BU Law ‘88 here. I see my alma mater continues its fine tradition of treating students like unfortunate inconveniences that come with the need to collect large tuition checks.
BU Class of '90 here. In '87 or so, a scheduled Ramones concert was abruptly cancelled by then President John Silber because--despite the concert being open only to BU students--he claimed "they attract the wrong element." I remember those words perfectly. Well the Ramones showed up anyway at the invitation of the student council, accompanied by Abbie Hoffman and someone from the ACLU. They stood on the steps of of Marsh Chapel talking (well, mostly Abbie was talking) about the importance of freedom of speech and expression. And that, friends, is how I learned about cancel culture at BU .
No hate! I loved BU! I wasn’t crazy about the president back then, but we had Elie Wiesel, Saul Bellow and Howard Zinn for professors, and today they have Ibram X Kendi, Stephen Prothero, Debbie Danielpor… and hey, I did get to see Abbie Hoffman speak there, right? (Alas, no Joe Strummer.)
I have nothing to say but :applause emoji: and thanks Ken!
OK one more thing. I think this is absolutely emblematic of how online debates around subjects are structured: there are legitimate criticisms to be made of 'cancel culture' or what have you. Legitimate arguments in favor of cultural acceptance of unpopular topics and modes of speech. But the way these subjects are discussed online snows those legitimate points under a blizzard of bullshit so that it becomes impossible to talk about them without digging down underneath the shit first. Hence a post like this, which is both great and necessary, but man I wish we could get past arguing semantics, knocking down strawmen, and having to counter the most uncharitable readings of intent.
"the way these subjects are discussed online snows those legitimate points under a blizzard of bullshit so that it becomes impossible to talk about them without digging down underneath the shit first. Hence a post like this, which is both great and necessary, but man I wish we could get past arguing semantics, knocking down strawmen, and having to counter the most uncharitable readings of intent."
Can you imagine what his reaction would be if I'd been there? He'd have had to have someone look up the definition of the obscenities I would have used.
“As I’ve argued before, arrogating to yourself the power to decide who can speak and who can listen is contemptible and could reasonably be described as “cancel culture.”
So - the CC question can’t be based on the effectiveness or size of the protest group. If the above statement is true, those who would have hoped to have the power to decide who can speak (but failed) deserve the same criticism as a group who succeeded. I don’t get that their ineffectiveness seems to render them sort of blameless.
If your goal is contemptible, you shouldn’t get off because you were lousy at execution.
I think they'd have loved to, but they lacked the numbers. As it was though, I suspect they were just virtue signaling to themselves and the people around them. They couldn't have possibly thought they were going to influence an unprecedented labor negotiation. I guess they earned one last shot at being children before having to go out in the real world.
It seems like a reasonable term for their behavior to me. I've enough respect for BU to assume their graduates are not total morons. Streaming has certainly changed the economics of the entertainment industry. I think everyone including the CEO of WB knows a new royalty model is necessary. There will be quite a bit of back and forth in negotiations over many aspects of various complex issues. BU could probably do an entire course on the issues involved. So what does yelling obscenities at the speaker accomplish? It won't influence negotiations. It's a completely consequence and cost-free way of expressing how much they stand with the writers, which makes them feel good about themselves and they hope makes the people around them feel good about them too. It's "look at me, aren't I wonderful for my righteousness?" If you're acting out in public to demonstrate your self-percieved virtue, I think virtue signaling is a reasonable label.
I mean I guess they could do something more meaningful like shoot a big gun at gay beer.
But I will alert the media that there is only one legitimate position on writers pay and that you have determined that traditional American forms of self-expression are too self-indulgent. I am sure they will be thankful for your input.
There's nothing more useless or virtue signaling than machine gunning beer. BTW, was that a full auto? Has ATF seen that? Is trans beer the same as gay beer? Anyway, I'm sure there's a dozen legitimate positions on writers pay, I just question if those shouting obscenities can articulate any of them. They have the right to self-expression, but so does the university president. I guess he should be held to a higher standard, but I don't think his behavior is any worse than the graduates.
so the civil rights movement and mlk’s speeches were all just “virtue signaling” eh? and accomplished nothing, what with them not being in government and all.
also, “signaling” is communicating. id rather hear people who communicate their virtues than those who signal their ill feelings and cruel intentions toward other human beings.
