7 ms·

Actually it's not different. University lecturers have been protested or cancelled for decades for reasons unrelated to their topic, usually due to political be

Actually it's not different. University lecturers have been protested or cancelled for decades for reasons unrelated to their topic, usually due to political beliefs or corporate interests that clashed with students' ideals. "Cancel culture" is specifically about "personal" societal reforms, which is what makes it different than the older complaints about general politics. Back in the day it was "edgy" to protest or cancel a speaker due to their support of the Vietnam war. People were just as angry (or more so!) at Vietnam protesters as people are today about "cancel culture" protesters, and vice versa. At the time, it was those young freaks with the long hair who were clearly nuts and extremists and going to erode the country's moral decency. Counter-culture folk in the 60's and 70's were a tiny but vocal minority of young people who were largely put down for their radical views about war and the environment. It's only in hindsight that protesting the Vietnam war seems socially acceptable.

still_grokking 5y ago
We all know why you're posting this form a throwaway account…
civilized 5y ago
I get the historical analogy with anti-Vietnam War protesters. I just don't agree that they are actually the moral equivalent of anti-anti-racial-preference protesters. And I definitely don't believe that the majority will see it that way in a few decades. The moral foundations for Vietnam War opposition are much intellectually deeper and ideologically broader than those supporting racial preferences. A medieval Catholic could have opposed the Vietnam War on grounds of just war theory.
- throwaway984393 5y ago
  For what it's worth, I'm not trying to draw moral equivalence. I'm hoping to demonstrate that we just don't know what protests will be acceptable or not in the future.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- unclebucknasty 5y ago
  >...much intellectually deeper and ideologically broader than those supporting racial preferences. A medieval Catholic... Sure, if you narrow the topic of racial preferences down to the literal instantiation of exactly that mechanism, then broaden the topic of the Vietnam War out to historical philosophies of War in general, then of course the latter reads "intellectually deeper" and "broader". But, these are all just discussions about what is morally just and, when society fails to provide justice, what we consider appropriate remedies.
  - whatshisface 5y ago
    I have no idea what people are meaning when they say "racial preferences" in this thread but the Vietnam war was objectively awful and gets more awful with every detail you learn.
    - unclebucknasty 5y ago
      Sure. But, not sure how to process that as a reply to my comment.
- AzzieElbab 5y ago
  This is very different from protesting Vietnam war or anything else that is specific. What we are seeing is a pure manifestation and exercise of power.
mint2 5y ago
> University lecturers have been protested or cancelled for decades for reasons unrelated to their topic I’m not sure this is the case here, it depends whether that means the specific topic they are giving the talk on or topic as in area of claimed expertise. I would say it’s fair game to consider them to be claiming an area of expertise if they are publishing articles on the topic, and this valid to consider the quality and impact of that work when inviting them for talks
cnppt 5y ago
Protesting against a war is nowhere comparable to demanding speech (correct pronouns and affirming the original sin of inevitable white racism). In fact, people from that era are marginalized because their brand of wokeness is no longer sufficient and too libertarian. Back in those days one could also see Chomsky discussing with William Buckley (impossible today) and Enoch Powell discussing with people on the left.
bluescrn 5y ago
Social media has completely transformed this type of protest. People who have nothing to do with the university can now join a 'cancel mob' to attack a political opponent on the other side of the world.
- klyrs 5y ago
  Oldsters remember when this was a slower process, where people would write angry letters. They would undertake letter-writing campaigns, persuading others to take up the literary torch. They'd write to newspapers and magazines, where "free speech" was subject to the gatekeeping editor. Shorter screeds would appear in classified ads, again, to be censored if the editor didn't want to print what you had to say. It's faster, it's more transparent, the gatekeeping is more often post-facto and more there are more platforms to try if one blocks you. Writing quality and wit has definitely declined, though. But I wouldn't say that this is a complete transformation. My dad would fume over his letters for days before sending them.
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    > Writing quality and wit has definitely declined I concur. The skewering of Sarah Palin "I can see Russia from my house!" by SNL was brilliant. SNL's skewering of Trump just wasn't funny. Edit: Ok, if you disagree, note that everyone recognizes the SNL "I can see..." quote. Any memorable ones from SNL's Trump skits?
    - mhh__ 5y ago
      Alec Baldwin was pretty good, no? I always found Trump-satire a little bit symbiotic. He thrives on non-boring politics, satire only normalizes his actions - i.e. mocking war hero's, regardless of what you make of the war they fought in, is just inhuman and satire only serves to form a grotesque hyperreality which we saw explode at the beginning of this year with all this nonsense over the election.
