Cancel Culture Has a Lot to Answer For

What is it about the DEI movement its tenets, its action agenda, and its fierce, adamant champions that has enabled it to gain such influence with students and some faculty on so many campuses? My close observation of the growing movement at Yale and elsewhere has convinced me of a number of related explanations. First, universities are massive entities whose leaders are obsessed by the need to raise ever larger endowments (Harvard s increased by $11.3 billion, or 40 percent, last year; Washington University in St. Louis gained 65 percent!) to fund ever more expansion, construction, academic and non-academic programs, and salaries. As such, they resolutely strive to create an impression of order on campus. But cancellations cause spasms of disruption, violence, and negative publicity that can affect their exceedingly important public rankings. Dissident students know that university leaders at the most prestigious schools (with rare but notable exceptions like Robert Zimmer and Geoffrey Stone of the University of Chicago) are prepared to pay a dear price to secure campus peace. And since they and their faculty are overwhelmingly liberal politically almost 90 percent identify with and often contribute to the Democratic Party they tend to sympathize with the protesters agendas, even when more radical than their own.

This brings me to the second point about DEI. Its ideals are rhetorically appealing only so long as they remain undefined. Who, after all, can be against diversity and inclusion, at least in the abstract? The reality, however, is that as abstractions these concepts are merely aspirational and essentially empty. What they actually mean in practice and what the cancellation cadres plainly mean by them is strict regimes of affirmative action based on race, ethnicity, gender, and a few other attributes. These attributes, cancel culture insists, must be used in college admissions, job hiring, sports teams, instrumental ensembles, art projects, and all manner of groups regardless of the actual distribution of preferences, talents, interests, and availabilities among the supposed beneficiaries. In a striking example, the Art Institute of Chicago just announced that it was dismissing all of its docents and starting over because too many of them are white women.

Cancel culture prescribes affirmative action as the means to install diversity in all activities that it values. But affirmative action means very different things to different people. It ranges from greater outreach to unrepresented groups which Americans largely favor to numerical quotas for minority groups, which most, including most black Americans, largely oppose. The same distinction applies to inclusion and equity; many of us endorse them in the abstract but often disagree when faced with specific applications.

Cancel culture is different and actually yields less genuine diversity. For example, its orthodoxies often contradict minority communities actual, intense desires for greater police presence and enforcement in their neighborhoods. These same orthodoxies also impede more effective discipline of unruly and violent students where such discipline might enable their children to learn and pursue pathways to a brighter future. Cancel culture s zombie-like insistence that white racism today is still the main reason for continuing poverty, high violent crime rates, poor health conditions, domestic turmoil, and chr

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Peter Schuck, from whom I should have taken a class.