Help Us Cancel the Cancel Culture

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CounterCurrent: Week of 6/21
Help Us Cancel the Cancel Culture

CounterCurrent is the National Association of Scholars’ weekly newsletter, bringing you the biggest issues in academia and our responses to them.
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Category: Academic Freedom; Reading Time: ~2 minutes
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** Featured Article - Tracking "Cancel Culture" in Higher Education by John David ([link removed][UNIQID])
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“Cancel culture ([link removed][UNIQID]) ,” a new form of mob rule used to enforce progressive orthodoxy in, well, everywhere, has grown all too common in American higher education. Administrators, students, and even professors run the risk of “cancelation” whenever expressing views deemed out of step with the ideological homogeneity dominating our colleges and universities.

We’ve all seen it happen: a professor says, publishes, or even Tweets an allegedly controversial statement, and the “anti-racist” barbeque gets started. Students create petitions to demand that their teacher is fired; colleagues condemn their peer’s views as “perpetuating” one of the myriad “isms” or “phobias” seen as heretical by the modern left; and college administration gives in to the mob’s demands, punishing the “culprit.”

To be sure, some of the aforementioned statements are unsavory and may be worthy of institutional discipline. But the vast majority are not. And yet, woke higher education bureaucrats show an eager willingness to placate the angry students and professors insisting that “justice” be served. Meanwhile, “cancelees” have their professional reputations permanently sullied and, in many cases, ruined.

A recent example of “academic cancelation” is the case of Kathleen Lowery ([link removed][UNIQID]) , Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Alberta. Professor Lowery is a self-described "gender-critical feminist," that is, she does not believe that transgender identity should supercede biological sex in public policy decisions. For example, she has said that “housing trans-identified men in women’s prisons is not fair to women prisoners and I think it puts women at risk.” Seems pretty reasonable.

And yet, Professor Lowery has been canceled. She expressed this view to one of her classes in order to expose students to varying opinions on sex and gender identity, causing some to “feel uncomfortable” and report Lowery’s alleged transphobia to administration. Two months later, she was informed of her dismissal from the university, effective July 1, 2020.

Cancel culture in higher education has reached crisis levels. That’s why NAS has decided to track cancelations and record them in a downloadable archive, to expose administrative malfeasance and provide concerned scholars and citizens with a helpful resource. In this week’s featured article ([link removed][UNIQID]#caseslist) , I expound further on the nature of cancel culture and present our current list. I write:

The threat to academic freedom is obvious: when those within academia are unable to contradict progressive orthodoxy, the disinterested pursuit of truth is lost. Reasoned scholarship is traded in for the cheap, vapid substitute of political activism. And in the long run, higher education itself dies.


Those who violate academic freedom must be called out, publicly exposed, and permanently marked for their misbehavior. Ideally, violators’ sullied reputations will then limit their ability to inflict further damage. This is not to form a counter-mob in opposition to the current one, but rather to hold the guilty parties responsible in the court of public opinion. Let the punishment fit the crime.


NAS needs your help to cancel the cancel culture. If you know of academics not in our archive facing the mob for running afoul of the campus thought police, please email us at [email protected] (mailto:[email protected]) .

Until next week.

John David
Communications Associate
National Association of Scholars
Read More ([link removed][UNIQID])
For more on cancel culture in higher education:
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June 08, 2020


** Let the Tweeter Beware ([link removed][UNIQID])
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Peter Wood

Professor Charles Negy is under investigation by the University of Central Florida for alleged classroom misconduct—one day after he posted a couple of controversial Tweets.

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June 04, 2020


** The Tyranny of Pronouns ([link removed][UNIQID])
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NAS

Can university officials force their professors to call students by their preferred titles and pronouns? That’s the issue in the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals case of Meriwether v. Francesca Hartop.

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May 18, 2020


** Disappearing Liberals ([link removed][UNIQID])
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David Randall

The Left in higher education seeks to destroy intellectual freedom and Western civilization. It is the very opposite of “liberal.”

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March 02, 2020


** Arizona House Passes Intellectual Diversity Legislation ([link removed][UNIQID])
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NAS

HB 2238 is now the first campus intellectual diversity bill to advance in a state legislature.


** About the NAS
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The National Association of Scholars, founded in 1987, emboldens reasoned scholarship and propels civil debate. We’re the leading organization of scholars and citizens committed to higher education as the catalyst of American freedom.

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