      - WalterBright 5y ago
milesvp 5y ago
I’m not sure you’re correct that nothing is different. I saw a lecture recently by someone whose organization does mediation between student groups and universities with regards to free speech. He was saying that a few years ago for the first time his organization was starting to mediate in the opposite direction. Was a very interesting talk. The speaker had tried to commit suicide and in the process of recovering from that realized that the speech patterns that are associated with sucidal tendencies, extreme consequences to minor events, were being used by student groups. Things like “if so and so comes to campus, people will die”. And they weren’t being hyperbolic, like they were honestly afraid someone would die if a speaker were allowed to speak. So the mediations required finding ways to bring nuance back to the conversation. I honestly don’t know how different these objections to speakers are than in the past, but I thought it was interesting that there was a shift in the balance of power between university administrations and student groups in the US. Edit: Thanks to mrosett for pointing out this was Greg Lukianoff who is with FIRE. Please take care researching this topic, it is a large lightning rod for alt-right and heavily conservative view points. Some cursory searches show that FIRE might not be as neutral as I thought they were.
- judahmeek 5y ago
  Any particular reason you choose not to name the speaker you're supposedly talking about?
  - mrosett 5y ago
    Quite clearly Greg Lukianoff who is with FIRE and wrote The Coddling of the American Mind
  - milesvp 5y ago
    Apologies, I don’t think I can easily find the talk. I did some cursory looking based on what I could remember of the talk before posting. I like to link to things when I can. Worse, is the topic is a current lightning rod for alt-right, so there’s a lot of garbage to sift through. I will see if I can get lucky and find the talk again. Edit: mrosett answered this. Yes it was a lecture by Greg Lukianoff of FIRE. I might have been click-baited to watch it, but he seemed credible enough to quote, and seemed to genuinely care about actual free speech.
tsss 5y ago
It was wrong then and it is wrong now. The Vietnam war protesters were free to protest, but they can not demand to restrict the freedom of speech of others.
deadpannini 5y ago
Protesting isn't addressed in the article. Who in the 60s and 70s was invited to speak at a college or university, then later had their invitation withdrawn due to their support of the Vietnam war or corporate interests?
- krainboltgreene 5y ago
  This is actually extremely googable and definitely happened way more than you think.
  - deadpannini 5y ago
    Then it shouldn't be hard to share a few examples, right?
    - krainboltgreene 5y ago
      Okay so you didn't do any research before making your comment, cool.
      - deadpannini 5y ago
        The original post claimed this, with no substantiation: > University lecturers have been protested or cancelled for decades for reasons unrelated to their topic ... Back in the day it was "edgy" to protest or cancel a speaker due to their support of the Vietnam war. I don't think I'm obligated to do anything before asking OP for evidence, but sure, I'll show my work, so to speak. I've been following free speech issues for about thirty years, which a close interest in academia. Obviously, that doesn't overlap with the period under discussion (I'm too young), but in the course of reading deeply about the issue, I've come across a lot of history covering the 60s and 70s (in the US & Europe, in particular). So I was surprised to learn that cancelations I'd never heard of were common. It's not easy to figure out the search terms for this - it's not like looking for the ten most popular NPM packages. So I tried searching for a few things. "campus speaker canceled 60s" "campus speaker canceled 70s" I tweaked the terms - "1960s"/"1970s" seemed to produce slightly more relevant content, but no examples. Substituting "lecture" for "speaker" and "university" for "campus" didn't improve things either. I dug a couple pages deep in the results and clicked on a few seemingly relevant links, but was always disappointed. I thought that maybe the ACLU's "Speech on Campus" page might reference an episode, but no. [1] I thought, perhaps FIRE has something on this, but they appear to be more concerned with recent history. If these events were "extremely googable", I'd expect to have seen something promising by that point, but it wasn't happening. After your second response I thought "Oh, maybe krainboltgreene said googlable but meant duckduckgo or bing", so I tried those, and guess what? Nothing. I've got huge gaps in my knowledge. It's possible that OP is right and this is neither new nor different. But I'm not going to take their word for it, and it's ridiculous to expect me or anyone else to spend more than ten minutes searching for (even just) a lead on something that might not even exist, particularly given the confounding ambiguity of the possible search terms and the lack of indexed web resources for the historical era in question. [1] https://www.aclu.org/other/speech-campus https://www.aclu.org/other/speech-campus
jmnicolas 5y ago
So you think there's nothing different between advocating for war and criticizing how universities admit students?

