It’s Time to Cancel “Cancel Culture”

A new FIRE report shows that Cornell needs to use its 2023-24 theme “The Indispensable Condition: Freedom of Expression at Cornell” to combat cancel culture on-campus. 

How Bad is the Cancel Culture Problem?

On April 20, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) issued a report analyzing efforts to cancel scholars at American universities.  The report found a shocking increase in attempted cancellations, from four in 2000 to 145 in 2022.

FIRE’s report uses its nation-wide database of all known cases where groups tried to terminate faculty. There were two attempted cancellations of faculty at Cornell in 2020. Chemistry Professor David Collum angered activists by tweeting about a protest in Buffalo, and President Pollack denounced his words. Similarly, Clinical Law professor William Jacobson posted about the origins of the Black Lives Matter movement on his blog, prompting calls for his firing and a rebuke from the Dean of the Law School.

In 2021, Oceanography Professor Bruce C. Monger was attacked by a Twitter mob for threatening to fail a student “with a prominent hooked nose” for not wearing a COVID mask.  While concerned students could have engaged with him directly, they used Twitter to seek allies beyond Cornell, and Cornell used its official Twitter account to reply that his description of the student “did not reflect Cornell’s values”.  Monger issued an apology and dropped the threat. Also in 2021, Turning Point USA targeted History Professor Russell Rickford for the content of his teaching and public protests. In all four cases, Cornell rejected terminating these tenured professors, and activists have stopped demanding the firing of faculty based upon their viewpoints.

Beyond faculty, in 2020 Cornell undergraduates ruthlessly doxxed and harassed Student Assembly representatives who voted against disarming the Cornell University Police Department. And in 2022, protestors successfully derailed a lecture by Ann Coulter ‘84.

How Does Cornell Compare?

On many issues, including cancel culture, Cornell takes its lead from other Ivy League schools, most notably Harvard. Harvard tops the list of most inhospitable schools in the FIRE report, with 23 faculty sanction attempts.  On FIRE’s overall free speech scoring, Cornell at 154th place tops Harvard at 170th. At Cornell, 36% of students say shouting down a speaker to prevent them from speaking on campus is never acceptable, while 27% at Harvard say the same. Cornell has not followed Harvard all the way down the cancel culture hole, but neither does a good job of protecting free speech or viewpoint diversity.

Cancel culture is only possible when a group can successfully intimidate those who disagree into silence.  Social media platforms such as Tik Tok, Twitter and Instagram have made cancel culture stronger. These platforms are not limited to Cornellians, allowing activists from peer campuses to drag Cornell’s conversations down to the lowest common denominator.

Institutional Neutrality

At its core, cancel culture represents a shift in how ideas are debated. Students used to advance their ideas through persuasion and discourse, which made thinking about the issues a collective, constructive effort. Now, many students seek to implement their agenda through social pressure and intimidation, refusing to hear any alternatives to their viewpoint. Additionally, students increasingly seek to use institutional power to batter their opponents into submission.  

This can be seen when students demand that Cornell’s President endorse their views, and then try to intimidate the rest of the campus to fall into step.  For example, in Spring 2019, Students for Justice in Palestine sought to have the SA pass a resolution that would condemn Israel as oppressive and have Cornell divest from companies doing business with Israel. This would have been difficult on account of Cornell’s partnership for Cornell Tech with Israeli university Technion. Although the SA ultimately defeated the resolution, many Cornellians on both sides of the issue focused on getting the SA to recommend that the President take a stand on the BDS movement, rather than convince their neighbors about the merits of their position. Both sides assumed that Cornell should take one side or the other, rather than stay out of the controversy.

