Cancel Culture Datapalooza -- Addendum

[Here is a quick addendum to my longer piece about the problems with the kinds of data commonly adduced to document a left-wing (or “woke”) “cancel culture” on US-campuses. I didn’t get to do this analysis until after I had hit “send” on my already overlong piece. This one is in English only.]

Last week I used an article in the Boston Globe (and an audience member who confronted me with it after a talk I gave in Cologne last month) as the occasion to look into the type of data usually adduced when we are being warned about a “woke” (or previously “politically correct”) threat to freedom of speech (or academic freedom, which isn’t the same thing, but frequently used interchangeably) at US universities. I mostly focused on the evidence proffered in this passage from that article (which is by Stephen Pinker and Bertha Madras):

You can find my analysis in the post linked above, but the upshot is: it’s way more complicated than the authors seem to want to make this data seem. Specifically I pointed out that:

— The reference to “the McCarthy era” (the claim that the 156 firings exceed those “during the McCarthy era” only if we compare them to those firings indeed motivated by McCarthyism) seems intended to suggest that these “attempts to punish” are partof one specific or at least identifiable political project — i.e. woke culture warriors shouting down conservative speakers. But if you look at the data, that’s not really true

— The authors seem to have generated these numbers from the FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) database (“Scholars under Fire”), which endeavors to collect any case in which an academic alleges they were fired/punished for speech that would likely be protected by the first amendment. — important work, surely. That means, however, that the authors are using any kind of (alleged) violation of academic freedom to illustrate a very specific threat of academic freedom. For instance, they implicitly use both the existence of right-wing campaigns to fire left-wing scholars, and the existence of left-wing campaigns to get conservatives fired as evidence that there is a pervasive leftist cancel culture. In fact, they also use cases where it’s unclear whether there was any political dimension (one party claims there was, the other says there wasn’t), or cases that are just plain bizarre.

— The timeframe of the quote (2014 to 2022) seems a little strange, and isn’t really explained in the article. It was likely chosen just to generate a nice, large number. If you break the numbers of firings down by year, you realize that they are actually fairly consistent from year to year (15-20 per annum), with a marked outlier year in 2020 — the year of COVID lockdowns, an election campaign, the run-up to a coup, and the year of Black Lives Matter; also the year where we all were at home saying things on zoom and on social media in ways that were exceptionally easy to document. There are 37 firings that year in the FIRE database, though if you go through them one by one you realize the numbers are clearly inflated and made to suggest something they actually don’t. Still, 2020 was clearly a comparatively rough year.

— Finally, it’s important that the “worse than McCarthy”-bit distorts the relative frequency with which something happens. There were about 100 professors fired due to accusations of communism during the McCarthy era — at the time there were about 190,000 instructors on about 1800 college/university campuses. The 156 firings Pinker and Madras document, by contrast, happened at a moment when there were 1.5 million people teaching at 5000 to 6000 campuses, depending on how you count.

What I didn’t talk about in my post — and what I’d like to focus on in my addendum today — is the parenthetical in the sentence about firings: “156 firings (44 of them tenured professors).” Now, I want to be clear that I don’t think that somehow tenured professors are a better or more real gauge of academic freedom than, say, an adjunct who is not renewed. But I do think they are a good gauge over time: the number of professors with tenure in the US is dwindling, but it’s somewhat inelastic from year to year. The other numbers Pinker at al rely on in their statistics rely on apples-to-oranges comparisons — graduate students dismissed from programs, practitioners dismissed from the one class they taught at the local college, professors that missed out on deanships, etc. But if someone has tenure and loses it — well, that means something fairly standard from campus to campus and from situation to situation.

Moreover — unlike just about everyone else in academia — tenured faculty have a bunch of ways to fight back against a firing. Meaning we get a at least somewhat official version of what happened to occasion the firing. And these things tend to make more waves, making them somewhat easier to trace. Plus, the purpose of tenure is precisely to make sure academics aren’t fired for the content of their scholarship — 44 people between 2014 and 2022 losing tenure would thus indeed pretty directly tell us about the state of academic freedom at US institutions.

