A Practical Remedy for University Cancel Culture – The American Spectator

Our institutions of higher learning are in freefall. The dominance of progressive political orientations among faculty members and administrators is well known, and the consequences of this intellectual monoculture are equally obvious. I need not recount the innumerable instances of cancel culture on American campuses, or the political pogroms launched even against established, tenured faculty members who have refused to bow before the progressive passions of the moment.

I was recently the subject of cancellation myself when the president of my former employer, Saint Vincent College, decided to take control of a long-standing and highly respected academic center that I directed — due to his objections to a single speaker whose arguments against affirmative action he deemed unacceptably heterodox. L’Affaire Saint Vincent attracted considerable national publicity, including two pieces that appeared in these pages. But it’s fair to surmise that there are other cancellations that do not get the attention they deserve — not to mention the countless daily demands for intellectual conformity with which professors, administrators, and students meekly comply for fear of being seen to oppose progressive orthodoxy.

In the film adaptation of Philip Roth’s novel The Human Stain, the fictional professor Coleman Silk is accused of racism by college authorities for using ordinary — and demonstrably nonracist — language in a classroom. It is language that is grossly misinterpreted — either intentionally or unintentionally — by unseen, unduly fragile students.

In an administrative kangaroo court, the angry professor — played brilliantly by Anthony Hopkins — stares at his colleagues and exclaims: “To charge me with racism is not only false; it is spectacularly false. And you know it!” And indeed they do know it. Yet not one of them will speak up for their colleague. As he storms from the conference room in which the academic show trial is being held, Silk ironically thanks one of his silent faculty friends.

Silk’s accusations point to the nub of the problem: colleges are facing a moral crisis as much as an intellectual one. There are still decent people on America’s campuses — many of them professors with tenure — who are decidedly not on board with the various woke outrages du jour. However, they often choose not to engage when they have the opportunity — nay, obligation — to defend open discourse or even other members of their college community who find themselves under assault.

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This dynamic repeats itself on campus after campus. Alexis de Tocqueville identifies the reasons for it in Democracy in America. He notes that standing against dominant opinions is particularly difficult in democratic times for fear of the disapprobation of the multitude. And the modern university is nothing if not a democratic institution — that is, one beholden to the opinions of the progressive majority that composes it. In most cases, this is a majority ethos more than an actual voting majority, but it is all the more powerful for being so. Once the majority has spoken, says Tocqueville, “everyone is silent, and friends and enemies alike seem to make for its bandwagon.”

Tocqueville notes, for example, that while a king has only physical power, a majority possesses both physical and moral authority. It thus encloses thought “within a formidable fence,” and anyone who traverses it “must face all kinds of unpleasantness and everyday persecution…. He believes he has supporters; but he feels that he has them no more once he stands revealed to all, for those who condemn him express their views loudly, while those who think as he does, but without his courage, retreat into silence as if ashamed of having told the truth.” Such is the democratic manifestation of the natural timorousness of men.

Like Tocqueville’s majority, wokeness “does not understand being mocked…. The least reproach offends it, and the slightest sting turns it fierce.” Overcoming the hegemony of the woke will, therefore, not be easy. The battles will be long, fierce, and messy — but it’s best to fight them now, rather than delay them to our disadvantage.

Alas, to fight requires the very moral virtue that is in shortest supply in academia — courage. The characteristic attributes and mores of academics are no substitute for courage. It is the nature of academics to value their perks and privileges rather too highly, to elevate urbane erudition over the moral virtues. Yet it is courage that makes the other virtues, including the intellectual ones, possible. There’s a reason why urbane cosmopolitans often don’t seem to be the sharpest knives in the drawer — a man cannot think straight when his knees are trembling. We are now dominated by the loudest and proudest voices in our institutions, largely because so many who might oppose them are wary of conflict, always afraid of being labeled impolitic, impolite, or resolute.

C.S. Lewis warned us that “no justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous. Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism.” As much as academics might wish it to be true, “it is not syllogisms that will keep the reluctant nerves and muscles to their post in the third hour of the bombardment…. Reason in man must rule the mere appetites by means of the ‘spirited element.’” Perhaps only in academia are “men without chests” so highly valued precisely because they are without chests. We castrate and then bid the geldings be fruitful intellectuals.

All of this has grave real-world consequences. Too many leaders of our national institutions — whether they be educational, corporate, cultural, political, or religious — now signal not only their own wokeness but also their intention to enforce conformity to woke dogma. To a large degree, they learned these attitudes, and cultivated their nascent authoritarianism, in colleges and universities. Yet in academia, far too many decent but timorous people are merely riding out their careers, fully concentrated on self-interest maximization — somehow hoping, or expecting, that civilization will continue on, more or less as normal, as Rome did after the fall of its traditional legal and moral authorities. But the barbarians at our gates are far more insistent and totalizing than were the Goths at the gates of Rome. And it is the new barbarians who will replace the silent ones; it is their ideas, their actions, that will replace what remains of the old order — of which there will not even be an echo if it continues to remain silent.

So what to do? I offer a brief but concrete recommendation, directed mainly at faculty members. If my analysis is correct, academics — even tenured ones — are particularly susceptible to a characteristic danger of democratic ages, that is, fear of the very real power of the majority. There is no cure for this, given the natural proclivities and character traits of academics. But there is a feeling of safety to be had in numbers. I strongly suggest that faculty members opposed to the intellectual monoculture organize themselves preemptively on every campus in America on which even a handful of them can be found. They should meet regularly and make their presence known. This will allow them to become aware of others like themselves and, with this knowledge, develop the confidence to speak and act when academic freedom, and intellectual freedom more broadly, are threatened. And it will also put woke administrators on notice that, should they overreach, there will be very public consequences. Such campus organizations could articulate principles similar to those set out in the University of Chicago’s 2016 letter to freshmen — an explicit rejection of cancel culture and a commitment to diversity of opinion. They could model their activities, in microcosm, on those of the Academic Freedom Alliance, pledging (and coming up with specific strategies for) mutual aid in times of threat.

The hour is late for our institutions, and for our civilization. For academics, it’s time to man up.

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