still_grokking 5y ago

We all know why you're posting this form a throwaway account…

civilized 5y ago

I get the historical analogy with anti-Vietnam War protesters. I just don't agree that they are actually the moral equivalent of anti-anti-racial-preference protesters. And I definitely don't believe that the majority will see it that way in a few decades. The moral foundations for Vietnam War opposition are much intellectually deeper and ideologically broader than those supporting racial preferences. A medieval Catholic could have opposed the Vietnam War on grounds of just war theory.

throwaway984393 5y ago
For what it's worth, I'm not trying to draw moral equivalence. I'm hoping to demonstrate that we just don't know what protests will be acceptable or not in the future.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
unclebucknasty 5y ago
>...much intellectually deeper and ideologically broader than those supporting racial preferences. A medieval Catholic... Sure, if you narrow the topic of racial preferences down to the literal instantiation of exactly that mechanism, then broaden the topic of the Vietnam War out to historical philosophies of War in general, then of course the latter reads "intellectually deeper" and "broader". But, these are all just discussions about what is morally just and, when society fails to provide justice, what we consider appropriate remedies.
- whatshisface 5y ago
  I have no idea what people are meaning when they say "racial preferences" in this thread but the Vietnam war was objectively awful and gets more awful with every detail you learn.
  - unclebucknasty 5y ago
    Sure. But, not sure how to process that as a reply to my comment.
AzzieElbab 5y ago
This is very different from protesting Vietnam war or anything else that is specific. What we are seeing is a pure manifestation and exercise of power.

mint2 5y ago

> University lecturers have been protested or cancelled for decades for reasons unrelated to their topic I’m not sure this is the case here, it depends whether that means the specific topic they are giving the talk on or topic as in area of claimed expertise. I would say it’s fair game to consider them to be claiming an area of expertise if they are publishing articles on the topic, and this valid to consider the quality and impact of that work when inviting them for talks

cnppt 5y ago

Protesting against a war is nowhere comparable to demanding speech (correct pronouns and affirming the original sin of inevitable white racism). In fact, people from that era are marginalized because their brand of wokeness is no longer sufficient and too libertarian. Back in those days one could also see Chomsky discussing with William Buckley (impossible today) and Enoch Powell discussing with people on the left.

bluescrn 5y ago

Social media has completely transformed this type of protest. People who have nothing to do with the university can now join a 'cancel mob' to attack a political opponent on the other side of the world.

klyrs 5y ago
Oldsters remember when this was a slower process, where people would write angry letters. They would undertake letter-writing campaigns, persuading others to take up the literary torch. They'd write to newspapers and magazines, where "free speech" was subject to the gatekeeping editor. Shorter screeds would appear in classified ads, again, to be censored if the editor didn't want to print what you had to say. It's faster, it's more transparent, the gatekeeping is more often post-facto and more there are more platforms to try if one blocks you. Writing quality and wit has definitely declined, though. But I wouldn't say that this is a complete transformation. My dad would fume over his letters for days before sending them.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  > Writing quality and wit has definitely declined I concur. The skewering of Sarah Palin "I can see Russia from my house!" by SNL was brilliant. SNL's skewering of Trump just wasn't funny. Edit: Ok, if you disagree, note that everyone recognizes the SNL "I can see..." quote. Any memorable ones from SNL's Trump skits?
  - mhh__ 5y ago
    Alec Baldwin was pretty good, no? I always found Trump-satire a little bit symbiotic. He thrives on non-boring politics, satire only normalizes his actions - i.e. mocking war hero's, regardless of what you make of the war they fought in, is just inhuman and satire only serves to form a grotesque hyperreality which we saw explode at the beginning of this year with all this nonsense over the election.
    - WalterBright 5y ago