Ken, I would like to see respond to someone who has questioned your position on the initial calls for the speaker to be disinvited prior to the event and whether or not those are cancel culture (or evidence thereof) rather than taking the easy, cheap shot at someone with a less substantive comment.
As I have argued in my own comment, I believe that the initial calls for the speaking engagement to be canceled are an example of cancel culture, but I also believe that they are justified. This is due to (1) the obvious power of someone booking a speaker at a private institution to permit or rescind permission for that person to speak at that institution and thus for others to hear them there and (2) the right of members of an institution to complain to its management when said management has made a decision regarding their experience without consulting them and with which they disagree.
I will agree with your second paragraph, sort of. I wil modify it by saying “if this is cancel culture then cancel culture is fine.” The school made an expressive, ceremonial choice of someone to represent its values at commencement. This isn’t a situation where students can have an alternate commencement or invite their own speaker to commencement. It’s a criticism of the school’s speech and a suggestion that they should have chosen someone else. If that’s cancel culture, then let’s have more of it. By contrast, if the school let students invite him to speak to a club, and other students said “you shouldn’t have let those students invite him or permitted him on campus to speak,” I think that would be the kind of cancel culture we should oppose.
I accept the amendment. In my longer, standalone comment, I included the qualification "in such contexts" when saying that "Cancel culture is [. . .] legitimate speech." I did not include such nuance here, and you are right to add it.
If cancel culture includes writing emails trying to convince a University president to change speakers, then cancel culture is even more useless as a term than I suspected. And the stakes could be much lower than that. For example, parents writing to school administrators to change a school play for being "woke" doesn't seem like cancel culture. Now if the parents show up and yell during the play or sue to stop it when their request is denied, etc. then that is different. Attempts to get someone to change their mind should not get dragged into the cancel culture discussion.
We're not talking about anything substantive regarding the relative positions of Warner Brothers or the Writers Guild though. I doubt the writer's negotiators have hardened their position now that they know rowdy college students at commencement are in their corner, or industry is now going to cave because of it.
Right, but my point is that they couldn't have anticipated that we, specifically, would be talking about them. Actions have consequences. Sometimes those consequences are hard to predict.
I suspect you are right that the consequences of the protest won't lead to much with regard to the labor dispute. But, not protesting is guaranteed to have no influence. Sometimes you work with what ya got and hope you can bring the mountain to mohammed. What was the practical alternative that was open to the students/graduates? And, at a minimum it let the people on the picket lines know that they had support.
Nihilism isn't always an option, and I say that as famous nihilist, Karl Hungus of Lebowski fame.
Well, they could have organized an on-line movement to have people cancel streaming services that carried WB produced content, but that would have required effort.
IMO, this is explained simply: people seem to generally lack the sophistication to keep more than one Current Thing They Don't Like in mind at one time, so everything becomes cancel culture. What they really object to in cases like this is something called "The Heckler's Veto", which is not free speech but also requires disruption to the extent that the speaker can't speak or the willing audience can't hear.
The student protest was relevant and appropriately directed and , in effect did no more than draw attention to a very topical issue. But White’s defense of it the protest is merely pragmatic. Yes, the protests didn’t silence this speaker, but that’s because the event was large, the university was prepared, and the proportion of attendees protesting was small. Not all speakers are so privileged: most events are far smaller, are not so well supported, and it’s easy for them to be overwhelmed by protestors.
I think the protestors would have been fine with silencing the speaker. There’s certainly no evidence that they had some sort of coordinated agreement to go so far and no further in disruptive behaviour. For what it’s worth I believe White is *also* opposed to the hecklers’ veto and would have criticised the protestors, too, if they had succeeded. But that puts us in the unsatisfactory position of defending protests only as long as they’re ineffective. I’d like to see some more principled response, because my experience (outside the US) has been that the knowledge that their events are likely to be disrupted by protests has meant that less privileged groups are effectively silenced.
