates and they believe in free speech when it's their side being attacked. But often I think that there's a kind of frailty to those claims in a society that's generally drifted away from free speech culture in general. And it is convenient and easy when you can defend the speech that you like to defend. And the right often has been put in that position by an illiberal left that is very cancel culture gung-ho heavy. But I would say I've been disappointed from time to time by people that I thought were genuine free speech activists on the right who when it's not speech that's convenient or appealing to them, shy away from defending it no matter what
RS: Our final chapter is really about restoring a free speech culture. And so I don't think it's bothsiderism to say that our entire culture has kind of stepped away from these values. And free speech has become almost a political weapon on one side or the other. And it's a really sad retreat in my opinion. And I think particularly because there are so many young people who don't like cancel culture, who don't like illiberalism, but have not been taught the tenets of classical liberalism and free speech culture that could supplant it. I think we really could make a cultural change, but it's a matter of civics education, and it's a matter of teaching people nonpartisan free speech values, which by and large, I think we fail to do.
How do we fix this?
GL: There's a lot to do. The fact that we have a chapter on parenting, on K-12 reform, on how to keep your corporation out of the culture war, and a long chapter on what to do about higher ed is not a sign of our optimism about the situations, about how much needs to be done. And I've even been writing more at my Substack, the Eternally Radical Idea, about going even deeper and going even farther about what we can do.
We all grew up with in a way that Rikki did not. Basic small-D democratic ideas in the form of expressions. To each their own. Everyone's entitled to their opinion. Walk a mile in a man's shoes before you judge him. Even don't judge a book by its cover, for goodness sakes. We had little ideas in our society that were basically, check yourself, man. You're not all knowing. You're not right about everything. It's not your place to just sit in judgment of everybody else. And of course some of these sayings have fallen out of popularity, because campuses want to be all of those things currently, at least the worst illiberal aspects of them. So we think that's a good starting point.
RS: And I would say a few very easy, simple things that people who are concerned in leadership positions can do. Certainly colleges and universities and alumnus who donate to them could say, "I'm not donating to you unless you have an actual orientation program about free speech and why it's important." I mean, that would've resonated with me as a student and I wouldn't have required a global pandemic to figure that out for myself ultimately. That would be a pretty helpful start.
I also think that corporations can start doing the same thing and follow... Coinbase was a pretty great example where they said, just out of nowhere, "We're not going to take a stance on political issues and hot button issues that divide people one way or another. If that's a problem, you can leave." And about one in 10 of their employees did, but that's not the type of person that you want to have working for you anyway. So that's a pretty perfect way to filter for people that would ultimately create a problem for you, and who obviously aren't capable of working in a diverse workplace with different viewpoints.
Full transcript here.
SHOWNOTES
Freedom of speech is endangered on college campuses – and I’m fighting back (New York Post, July 31 2021)
The Coddling of the American Mind (The Atlantic, September 2015)
‘The Canceling of the American Mind’ Review: Shut Up, They Said (Wall Street Journal, October 8 2023)
In the aftermath of Claudine Gay's resignation, here's how Harvard can reform itself (FIRE, January 2 2024)
FIRE 2024 College Free Speech Rankings
FIRE’s 10 common-sense reforms for colleges and universities