milesvp 5y ago

I’m not sure you’re correct that nothing is different. I saw a lecture recently by someone whose organization does mediation between student groups and universities with regards to free speech. He was saying that a few years ago for the first time his organization was starting to mediate in the opposite direction. Was a very interesting talk. The speaker had tried to commit suicide and in the process of recovering from that realized that the speech patterns that are associated with sucidal tendencies, extreme consequences to minor events, were being used by student groups. Things like “if so and so comes to campus, people will die”. And they weren’t being hyperbolic, like they were honestly afraid someone would die if a speaker were allowed to speak. So the mediations required finding ways to bring nuance back to the conversation. I honestly don’t know how different these objections to speakers are than in the past, but I thought it was interesting that there was a shift in the balance of power between university administrations and student groups in the US. Edit: Thanks to mrosett for pointing out this was Greg Lukianoff who is with FIRE. Please take care researching this topic, it is a large lightning rod for alt-right and heavily conservative view points. Some cursory searches show that FIRE might not be as neutral as I thought they were.

judahmeek 5y ago
Any particular reason you choose not to name the speaker you're supposedly talking about?
- mrosett 5y ago
  Quite clearly Greg Lukianoff who is with FIRE and wrote The Coddling of the American Mind
- milesvp 5y ago
  Apologies, I don’t think I can easily find the talk. I did some cursory looking based on what I could remember of the talk before posting. I like to link to things when I can. Worse, is the topic is a current lightning rod for alt-right, so there’s a lot of garbage to sift through. I will see if I can get lucky and find the talk again. Edit: mrosett answered this. Yes it was a lecture by Greg Lukianoff of FIRE. I might have been click-baited to watch it, but he seemed credible enough to quote, and seemed to genuinely care about actual free speech.

tsss 5y ago

It was wrong then and it is wrong now. The Vietnam war protesters were free to protest, but they can not demand to restrict the freedom of speech of others.

deadpannini 5y ago

Protesting isn't addressed in the article. Who in the 60s and 70s was invited to speak at a college or university, then later had their invitation withdrawn due to their support of the Vietnam war or corporate interests?

krainboltgreene 5y ago
This is actually extremely googable and definitely happened way more than you think.
- deadpannini 5y ago
  Then it shouldn't be hard to share a few examples, right?
  - krainboltgreene 5y ago
    Okay so you didn't do any research before making your comment, cool.
    - deadpannini 5y ago
      The original post claimed this, with no substantiation: > University lecturers have been protested or cancelled for decades for reasons unrelated to their topic ... Back in the day it was "edgy" to protest or cancel a speaker due to their support of the Vietnam war. I don't think I'm obligated to do anything before asking OP for evidence, but sure, I'll show my work, so to speak. I've been following free speech issues for about thirty years, which a close interest in academia. Obviously, that doesn't overlap with the period under discussion (I'm too young), but in the course of reading deeply about the issue, I've come across a lot of history covering the 60s and 70s (in the US & Europe, in particular). So I was surprised to learn that cancelations I'd never heard of were common. It's not easy to figure out the search terms for this - it's not like looking for the ten most popular NPM packages. So I tried searching for a few things. "campus speaker canceled 60s" "campus speaker canceled 70s" I tweaked the terms - "1960s"/"1970s" seemed to produce slightly more relevant content, but no examples. Substituting "lecture" for "speaker" and "university" for "campus" didn't improve things either. I dug a couple pages deep in the results and clicked on a few seemingly relevant links, but was always disappointed. I thought that maybe the ACLU's "Speech on Campus" page might reference an episode, but no. [1] I thought, perhaps FIRE has something on this, but they appear to be more concerned with recent history. If these events were "extremely googable", I'd expect to have seen something promising by that point, but it wasn't happening. After your second response I thought "Oh, maybe krainboltgreene said googlable but meant duckduckgo or bing", so I tried those, and guess what? Nothing. I've got huge gaps in my knowledge. It's possible that OP is right and this is neither new nor different. But I'm not going to take their word for it, and it's ridiculous to expect me or anyone else to spend more than ten minutes searching for (even just) a lead on something that might not even exist, particularly given the confounding ambiguity of the possible search terms and the lack of indexed web resources for the historical era in question. [1] https://www.aclu.org/other/speech-campus https://www.aclu.org/other/speech-campus

jmnicolas 5y ago

So you think there's nothing different between advocating for war and criticizing how universities admit students?