As I stated in the first blog post of this series, I've been fascinated by the concept of cancel culture in the past few months and I've been doing a lot of looking into it. Please go back and read it if you haven't yet, because it lays some important groundwork for what I say in the rest of this series.
In this post I want to think about how a particular trend in American colleges might affect western culture in the decades to come. I say "American" colleges specifically just because most of the thinking on the subject is in the American context and therefore that is most of what I have read and listened to. I'll get into why I am focussing on college contexts as I go.
Here are four facts to consider:
1st Fact: American Colleges are Influential
According to the book The Cancelling of the American Mind, the market size of the US higher education industry is around $1 trillion. For comparison, the GDP for the entire country of Canada is $1.9 trillion. The reason this is important is to highlight that American Colleges wield immense power and money, and are a big shaper of western society.
Secondly, and more obviously, colleges in general are influential because of the simple fact that they educate upcoming generations. If you want a sense of where ideas and society will be 20-30 years from now, look at what's happening at colleges today. Colleges—especially elite colleges—will shape and produce future leaders in the realms of politics, law, education, media, etc.
2nd Fact: American Colleges Lean Politically Left
Check out this graph:
These are numbers collected by Mitchell Langbert that represent the ratio of Democrats to Republicans from 51 of the 66 top-ranked American colleges. For example, in the chemistry departments surveyed there was approximately 5 professors that voted Democrat for every 1 professor that voted Republican. As you can see, as you go down the graph the ratio gets increasingly lopsided, with the extreme being 108 Democrats in the Communication departments and no Republicans at all! It's not hard to imagine what this lopsidedness would do to the education of students going through these schools. Even if these Democrat-voting professors have the best of intentions—and I would like to believe that most of them do—it seems inevitable that being educated in contexts so saturated in liberal or progressive values would to some extent instill the same values in its students.
A few notes on this:
First, similar ratios were found among college administrators as well. In other words, it's not just the professors teaching the courses, but also other college staff in charge of admissions, student life, programming, communications (and so on) that lean left politically.
Second, it should be noted that Langbert's survey was of 51 top-ranked American colleges. The more elite the college the more it tends to lean Democrat, which means if the survey sample was all American colleges it would still tilt towards Democrat but not as strongly.
Third, colleges have been politically left for a long time, but they are becoming more left over time.
3rd Fact: Cancel Culture is Increasing
Here's another graph:
This is a graph of the number of cases reviewed by FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) per year. FIRE's mission is to defend free speech in America, so the "cases" this graph is referring to are attempts to silence people's voices or get them "cancelled". As you can see, the number of cases remains stable until about 2013 and then starts rising until about 2019 and then shoots up in 2020 amidst all the unrest of Covid and racial tensions. According to Greg Lukianoff, President and CEO of FIRE, the rate of cancellation attempts on college campuses is unprecedented in modern times.
Professors are feeling it:
When FIRE surveyed college professors, 16% of professors said they have been disciplined or threatened with discipline for their teaching, speech, or academic research.
76% of conservative faculty felt the climate on campus was hostile to people with their political beliefs, and 72% were worried they may lose their job or reputation due to their beliefs
Students are feeling it too:
According to a FIRE survey, 80% of college students said they have self-censored their beliefs and avoided discussing controversial topics out of concern for how professors, the administration, and other students would respond.
Giving voice to this widespread concern for being judged or cancelled, one student at MIT said "I never feel like I can express my views around my classmates, even a lot of my close friends. They frequently talk about how evil all conservatives are and even talk about how they wish they'd all just die."
4th Fact: Gen Z Entered College Around 2013
Gen Z (sometimes called iGen), is the generation that was born between approximately 1995-2012. This generation is notable because it has grown up with media—cell phones and social media in particular—in a way that no prior generation has. They are also sometimes called the "anxious generation" because the rate at which they have struggled with anxiety and depression is far above prior generations.
Jon Haidt and Greg Lukianoff in their book The Coddling of the American Mind (not to be confused with its follow-up book, The Cancelling of the American Mind) point out the sad irony that the rise in Gen Z's anxiety is partly due to their parents' overactive desire to keep them safe. You may have heard of the phenomenon "helicopter parenting", which more recently has evolved into "snowplow parenting". The parents of Gen Z, with the entirely good intention of wanting their kids to be happy, were more prone to not allow their kids play without adult supervision, to step in to resolve any difficulty their kids faced at school, to keep their kids away from anything that caused them stress, and so on. But these good intentions backfire. In the same way that locking yourself in your house to avoid catching any illnesses actually weakens your immune system in the long run, never letting a child face difficulty actually doesn't teach them the skills and resilience needed to face the adult world. The result of Gen Z being raised in this environment is not just a generation that is more anxious but also a generation that has less tolerance for perspectives and ideas that make them uncomfortable.
(A quick sidenote: all of these are generalizations about Gen Z, and all generalizations need to be taken with a grain of salt. As someone who works directly with Gen Z, I have seen strength, courage, curiosity, and more in them. Similarly I have witnessed abundant wisdom and compassion in the parents of Gen Z. Generalizations don't apply to every individual, all the time, or in every situation.)
The key point that Haidt and Lukianoff go on to make is that Gen Z enters college around 2013, the same time that cancellation attempts start to rise in the graph above. It is around 2013 that terms like "microaggressions", as well as demands for trigger warnings and safe spaces, dramatically became more prominent. So campus cancel culture is being driven from the top-down and the bottom-up: professors and administrators are pushing it top-down based on prominent progressive ideology (which we'll dive into in later blog posts), but incoming students are also driving it from the bottom-up because of a low tolerance for perspectives that might cause them psychological stress.
Conclusion
So, is there a coming wave of progressive cancel culture in broader society? I have no idea! I'm not an expert in the field and even experts in the field aren't fortune tellers. And the last thing I want to do is come across like an apocalyptic doomsayer, exaggerating the danger of these trends.
But having said that, these trends are worth noting and being aware of. These four facts, when you put them together, are not insignificant. American Colleges are too powerful and influential not to create a ripple effect throughout society. And the more elite the college the more this is true: places like Harvard are not only among the most influential because of the graduates it produces and the high esteem it is held in, but also places like Harvard tend to be the most politically progressive and have the worst track records for cancel culture.
In the next post I'll focus on the flipside of cancel culture: freedom of speech and why it is important in society.
Footnote
I've looked into this topic (cancel culture) a lot and I want these blog posts to be reflective of that. If you're reading this I want you to know what I'm saying is grounded in my research and I'm not just making stuff up off the top of my head. However, I also don't want these blog posts to become so rigid that they become academic papers because that just takes the fun out of it for me. So I'm not going to footnote every point I make with a specific page number. That being said, basically every fact I give in this blog post is taken from The Cancelling of the American Mind or The Coddling of the American Mind. If you want to dig into the stats and facts more, I highly encourage you to read the books for yourself!