Oct 22, 2021 05:16 PM
https://quillette.com/2021/10/21/cancel-...nswer-for/
INTRO: 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.
The Abbot incident also reveals cancellation’s potential expansiveness... (MORE)
INTRO: 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.
The Abbot incident also reveals cancellation’s potential expansiveness... (MORE)