Yes, I have specifically opposed shouting-down tactics that genuinely prevent speaking and hearing. I reference that in this very post. This is not anywhere near that. It’s not any threat of becoming anywhere near that. Instead, it’s a form of protest that is familiar and traditional at all sorts of political, social, and academic events. Saying that it’s bad because you can imagine a scenario where it could involve enough people that eventually it could have the effect of stopping speech is a non-sequitur to me. That would be an excuse to disapprove of almost any form of protest because you could imagine it being taken to an extreme that prevents speech.
I would say that the pre-commencement appeals to uninvite the speaker were cancel culture. I would also say that they are unambiguously legitimate speech deserving of as much protection and respect as any request from members of an institution and its community to its management regarding an issue of institutional operations that will affect them. We need not even reach the constantly retreaded argument that even objectionable speech deserves protection, because there is no legitimate objection to the head of an institution receiving constructive feedback from its members and community.
Suggesting that an institution must never be questioned when it chooses to give a platform to a particular speaker is simply wrong. The same goes for a private institution choosing not to give a platform to a speaker (or a government institution choosing what not to express as government speech) and by extension calls for it to (not) do so. Cancel culture is, thus, legitimate speech in such contexts.
Whether this legitimate deplatforming argument can then be legitimately leveraged against protesters is an interesting question, as it suggests that this value can be allowed to cannibalize itself. To avoid the paradox and err on the side of free speech, I would say that it cannot.
Right. If a university allows a student club to invite a speaker you hate, there are many remedies to show disapproval — among them having your club invite a contrary speaker. But when a university makes an expressive, ceremonial choice to pick a commencement speaker to represent values at the graduation, what do you do? Hold another graduation?
It’s entirely appropriate to say “this was a bad choice and the school should make another.”
Now, I can see how it’s “cancel culture” if you are opposing a speaker because they have expressed a controversial view. But that’s not what’s happening here.
I think a number of people find the AMPTP's negotiating positions to be "controversial"—some of them are even striking about it—and despite the speaker's constant remarks about how much he loves writers, I'm not aware of the company he heads adopting a separate stance. And that was, after all, what the protesters were protesting about.
Does it not count as speech because it's in the pursuit of economic interests? It is not attributable to this speaker because it's by a trade group he's only one component of? Is the subject matter not controversial because it's not on a culture war topic? We could argue over those points, but I'm not sure that the discretion provided by allowing such line-drawing exercises would do anything but allow us to carefully tailor our definition of "cancel culture" to apply to only those deplatforming attempts it suits our interests to label as such. I therefore disagree with your conclusion.
Nah, it’s begging the question —- assuming as a premise the conclusion to be reached. In other words, assuming that speech was prevented as the premise.
Right - I don’t know the details. If it’s a few random people that are not really organized, that doesn’t seem to be a truly concerted effort with much potential for disruption.
But it doesn’t seem that the intent is all that different. I would guess that those who did it in this case would be happy for the speaker to stop, give up, etc. And if so, criticism of them seems fairly legitimate.
I would just add - while the effectiveness/value of this kind of protest is widely debated, I wouldn’t want it to be curbed, exactly. But I also agree that deciding “who gets to speak” in this way is generally offensive.
But any protest can be criticized on the grounds that “if too many people did this, or did it in a different way, it could prevent speech.” Isn’t that a grounds to oppose almost any protest?
BU Law ‘88 here. I see my alma mater continues its fine tradition of treating students like unfortunate inconveniences that come with the need to collect large tuition checks.
It is kind of like the legal joke "but for clients, the practice of law would be easy."
BU Class of '90 here. In '87 or so, a scheduled Ramones concert was abruptly cancelled by then President John Silber because--despite the concert being open only to BU students--he claimed "they attract the wrong element." I remember those words perfectly. Well the Ramones showed up anyway at the invitation of the student council, accompanied by Abbie Hoffman and someone from the ACLU. They stood on the steps of of Marsh Chapel talking (well, mostly Abbie was talking) about the importance of freedom of speech and expression. And that, friends, is how I learned about cancel culture at BU .
I never hated BU before, but you made me do it. Thanks. Had BU had cancelled a Clash concert that would have meant war!
No hate! I loved BU! I wasn’t crazy about the president back then, but we had Elie Wiesel, Saul Bellow and Howard Zinn for professors, and today they have Ibram X Kendi, Stephen Prothero, Debbie Danielpor… and hey, I did get to see Abbie Hoffman speak there, right? (Alas, no Joe Strummer.)
