RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quillette.com/2021/10/21/cancel-culture-has-a-lot-to-answer-for/

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.

https://www.realcleareducation.com/articles/2021/10/20/elite_universities_are_the_worst_for_free_speech_110653.html

Inside the 2021 College Free Speech Rankings

One of the great values of an American collegiate experience is that students have the chance to engage deeply with differing opinions. To this day, I am grateful for the cornucopia of people, traditions, views, and cultures that I was able to engage with two decades ago when I, then a fairly conservative Jewish teenager, left the East Coast to go West and to college at Stanford University.

I would be lying if I said that there were no evenings when I felt hurt, misunderstood, shocked, and angry when my ideas were challenged and came into conflict with others. But there were far more nights where I was able to connect, learn, and grow in ways unimaginable to me in high school. I certainly remember the frustrations and agony of being challenged, but I remember more powerfully the ecstasy of having my mind opened up to new ideas and changing my opinions when I heard someone or something new. My old dorm even hosted a speaker’s series where huge turnouts were common for guests on both the left and the right and no one shouted down anyone; we even hosted the frequently-protested Dinesh D’Souza without incident.

While I, along with significant numbers of other students, did not like nor agree with the ideas shared by many of the speakers we heard, their perspectives were always worth hearing and then debating late into the night. Sadly, my undergraduate experience of being able to hear, respond to, and then reject or accept a plethora of views is under threat. Today, cancel culture runs rampant on our college campuses, and viewpoint diversity is no longer considered a sacred, core value in higher education.

Thanks to the largest data set ever compiled on student’s views toward free speech, we now know that students who attend the nation’s elite schools – those that purportedly thrive in the world of research, innovation and discovery – are actually more likely to try to cancel speech than their peers who attend lower-ranked educational institutions.