Speech Hypocrisy: A Prominent Conservative Sees the Appeal of Cancel Culture
Here is John Hinderaker at Powerline:
In 2017, Professor Knijnenburg wrote that “all Trump supporters, nay, all Republicans, are racist scum.”...
Why should the people of South Carolina fund this bigot? Why should they allow him to teach their children? They should fire him. Yeah, sure, tenure. But tenure should not protect a professor who is guilty of this kind of overt bigotry.
I am racking my brain to figure out how Hinderaker's plea for a public institution to fire a tenured professor is any different from the run-of-the-mill Leftist cancel culture that the Powerline bloggers often lament? Narrowly defining an Overton window based on one's own beliefs and then demanding that anyone whose speech falls outside that window should be muzzled and denied a living sure sounds like cancel culture to me. And there is not even a hedge here like, "well it's a private institution so the 1A does not apply" -- this is a public institution.
I have only seen selected bits of Professor Knijnenburg's academic work that have been cherry-picked by critics such as Hinderaker, but I am willing to believe that this professor does not represent the values I would want to see upheld in an institution of higher learning. But the solution is to ignore Professor Knijnenburg as the trivial scholar he likely is and go after the folks that run these institutions and demand that they justify their standards for putting together the faculty and awarding tenure. The problem here is not speech, but the absurdly low standards that obtain in much of academia, even at Ivy League Universities.