So, my co-researcher Eren Yurek and I decided to just reconstruct the number the authors cite: 44 losses of tenure between 2014 and 2022. Going through the firings on FIRE’s website, we noted the ones where the target of the firing had tenure — between the end of 2014 and the end of 2022, but okay. For those years we indeed got 44. So far, so good. At the same time, though, it is worth noting that for each case, FIRE gives a quick sense of the political dimensions of a firing, specifically whether the calls to “cancel” came “from the left” or “from the right”. This is by no means perfect, and there are a bunch of well-known cases where it clearly breaks down — but this data would have been clearly visible to Pinker and his coworkers when they compiled their numbers. (There is no way to filter for tenure, so I think they did what we did — click on each case and read the media coverage.) So here are the firings of tenured professors and whether the motivation of their firing came “from the left”, “from the right” or was “unclear”:

Of the 44 firings of tenured professors, then, 14 were “from the right”, 3 were “unclear” and 27 were “from the left”. Furthermore, the number of firings from the left and from the right are largely in the same basic ballpark for every year other than 2020. So this is what would have stared them in the face as they compiled these numbers: the fact that — with the evident exception of 2020 — these numbers are both not very large and pretty evenly distributed politically. It’s really curious they nevertheless came up with the warning they did, invoking “heckled”, “mobbed” professors being “cursed [out]”, invoking the specter of a new McCarthyism (a label that has attached to PC since the 90s) — ladling on signifiers that will, to almost any reader, suggest a connection to leftist social-justice positions. Their article warns about cases of “disinvitation, sanctioning, harassment, public shaming, and threats of firing and boycotts for the expression of disfavored opinions”. We’ve all read enough of these articles to know who the authors see behind those.

Then there’s the question of scale. In one year, there are even more cancellations from the right than from the left — but honestly, I don’t think this even matters: it’s 3 cases versus one case. Among hundreds of thousands of faculty on five to six thousand campuses. That doesn’t change the fact that each of these cases should be looked into and is deeply awful for the scholar concerned. But I don’t know if I’d call that a crisis. There are hundreds of tenured faculty who lose their jobs each year — if their program gets cut, for instance (this happened at UNV not too long ago), or their university hits dire financial straits (Mills College, West Virginia University), or for contract violations. This is of course super troubling — but it’s largely a story about the corporate university, about a bloated administrative apparatus wanting to create a more precarious teaching staff, etc. Only a tiny fraction of these, it turns out, are about woke mobs on Twitter. And yet we hear almost exclusively about them.

In fact, as I showed in my other post about this data, the exceedingly big blue bar of firings of tenured faculty “from the left” in 2020 (13 in total), seems to have been exactly that — a tale of an administration running roughshod over its own rules. 4 of the 13 were music professors at the College of Saint Rose in New York who fired them, the university says, as part of a cost cutting effort. The professors said it had to do with criticism of the music department for being "too white". On the FIRE website, the four are naturally part of the 13 tenured professors fired in 2020 — with the note that their cancellation came “from the left”. This is where it helps that tenured professors have a lot of legal recourse. The four professors successfully sued against their firing — and we have an unusual amount of information about the firing as a result.

Finding in the professors’ favor, the New York Supreme Court only tangentially mentions the political dimension to which the four professors owe their presence on the FIRE-list. Rather, the court determined that the “Music Department acted in violation of its own procedures,” “using inadequate, inaccurate, and misleading financial data, while retaining members of the same Department who were lower in rank and years of seniority, including those who had not been awarded tenure.” That is to say, the court didn’t seem to regard this as a first amendment issue — the ruling didn’t mention either the first amendment, or the issue of academic freedom, at least not insofar as it pertained to the content of their teaching. Rather, it treated the termination as a violation of the institution of tenure.

My conclusion in my other post still stands: how you interpret these numbers is up to you. It’s absolutely fine to say that 3, 4 or even 7 scholars losing tenure in one year is too many. But I think it also is incumbent on us to not further dishonor those scholars by making their (at times egregious) terminations mean something that they evidently do not. For Pinker and his co-author do not say: it’s too easy to fire tenured faculty (I also don’t think that’s a battle anyone would want to pick; it’s far too easy to fire just about everyone else in academia, and we should probably start with that!). They warn about a specific source of those firings — a particular ideology that they allude to but don’t name —, blithely unconcerned that their data doesn’t bear that out.