I recently posted a Federalist Society Youtube clip for the first time in my daily miscellany blog post. This hour-long debate was on academia and cancel culture. Speaking in favor of cancel culture was author JC Hallman, against noted conservative Charles Murray, widely known for his co-authored book on the bell curve, particularly on a disputed point on race and intelligence. I didn't think Murray came off looking adequately prepared for the debate and repeatedly ceded ground as not in academia as a professor (he's an MIT PhD but has spent moat of his career at research institutes and conservative thinktanks (AIR, Manhattan Institute and AEI).Obviously Murray has experienced his own exposure to cancel culture, with protested invitations to speak at Azusa Pacific University and Middlebury College and targeted by Southern Poverty Law Center. However, Mr. Hellman also hasn't had a career in academia.
At the risk of oversimplification, Hellman argues that cancel culture is more of a myth, not a real thing, that basically conservatives are simply losing in the free market of ideas, that students are simply responding to their intrinsic consumer rights. I personally think Hellman is wrong, putting a lot of lipstick on that pig. Just a side note here: both Hellman and Murray dismiss Ann Coulter's protested college speaking invitations (Berkeley? Ottawa?) as relevant, Hellman more or less arguing that Coulter's speeches weren't about ideological diversity but more like poking a bear with a stick. Ms. Coulter and I disagree on a matter of topics (notably immigration), but the issue I have is with the nature of the tactics which amount the unprovoked use of violence, force or tactics (interruptions, etc.) to censor her point of view. I don't have an issue with students boycotting a speaker, protesting her, etc. It's quite another thing to shout her down, denying others the right to attend her speech. It fundamentally violates free expression and academic freedom, no matter how disingenuously Hellman attempts to explain them away.
I don't think Hellman makes it a point in this debate but he does in the cited essay. about some Latino who lied about earning some military honor, so-called "stolen valor". He didn't like the government sanctioning individuals for the crime of lying, pointing out that others publicly exposing his fraud is more than enough. The issue is more complicated than Hellman would have you believe; to give a simple example, the person could be engaged in fraud taking advantage of the goodwill of others. And there are obvious examples of lihel or slander which can be difficult to disprove, e.g., sexual misconduct of minors or allegations against nominated SCOTUS justices Thomas and Kavanaugh.
To give a personal example, I once almost lost a job when a female co-worker filed an HR complaint over my asking her to lunch at the building cafeteria. (I barely knew her; she was a junior account representative for a client for which I performed IT work. She was a cute, friendly blonde in a nearby cubicle, no ring on her finger.) Well, the complaint wasn't stated like that, of course. She fabricated this story that I had been harassing her with incessant, unwanted date requests, refusing to take no for an answer, and that she had issued me a final warning she would go to management if I didn't cease and desist. There was no truth to any of this. The lunch invitation was the first and only date attempt. by a shy geek. Why did she try to get me fired? I don't know to this day;(there was a rumor she had a boyfriend and had hoped that he would propose over the holiday break). I guess she really, really didn't like me. The company responded that if their lawyers found any merit to the complaint, I was done. (It's bad enough facing possible rejection for a date request. Just imagine getting rejected in front of your whole company, while lawyers scrutinized every move you made, looking for evidence to fire you.) Nevertheless, they still moved me to a cubicle on the other side of the building. I have never dared to ask out another colleague since then.
But the fact of progressive dominancy in academia is fairly well known (cf here for a fairly comprehensive take). Unlike the principles in the debate I did have a short (5 year) career in academia as a junior tenure-track MIS professor at UWM and UTEP business schools; my final year was at a hybrid applied computer science program at Illinois State as a visiting professor in the early 90's. I ALMOST returned to academia in 1994. I can't really speak to changes in academia since than but everything I've seen leads me to believe that the underlying trend has continued. Even in economics departments, the numbers I've seen are social liberals outnumbering conservatives by neatly 5-1. I've seen comparable, maybe somewhat lower ratios for business schools, e.g., see this study of finance professors. And of course the ratios are multiples higher in the arts and humanities.
Was my own career a victim of cancel culture? Probably not. I received a job offer from a historic black college in 1994. I think my career ended primarily because of a bad academic job market I did face political issues but these were more involving academic office politics, not involving national politics, and/or interpersonal conflicts, some of which I've described in passing over the past decade-plus of the blog. In fact, I was a registered Democrat throughout my college years and when I joined UWM, although I had become a fairly rare conservative Southern Democrat while in business school. It had zero to do with Houston professors expressing political views in class or in person. In fact, I never discussed politics with students or faculty.as a student or professor. It's possible some may have inferred my leanings from certain incidents I'll describe, but really even during my more socially liberal salad days I was pro-life and a fiscal conservative. I had blurred intent of legislation with the means of government intervention, and by the time I went to business school (around 25), I had been developing a growing skepticism of most government programs. As I learned more business and economics, this accelerated. It began to surface in some work products; my late marketing management professor (Dr. Zinkhan) .remarked in his review of one assignment, "You're coming across as a little strident here!"
