Speech or Cancel Culture At Boston University?

90% of invocations of “cancel culture” are bullshit. Of that 90%, maybe two-thirds is cynical partisan bullshit and a third is just thoughtless bullshit.

Where did I get those numbers? I made them up, obviously. Duh. But I’ve been arguing this point for a long time. The epithet “cancel culture” is overwhelmingly used to express disagreement with speech, not to defend speech. Rather than a principled description of people trying to prevent others from speaking, it’s a form of special pleading that some kinds of criticism are too mean, too uncivil. It’s certainly possible to approach a speech incident and analyze it in some kind of methodical way, that’s not the way the term is generally used. It’s generally used to mean “I disagree with these critics and their values and values I associate with them.”

For a prime example consider, consider Boston University President Robert A. Brown.

President Brown is upset that some students protested and heckled Boston University commencement speaker David Zaslav, CEO of Warner Bros. With impeccable timing that only a university administration could achieve, BU announced Zaslav as its commencement speaker the day after the Writer’s Guild of America went on strike. This generated controversy. This led to letters asking BU to “cancel” Zaslav, protest signs, protests, and some heckling and swearing at the commencement, mostly focused on labor issues.

This, President Brown claims, was CANCEL CULTURE.

Our students were not picking a fight. They were attempting to implement the cancel culture that has become all too prevalent on university campuses. The hundreds of virtually identical protest emails we received in my office in advance of Commencement came with an explicit “cancel” hashtag, indicating an aim to prevent Mr. Zaslav from speaking. The attempt to silence a speaker with obscene shouts is a resort to gain power, not reason, and antithetical to the mission and purposes of a university.

This, of course, is sheer jiggery-pokery. President Brown got a lot of similar emails with #cancel in them because labor groups encouraged students and alumni to write them and provided a form.

Moreover, the protests and heckling against Zaslav weren’t because he said something controversial. They weren’t even about his ham-handed meddling with your binge-watching. The protests were explicitly about labor issues, which is why the chants included both obscenities and slogans like “pay your writers.”

Now, I recognize that it’s fashionable to claim that everyone knows ...