NY Times Editorial Board: Cancel Culture Created the Campus CrisisJOHN SEXTON 5:30 PM | May 11, 2024
AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez
You won't find the phrase "cancel culture" in the NY Times' editorial about campus protests, but that is what they are talking about. It's actually hard to tell because I think the Times editorial board must have been a bit hesitant to write something saying that conservative critics of campus culture are right. As a result of this effort to avoid saying things that might upset progressives, the message is a bit muddled. Still, by straining out the filler it's possible to get to the point.
...students and other demonstrators disrupting college campuses this spring are being taught the wrong lesson — for as admirable as it can be to stand up for your beliefs, there are no guarantees that doing so will be without consequence.
It sounds to me like the board is addressing the calls for student amnesty (which most of the protesters include in their demands). The board is saying that If you want to push the boundaries you should expect consequences. And after several paragraphs we get back to this theme about accountability and how the lack of it has made things worse.
During the current demonstrations, a lack of accountability has helped produce a crisis.
It has left some Jewish students feeling systematically harassed. It has deprived many students of access to parts of campus life. On campuses where in-person classes or commencement exercises were canceled, students have watched their basic expectations for a university experience evaporate.
Simply put, allowing the occupations to ruin campus life for everyone else on campus was a mistake.
At this point, we take a detour into a paragraph attacking "right-wing Republicans" which feels like something required by secret bylaws to be included in every NY Times editorial. But after a couple paragraphs we're back to the real problem which is left-wing cancel culture. Emphasis added by me because wow! I can't believe this is in the NY Times.
For several years, many university leaders have failed to act as their students and faculty have shown ever greater readiness to block an expanding range of views that they deem wrong or beyond the pale. Some scholars report that this has had a chilling effect on their work, making them less willing to participate in the academy or in the wider world of public discourse. The price of pushing boundaries, particularly with more conservative ideas, has become higher and higher...
It has not gone unnoticed — on campuses but also by members of Congress and by the public writ large — that many of those who are now demanding the right to protest have previously sought to curtail the speech of those whom they declared hateful.
It sounds to me as if the board is saying that years of cancel culture, which were downplayed and ignored by administrators, have taught leftist students that they don't have to worry about the rights of anyone else.
And now the encampments have taken that to a new level. They are demanding maximum freedom for their right to assemble and speak while simultaneously giving no space for the rights of others.
You reap what you sow.
The editorial concludes with a call for "clear guardrails on conduct and enforcement of those guardrails, regardless of the speaker or the topic." In other words, stop letting the campus left shout down speakers and dominate the space.
Teach them that they have to obey the rules like everyone else. If schools had done that, we might not be here.
It's a good message overall but it's also somewhat tone deaf. I've written about the NY Times itself downplaying the witch's brew of CRT and identity politics that has infected schools. And I don't remember much criticism from the Times of Occupy Wall Street which is where the current protesters got the script they are now rehearsing on campuses across the country. In other words, how about a little accountability for the newspaper that lavished attention on all of the same leftist tactics it is now suggesting require more accountability from administrators.
There's also one obvious flaw in the piece: "the disarray and violence of the past weeks has been escalated by the continued involvement of both the police and external agitators." Tossing the police in with outside agitators is a mistake. Police were invited onto these campuses specifically because all other efforts to get students to respect the rules have failed. One university president after another has made this clear. They tried to negotiate but ultimately, often when it came to a question of holding graduation or not, they had to physically remove the encampments.
The editorial board has written a pretty good piece about the need for consequences but it balks at noting that, in extremis, those consequences could include arrest and charges as well as suspensions and expulsions. Suggesting that police are part of the problem rather than part of the solution undermines the whole theme of the editorial.
It's not hard to imagine why the authors balked at the idea that police are one consequence protesters should face. We all remember how the Times newsroom responded to an opinion piece suggesting the National Guard should be called in to end the 2020 riots. The editorial board probably doesn't want to kick the hornets nest again. But really, how are university administrators supposed to dish out accountability when the protesters just ignore them? If police are out of bounds what are they supposed to do when people simply refuse to follow the rules (including staying off campus after you've been suspended). The editorial board flinched.
Some good comments including this one (2nd most upvoted).
For years academia was perfectly comfortable silencing conservative views, speakers, and opinions in order to appease the intolerant Progressive tribe. Now, these institutions are struggling to manage a related crisis that emerges from within the tent because they have such a terrible record on free speech and inquiry. I am glad that this paper finally acknowledges that this was a mistake and that there is a real problem with campus cultures.
Also, this comment which makes a great point. The current crisis is directly connected to the rise of DEI.
The editors have expressed a balanced opinion about the demonstrations rocking too many campuses. To my surprise, they have even acknowledged the intolerance of dissenting viewpoints to progressive platitudes as a contributing factor.
That doesn't go far enough. They are missing the elephant in the room with regard to the tenor of these demonstrations.
The intellectual dishonesty of college administrations over the past ten years is the root cause of the conflicts on campus.
This dishonesty is rooted in the expansion of DEI administrators which are currently one of the highest personnel cost factors in higher education. Those administrators have effectively given the progressive social justice warriors the permission, actually the expectation, that they have a moral obligation to deny dissenting viewpoints to their dogma.
Interestingly enough, while the number of tenured and tenure track teachers has declined since the 1990s, the number of administrative positions have increased anywhere from 6x to 10x. DEI has been the main beneficiary. As a result, college tenure decisions, hiring and worse, thought and language policing have become norms. Any untenured faculty at any college today risk loss of career opportunities if they do not genuflect to those demands.
To establish a culture of intellectual rigor and intellectual openness in an academic setting, the DEI morality police must go.
You can't bring accountability to leftist students when there is a massive bureaucracy installed to back up exactly what they are doing. And let's not forget mandatory DEI statements which give the DEI bureaucrats control over hiring.
When woke DEI "goals" are all a university cares about, some other aspects are, of course, going to decline and decay. When painting everything, including math, as somehow a colonialist assault, the brightest minds are going to scorn that game and go elsewhere. When a candidate for a astrophysics professorship is told s/he must provide an essay on how s/he promotes social justice, the university has forgotten what credentials it is hiring for.
One more comment suggesting it's already much worse than the Times is willing to admit.
The problem is that administrations have embraced intersectionality and identity politics as "truth" rather than as the political, theoretical framework or lens that it is.
"Institutional neutrality" should mean that administrations do not embrace a single theoretical framework/lens as "truth" but rather create universities as a platform for freely debating different frameworks without fear of reprisal or penalty.
The "intersectionality" framework leads to symptoms like diversity statements in hiring and the overly simplistic "colonizer/colonized" narrative that so many students have embraced in the current Gaza conflict.
The problem is that other possible frameworks for interpreting reality have been largely censored. Many faculty also accept "intersectionality" and "identity politics" as truth as well, and so have been perfectly content these past 10 years to go along with the administration.
Faculty who disagree or simply have a different way of looking at things risk ostracism or worse if they do not embrace intersectionality as "truth."
I guess we have to give them some credit for stating the obvious but, frankly, they've only scratched the surface of a much deeper problem. I hope the editorial board members who wrote this are reading the comments.
NYTimes Addresses Cancel Culture-Without Mentioning It
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