Even as an undergraduate, I took exception to having multiculturalism and feminism shoved down my throat; I really wanted a solid foundation on Western Civilization and the Great Books but the Catholic sisters that ran OLL were socially conscious (many of them lived not in the convent but in the surrounding barrio and wore more secular clothes except for maybe a hanging cross pendant). I ended up doing some supplemental reading on my own. I still remember resenting being required to attend a lecture by then largely unknown Alex Haley. I signed a counter-petition to the Chicano group loudly protesting the campus (including some fellow dorm students and friends). I won't go into much specifics here; they went around, among other things, sliming one of my (sister) professors as a "racist" (I never got anyone to explain what was behind the libel) and claiming the college hired too few Latino professors (as if newly minted Latino professors in demand nationally under affirmative action policies were as plentiful as blackberries!). One of my main philosophy professors was a Czech-American niece of a Houston archbishop; the other was an Irish immigrant Oblate priest. They probably earned a nominal salary. (A lot of religious take vows of poverty.) I remember one of my calculus professors or lecturers was a black woman. Some of my fellow students were first generation college students who were born into migrant Mexican families. The idea that OLL was anything short of progressive is a departure from reality.
I still recall talking my best friend, an education major, into coming with me as moral support to see some UT/Austin recruiters visiting campus. (I was applying for graduate school in math.) They were on Ramon as soon as he entered the room; it was like a cheerleader accidentally dropping into a meeting of the chess club. Me, they barely glanced in my direction. Ramon was ill at ease with the unwanted attention and repeatedly, unsuccessfully tried to steer them in my direction: "Why don't you talk to Ron? He wants to go to your school."
I'm not sure it's possible to do justice to the pervasiveness of progressive groupthink in academia, but a few anecdotal experiences I've discussed in some form over the tenure of my blog. I never realized the power of the Dean of Students and/or so-called student rights. I never even thought of complaining about a professor during my years of pursuing 4 college degrees. I could go on a rant here about the Deans of Students I've met; I'll simply say if I ever headed a college, the first thing I would do is fire the Dean of Students and eliminate the position.
Oddly enough I and the senior MIS faculty (we didn't have a department at UWM's School of Business) didn't agree on much of anything, but they initiated an overdue reform I wholehearted supported--doubling the undergrad major from a nominal 9 hours (3 classes) to 18 hours. Now degree programs differ by school and/or fields but from my own experience it was 30 hours for each of my majors. I think high school teachers needed 24 hours per discipline. Quite frankly, if I were an IT recruiter, 9 hours isn't credible. There were other factors; I think at the time IT recruiters definitely preferred graduates with IBM mainframe exposure. If I'm not mistaken, UWM was running a UNISYS mainframe, probably the preference of the science department. The business school tried to get the IBM name on its program by standardizing on IBM PC labs. (I don't really think that convinced many recruiters.) The real competition for our graduates was a cousin branch school, UW-Whitewater, which required 21 hours and had an IBM mainframe on campus. We did have a very good faculty, but for example, until I taught the service level COBOL class, it was usually covered by a grad student.
The real problem was the undergraduate degree program was not competitive and it was hurting our credibility and reputation. But students generally rebelled against the reform, insisting we were changing the rules of the game after it started, a violation of their entitlement. If it had been up to me, I would have required at least 21-24 hours. The malcontents didn't realize they were in a state of denial. They had to compete against more credible program graduates. Once they're in the job market and find out their degrees don't get their feet in the door, what can they do? Their professors and college administrators will still have their jobs; the college isn't reimbursing their tuition and fees.
So much for Hellman's utopia of college students as consumers But let's deal more directly with Hellman's fantasy of progressive academia. The following is a telling real-world example, again something I've mentioned in passing in my blog.
To those unfamiliar with academic life of a university professor, they are generally evaluated on 3 main criteria: teaching, research and service. The specifics differ by school. Teaching often involved a number of well-known objectives, including course load, office hours, etc.' perhaps less understood is the "real" measure is not how much a student learns or can do but their subjective ratings on maybe a 15-minute form on one of the last days of the semester. People will tell you that students respect teaching preparation and high standards; maybe if you are a professor with industry contacts who can get you a break into a promising career, but for many students, they are more concerned about getting good grades for modest effort, and a hole punch on their job ticket. I remember at UTEP, I had to show up 15-20 minutes late one day for evaluations and met a male student coming to class late. As we entered the classroom, one of the coeds whispered loud enough for me to overhear, "You missed your chance to screw [me] over." Almost makes living off a modest stipend, all the countless hours of ballbuster courses, comprehensive exams, writing and defending a dissertation worth it, don't you think?
Research differs by field, but typically there's a track record of quantity and quality of recognized journal articles.
Finally, there's service. For example, I served as a reviewer of MIS Quarterly and various academic conferences. But for the purposes of this post I'll focus on one of my UWM assignments: MBA admissions. My quirky faculty neighbor KK turned down the assignment, and I was asked to replace her.
