By David Gordon, associate editor
Frequent heated exchanges marked Wednesday’s final online Free Speech Week event at UW-Stout but the two speakers often seemed to be speaking past each other in the discussion of “cancel culture.”
J. C. Hallman and James “Duke” Pesta had strongly contrasting views on the impact and the legitimacy of cancel culture but never quite agreed on exactly what the term means or on its effects. Hallman is a New York City author and Pesta is a professor of English at UW Oshkosh.
The program was the third of three this week hosted by UW-Stout’s Menard Center for the Study of Institutions and Innovation (MCSII). Some 30 people were in the online audience and several of them posed questions or provided comments that kept the discussion going for 30 minutes beyond its scheduled length of an hour.
Earlier Free Speech Week programs included Prof. M. Alison Kibler of Franklin and Marshall College discussing on Monday the arguments for and against banning hate speech; and a Tuesday discussion of free speech and academic freedom by UW-River Falls Prof. Brian Huffman and John K. Wilson, a leading commentator on academic freedom.
All three programs were recorded and are scheduled to be available by the weekend on the MCSII website. For a CVPost report on the Monday program, click here.
Definitions of ‘cancel culture’
Dictionary.com defines “cancel culture” as a term that refers “to the popular practice of withdrawing support for (canceling) public figures and companies after they have done or said something considered objectionable or offensive. Cancel culture is generally discussed as being performed on social media in the form of group shaming.”
The Cambridge Dictionary online defines the term as “a way of behaving in a society or group, especially on social media, in which it is common to completely reject and stop supporting someone because they have said or done something that offends you.”
Hallman suggested that the term might derive from television, where programs disappear when they are cancelled. He said “canceling” involves “deplatforming” people or groups so they have no way of communicating their ideas to a mass audience, and the “culture” aspect “speaks to the effect of these efforts to remove people from their positions of authority.”
Pesta focused his criticism of the idea on people’s unwillingness to hear ideas they don’t agree with even when fairness might require two sides of an issue to be presented. He focused particular criticism on universities for what he views as giving undue weight to students who take offense to various statements, including – he said – from people who are attempting to present two sides of a controversy.
“Administrators care much more about what would offend the students than they do about the First Amendment,” he said.
“We are more and more becoming comfortable with the idea that certain people” have the right to silence those who offend them, Pesta said. This has gotten to the point where students seemingly have the power to dictate that classes be taught in ways that don’t offend them even if they don’t know and understand the culture they’re criticizing, he added.
Competing efforts to focus the discussion
Parts of the rest of the discussion revolved around Hallman’s efforts to consider the effects of cancel culture on society as a whole and Pesta’s insistence on maintaining a narrower focus on the academic context. They seemed to agree that the issue comes down to who gets to decide what speech or actions are offensive, and to whom, but strongly parted ways at that point.
Hallman said students should have the right to file complaints if they are offended and argued that final decisions should be “market-based” – an approach he suggested conservatives should support. Pesta countered by criticizing any possibility that students’ decisions about whether they are offended could be the final word and stressed that allowing this could ruin real people’s lives because of their political or other views.
“Why are college-age kids deciding they won’t listen to anything they disagree with” and becoming “culturally ignorant” revolutionaries, he asked.
Hallman noted that “values shift over time” and changes in culture may well require changes in how a subject is taught. The failure to recognize this is one of the causes for conflict, on campus and elsewhere, he said, and added that society’s current turmoil reflects both differing and changing values.
Disagreement over value of ‘process’
Hallman suggested several times that student-faculty conflicts – even those based in differing values — could be resolved by following established procedures for hearing student complaints. He said that faculty members who dislike their school’s processes or their results are not compelled to stay at that school – a position that glosses over the difficulties of changing academic jobs today.
Pesta said that Hallman’s attitude illustrates the existence of a double standard, since a faculty member could never get away with telling a minority student to enroll elsewhere. He added that academic review procedures usually take considerable time and effort, and faculty can never recover the time lost to them even if they emerge successfully from the process.
Hallman said that – in contrast to the existence of campus procedures – cancel culture is really speaking to situations where similar processes don’t exist. He said that it should be possible to “disagree with people without having to throw a brick through a wall” or tear down a statue.