What the Discourse about “Cancel Culture” Tells Us About Academic Freedom

I gave a talk at a workshop on "Academic Freedom" as an object of discourse in Berlin

[Earlier this month, I got to participate in a workshop about academic freedom co-organized between Princeton University and Humboldt University in Berlin. I decided to try to use recent debates about “cancel culture” to think about how a broader public talks about academic freedom. I tried to take account of two things that are true at the same time: “cancel culture” debates very quickly got connected to questions of academic freedom in various countries (look at anti-”cancel culture” efforts in the UK and they’re basically all about universities); but in other countries, concerns about “cancel culture” have nothing to do with academic freedom. My idea in this piece was: what if that strange disconnect actually allows us to think about how academic freedom functions in public discourse. That doesn’t mean, of course, that there aren’t genuine threats to academic freedom, or that it’s not important to have debates over it. But I think paying attention to the attention economy of public academic freedom debates gives us a sense of the pitfalls that seem to attach to these issues when they’re hashed out outside of universities…]

I am neither a legal scholar nor a philosopher, which is why I am approaching the question of academic freedom as a cultural historian and as someone who analyzes public discourses in different countries. I also approach it as a scholar who has been running an Institute for Gender Research for the past few years—years that were, to put it mildly, interesting ones for Gender Studies. The experiential core, as Adorno might call it, of my remarks in this paper is the puzzlement that people who claim academic freedom as their lodestar nevertheless argue that someone—the government, our administration, just, please someone!—should abolish the very discipline to which I’ve dedicated a good part of the last decade and indeed my career. My basic methodical move is not to decry a contradiction or inconsistency here, but to ask why it is not perceived as a contradiction or inconsistency, what methods of rationalization and reframing make this move seem plausible to a good number of people.

And perhaps it is an apt, if eccentric path into the topic (the moat in the eye as magnifying glass, to again speak with Adorno) to start with the—somewhat shocking, somewhat disorienting—experience that a great number of people seem to care, and seem to think they know a great deal about, your discipline. For whatever else it is, academic freedom is an object, and great shaper of interest and focus, and—and this seems to me key—an object of attachment well beyond the groves of academe. It is a piece of attention economy. People may not care when English professors debate post-critique, but they care, or can be made to care, where issues of academic freedom are concerned. This is my topic in this paper, and my window into it will be a discourse that has been with us since mid-2018 in the US and mid-2019 in Germany: cancel culture.

What does “cancel culture” have to do with academic freedom? It’s important to note that, when the word first entered the global lexicon, the answer was: not very much. It was a term used to describe dynamics in social media fandoms, never applied to academics and their work, its victims were comedians and actresses, not professors. In many countries, it still works that way. When Vladimir Putin invokes the evils of “cancel culture”, the kind of example he seems to have in mind is author J.K. Rowling, not, say, Kathleen Stock. In France, “cancel culture” is still very much a post-#MeToo phenomenon, the words used to describe academic contretemps are islamogauchisme or wokisme, for instance to discuss the case of Klaus Kinzler at the SciencePo Grenoble. In Turkey, Brazil and elsewhere the word remains, as far as I can tell, a staple of celebrity coverage.

But in the two countries we’re talking about the most in this short workshop, in the US and Germany, considerations of academic freedom very clearly came to impinge upon the evolution of the term “cancel culture”. It proved a conduit, in other words, for detaching the word, at least somewhat, from its native habitat on Twitter and in fan communities, and to give it a sense of respectability and stakes. Academic freedom turned a Tumblr-term into a preoccupation for ambitious journalism, TV talking heads and their consumers.