Cancel culture reveals a complete misunderstanding of the nature of a university. A better vision includes institutional neutrality on the social issues of the day – which are the primary focus of cancel culture advocates. Cornell is supposed to be a home for a community of scholars who make up their own minds, freely speak their views, and often disagree.  This was reinforced by a 1967 University of Chicago report on institutional neutrality authored by a leading First Amendment scholar, Harry Kalven. To quote the Kalven Report,

A university, if it is to be true to its faith in intellectual inquiry, must embrace, be hospitable to, and encourage the widest diversity of views within its own community. It is a community but only for the limited, albeit great, purposes of teaching and research. It is not a club, it is not a trade association, it is not a lobby. 

In essence, cancel culture tries to leverage peer pressure and public shaming to halt academic productivity. In contrast, dialogue and conversations happen at a much smaller scale, often between individuals or in small groups. With learning, each scholar and student pursues the path he or she wishes to explore. Cancel culture can’t crowd-source instruction or academic papers, but cancel culture can halt academic productivity.  Although Cornell is involved in exploring the pressing problems of the day through teaching and research, individual faculty and students do that work in the manner that each individual believes is best within the limits of the law and academic discipline.

Different Cornellians may take conflicting paths in that work, but that is a good thing, because academic freedom allows their ideas to compete based upon merit.  Perhaps cancel culture results from a fear of making or defending merit judgments. Cancel culture can shoot down good ideas and artificially elevate ideas lacking merit.  It is not Cornell’s job to pick winners and losers and to declare any idea “wrong” or its advocate “canceled.”  Cornell is the friendly inn-keeper ready to host advocates from across the full spectrum of ideas with its ethos of “any person, any study.”

Content Neutral Limits on Speech

Cornell is also the wrestling referee, ready to keep the wrestlers from using illegal holds.  In refereeing, Cornell must be impartial and regulate speech in only a content neutral way.  That is why Cornell does not prohibit “hate speech” or any specific message.  Instead, Cornell has specific rules forbidding harassment or academic dishonesty.  All speech that does not violate such specific rules is allowed and encouraged under Cornell’s core value of free expression.

Cornell has many policies and tools in place to implement its referee role, some of them are very controversial.  Cornell has bias response teams which claim to respect free expression while focusing on allegedly biased speech content.  Cornell also has terms of service governing the use of information systems. 

Now, some members of the University Assembly (UA) and the Student Assembly (SA) want Cornell to be a cheerleader rather than a neutral referee. By further analogy, they want to give the fans in the stands (instead of the referee) the right to disqualify the visiting team.

Both the UA and SA are taking action this Spring that would strengthen cancel culture. In Resolution 31, the Student Assembly advocated for mandatory trigger warnings from instructors who present controversial materials.  While voluntary trigger warnings do not pose a serious problem to free expression, mandatory trigger warnings would especially threaten non-tenured faculty and graduate student teaching assistants who would face “cancellation,” and possible dismissal. The proposal’s goal was to empower students (or their Twitter mobs) to sanction “instructors” if they were not sufficiently protective against the “harm” caused by troubling ideas. This was rejected by President Pollack.

The SA also passed Resolution 28 about “The Right to Protest”, which President Pollack refused to read as expanding protestor rights. Currently, the UA is debating Resolution 7, which is based on Resolution 28.  Both resolutions are hopelessly ambiguous, and Cornell does not explicitly define a “right to protest.” 

Some argue that the “heckler’s veto” such as the protestors who prevented Ann Coulter ‘84 from giving her lecture should be an allowed form of protest, because Ann Coulter deserved to be “canceled” for not upholding “our values.”  Yet, the regulation of speech must be content-neutral and a conservative group has as much right to invite a speaker of its choice to campus without disruption as does a liberal group.  Cornell’s policies have been clear, and the students who illegally disrupted Coulter’s talk have been punished. With this punishment, free expression triumphed over cancel culture.

We must fight to end cancel culture to strengthen the university, and not just to curry favor with the national media or our donor base. The task for all Cornellians is to shift to winning on an issue by convincing Cornellians on the merits of the argument rather than by blindly threatening skeptics with cancellation.