By Peter H.
Schuck
Thursday,
October 21, 2021
Sometimes our most precious cultural
institutions fail to live up to their high educational and moral commitments
and responsibilities. These failures especially damage the social fabric
because they tend to harm many people who rely on them and tarnish the high
ideals that the institutions claim to exemplify.
An incident in early October involving
MIT, a jewel in world academia’s crown, presents an especially egregious
instance of this institutional failing, aggravated by that university’s
cowardice in the face of intimidation and threats by self-righteous students
and their faculty allies. MIT had invited Dorian Abbot, a University of Chicago
geophysicist, to deliver the prestigious John Carlson Lecture on climate and
the potential of life on other planets—a topic on which Abbot is a recognized
expert. Unfortunately for Abbot and his intended audience, however, he had
recently committed the campus equivalent of hara-kiri by
taking seriously the norms of academic freedom which MIT and other schools
claim to cherish.
Abbot, in online discussions of the
growing “diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)” movement on American
campuses, had stressed “the importance of treating each person as an individual worthy of
dignity and respect. In an academic context,” he continued, “that means giving
everyone a fair and equal opportunity when they apply for a position as well as
allowing them to express their opinions openly, even if you disagree with
them.” And in a co-authored Newsweek op-ed in August, he had argued that DEI as currently practiced on campus “violates the ethical
and legal principle of equal treatment” and “treats persons as merely means to
an end, giving primacy to a statistic over the individuality of a human being.”
Abbot proposed instead an alternative
framework that he called Merit, Fairness, and Equality (MFE) whereby university
applicants are treated as individuals and evaluated through a rigorous and
unbiased process based on their merit and qualifications alone. His MFE norm
rejected legacy and athletic admission advantages, “which significantly favor
white applicants.” For these heretical views, he was pilloried by groups of
students who demanded that MIT withdraw its lecture invitation. Ten days later,
the chairman of the sponsoring MIT department did just that.
Here we have, quite literally, an instance
of “cancellation culture”—one that seeks to impose a kind of annihilation or
social death. Advocates for speech, actions, or positions that their critics
deem unacceptable increasingly use the term to describe those critics’ efforts
to suppress, marginalize, and otherwise punish their adversaries. In Abbot’s
case, denying him a prominent platform for his views on DEI (and perhaps other
issues) was a classic cancellation effort.
The Abbot incident also reveals cancellation’s
potential expansiveness. After all, his lecture topic, while socially and
scientifically important, had nothing whatsoever to do with the protesters’
demand for DEI. Even so, their cancellation scheme almost succeeded. In a lucky
break for Abbot, he ended up delivering the canceled lecture—not at MIT but at
Princeton. There, some faculty led by conservative political theorist Robbie
George immediately stepped up and offered to sponsor it. Indeed, Abbot’s luck
was even more dramatic: the New York Times and other leading
media gave the incident some prominence, thousands of students signed up for
Abbot’s Princeton lecture, and his cancellation by MIT earned him a distinction
bestowed by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, which named him a Hero
of Intellectual Freedom!
This remarkable turnabout—a kind of moral
jiu-jitsu in which Abbot was able to convert his vulnerability to a mob’s
demands into a larger forum for his message—should gladden the hearts and minds
of the many people who deplore the forces of cancellation. All too commonly,
such pressures for conformity are strictly reinforced by hierarchy, fear of
social isolation and other informal sanctions, and the ubiquitous
hostage-taking of reputation.
What is it about the DEI movement—its tenets,
its action agenda, and its fierce, adamant champions—that has enabled it to
gain such influence with students and some faculty on so many campuses? My close observation of the growing movement at Yale and elsewhere has convinced me of
a number of related explanations. First, universities are massive entities
whose leaders are obsessed by the need to raise ever larger endowments (Harvard’s increased by $11.3 billion, or 40 percent, last year;
Washington University in St. Louis gained 65 percent!) to fund ever more
expansion, construction, academic and non-academic programs, and salaries. As
such, they resolutely strive to create an impression of order on campus. But
cancellations cause spasms of disruption, violence, and negative publicity that
can affect their exceedingly important public rankings. Dissident students know
that university leaders at the most prestigious schools (with rare but notable
exceptions like Robert Zimmer and Geoffrey Stone of the University of Chicago)
are prepared to pay a dear price to secure campus peace. And since they and
their faculty are overwhelmingly liberal politically—almost 90 percent identify with and often contribute to the Democratic
Party—they tend to sympathize with the protesters’ agendas, even when more
radical than their own.
This brings me to the second point about
DEI. Its ideals are rhetorically appealing only so long as they remain
undefined. Who, after all, can be against “diversity” and “inclusion,” at least
in the abstract? The reality, however, is that as abstractions these concepts
are merely aspirational and essentially empty. What they actually mean in
practice—and what the cancellation cadres plainly mean by them—is strict
regimes of affirmative action based on race, ethnicity, gender, and a few other
attributes. These attributes, cancel culture insists, must be used in college
admissions, job hiring, sports teams, instrumental ensembles, art projects, and
all manner of groups regardless of the actual distribution of preferences,
talents, interests, and availabilities among the supposed beneficiaries. In a
striking example, the Art Institute of Chicago just announced that it was dismissing all of its docents and starting over because too
many of them are white women.
Cancel culture prescribes affirmative
action as the means to install diversity in all activities that it values. But
affirmative action means very different things to different people. It ranges
from greater outreach to unrepresented groups—which Americans largely favor—to
numerical quotas for minority groups, which most, including most black
Americans, largely oppose. The same distinction applies to inclusion and equity; many of us
endorse them in the abstract but often disagree when faced with specific applications.
Cancel culture is different—and actually
yields less genuine diversity. For example, its orthodoxies often contradict
minority communities’ actual, intense desires for greater police presence and
enforcement in their neighborhoods. These same orthodoxies also impede more
effective discipline of unruly and violent students where such discipline might
enable their children to learn and pursue pathways to a brighter future. Cancel
culture’s zombie-like insistence that white racism today is still the main
reason for continuing poverty, high violent crime rates, poor health
conditions, domestic turmoil, and chronic family dissolution in troubled
inner-city communities is a perverse distraction from, and even a denial of,
the more important causes and possible remedies for these tragic, debilitating
conditions.
The MIT fiasco should remind us how much
cancel culture has to answer for. Although this culture’s activists are
relatively few and its rhetoric is often risible in its hyperbole, its
militants on college campuses sometimes have an outsize effect on others:
cruelly blighted reputations, perverse policy agendas, stigmatization of
moderate Democrats, and much more. But Princeton’s swift response to Abbot’s
cancellation by providing an alternative, honored forum also suggests a
hopeful, low-cost remedy, consistent with free speech and liberal academic
values. MIT should be ashamed of its craven support for bullying—and perhaps
other more principled institutions will heed this simple exemplary lesson.
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