For the most part the business school had a largely automated admission process based on 2 main criteria: upper division GPA and GMAT scores. There were 6 people on the committee: the chair, a Dean-selected male stooge, 2 older male senior profs (I think), 2 junior female faculty and me. We were asked to deal with the borderline cases, say they did well on one criterion but not the other. Generally we were in agreement on most cases; I was probably the most likely one to dissent. One classic case comes to mind; I think the candidate had a PhD from the University of British Columbia. He also had the lowest GMAT score I've ever seen, probably pissed off over the indignity and formality of being forced to take a stupid test. We weren't thrilled with his attitude, but it was obvious he was qualified.
But the case that I remember most was a case during my last meeting. The applicant was a woman of color. She fell way short of either criterion. We had routinely rejected applicants with better qualifications. For some reason, which I didn't get, the chair and the women voted to approve, leading to a 3-3 deadlock.
Then the chair confessed, "Look, you guys have to agree. The Dean has already awarded her financial assistance. It would embarrass him to have done that to someone who is not granted admission."
Say, what? That is so corrupt. He was demanding that we engage in an unethical double standard, unfair to others we rejected before her. Ethically, I couldn't do it.
When that didn't work, the chair then played his trump card. I'm paraphrasing for dramatic effect: "Resistance is futile. This is Ron's last meeting. The Dean will replace him with someone who will rubberstamp her admission." Oh, tell me you didn't just say that! I then responded in a way no one in the room expected: I changed my vote from "No" to "Present". All 5 people in the room were pissed at me. My two male colleagues were outraged I was giving the applicant a pass against precedent, but the other side knew the applicant was passing with a plurality, not the moral authority of a majority vote. I was signaling a protest against a corrupt decision.
But the reader might still ask: were you canceled? In a manner of speaking, yes. Another incident from the blog.
The context at UWM was that typically a junior professor got 2 3-year contracts to win tenure. Usually the contract renewal was a formality. Except for me. There is a story beyond this post, but in my first semester, the informal MIS area chair (no department) threatened my tenure process; without support of your senior colleagues, you were done. So I knew I wasn't going to stay at UWM. But the renewal would give me multiple opportunities to build my research record and shop the academic job market.
The renewal hearing would happen the first semester of the second year, which would give the unsuccessful candidate a year to find alternative employment. I made a fatal error for the second year: I gave up teaching my beloved graduate DSS course and volunteered to teach the COBOL class, like I had at UH. Initially the administration was thrilled beyond words. Except for one thing. I was an advocate of structured programming, and ANSI had published a COBOL-85 standard supporting these constructs. I selected a textbook which came with floppy disks (remember them?) with Ryan-McFarland COBOL-85 compiler. Now the administration was pissed. I wasn't having the students use their Microsoft COBOL compiler licenses. (Because the moron Microsoft account rep had lied, telling me it was 85-standard compliant.) Now there were other risks including the fact nobody staffing the computer labs knew the 85-standard.
Now my program requirements were modest; just 4-5, spread across the semester. (In contrast I had to turn in a weekly program when I took a computer science course (FORTRAN) at OLL.) Shortly (I think just 1 or 2 weeks into the semester) a group of 5 malcontent students knocked on my door and demanded an extension for the first assignment (still 2 weeks off) "or else". I generally don't respond well to threats and knew they were panicking. I reminded them I had office hours, and two weeks of lectures to ask questions. They were unmoved, repeated their unspecified ugly threat and left. The first assignment came and went without incident, and I had thought the whole thing had blown over.
Weeks later, I showed up to my office after dinner to work on the next day's lectures, the night before my renewal hearing, to find a thick folder under my office door. There was a redacted student petition against my contract renewal (to prevent my "reprisals"); the story on the grapevine was they were trying to coerce classmates into signing the petition.
Obviously this violated any concept of due process. Even a cursory look at the complaints in my renewal folder was nauseating. Not kidding: one student wrote: "Dr. Guillemette's chalkboard usage is so irritating, I'm on the verge of primal screaming in class if I have to endure it one second longer". Seriously, dude? Another student complained I have "the hygiene of a frog" (I gather that's not a good thing).
I was done and everybody knew. I think a few committee members were worried about setting a precedent. I have heard no similar story anywhere. Later the assistant dean told me that a group of 5 students (I wonder who?) had been rotating daily visits to the Dean of Students Office to file complaints. I'm sure the Dean would have accepted my resignation in a heartbeat.
I almost didn't want to write about it to give other malcontent students ideas of tactics to use against other faculty they dislike.
This was a living nightmare, and I think administrators and senior faculty probably manipulated the circumstances. I still believe I 'm better than any professor I've ever met. I probably misplayed that situation. Being a professor was my dream job, and I miss it. I was good at it.
I'm sure if Hellman read my experiences, he would insist the free market works and there's no such thing as cancel culture.