Between Silber and our law school dean, it was a one-two punch of asshattery when I was there.
I liked the part where the president lamented that some students were "entitled to attend" their own graduation." Hilarious choice of words.
Thanks Ken, good article as always
"I flinched, as my reaction harkened back to my teen years, over half a century ago, on the south side of San Antonio, Tex."
Yeah, definitely no bad words were used in Texas over half a decade ago.....
I have nothing to say but :applause emoji: and thanks Ken!
OK one more thing. I think this is absolutely emblematic of how online debates around subjects are structured: there are legitimate criticisms to be made of 'cancel culture' or what have you. Legitimate arguments in favor of cultural acceptance of unpopular topics and modes of speech. But the way these subjects are discussed online snows those legitimate points under a blizzard of bullshit so that it becomes impossible to talk about them without digging down underneath the shit first. Hence a post like this, which is both great and necessary, but man I wish we could get past arguing semantics, knocking down strawmen, and having to counter the most uncharitable readings of intent.
"the way these subjects are discussed online snows those legitimate points under a blizzard of bullshit so that it becomes impossible to talk about them without digging down underneath the shit first. Hence a post like this, which is both great and necessary, but man I wish we could get past arguing semantics, knocking down strawmen, and having to counter the most uncharitable readings of intent."
Amen, brother Matt, whoever you are.
I long for the day where I am important enough to be heckled.
At this point in my career, though, I'm pretty sure that that ship has sailed.
Can you imagine what his reaction would be if I'd been there? He'd have had to have someone look up the definition of the obscenities I would have used.
You're just mad he cancelled FBoy Island
Whomst among us is not
My reaction to this:
“As I’ve argued before, arrogating to yourself the power to decide who can speak and who can listen is contemptible and could reasonably be described as “cancel culture.”
So - the CC question can’t be based on the effectiveness or size of the protest group. If the above statement is true, those who would have hoped to have the power to decide who can speak (but failed) deserve the same criticism as a group who succeeded. I don’t get that their ineffectiveness seems to render them sort of blameless.
If your goal is contemptible, you shouldn’t get off because you were lousy at execution.
Do you think these protesters were trying to prevent him from speaking or being heard?
Judging by the letter campaign, it sounds like they tried to prevent it, failed, and then protested as Plan B.
I think they'd have loved to, but they lacked the numbers. As it was though, I suspect they were just virtue signaling to themselves and the people around them. They couldn't have possibly thought they were going to influence an unprecedented labor negotiation. I guess they earned one last shot at being children before having to go out in the real world.
A day may come when I take serious someone who uses “virtue signaling” non-ironically.
But it is not this day.
It seems like a reasonable term for their behavior to me. I've enough respect for BU to assume their graduates are not total morons. Streaming has certainly changed the economics of the entertainment industry. I think everyone including the CEO of WB knows a new royalty model is necessary. There will be quite a bit of back and forth in negotiations over many aspects of various complex issues. BU could probably do an entire course on the issues involved. So what does yelling obscenities at the speaker accomplish? It won't influence negotiations. It's a completely consequence and cost-free way of expressing how much they stand with the writers, which makes them feel good about themselves and they hope makes the people around them feel good about them too. It's "look at me, aren't I wonderful for my righteousness?" If you're acting out in public to demonstrate your self-percieved virtue, I think virtue signaling is a reasonable label.
I mean I guess they could do something more meaningful like shoot a big gun at gay beer.
But I will alert the media that there is only one legitimate position on writers pay and that you have determined that traditional American forms of self-expression are too self-indulgent. I am sure they will be thankful for your input.
There's nothing more useless or virtue signaling than machine gunning beer. BTW, was that a full auto? Has ATF seen that? Is trans beer the same as gay beer? Anyway, I'm sure there's a dozen legitimate positions on writers pay, I just question if those shouting obscenities can articulate any of them. They have the right to self-expression, but so does the university president. I guess he should be held to a higher standard, but I don't think his behavior is any worse than the graduates.
so the civil rights movement and mlk’s speeches were all just “virtue signaling” eh? and accomplished nothing, what with them not being in government and all.
also, “signaling” is communicating. id rather hear people who communicate their virtues than those who signal their ill feelings and cruel intentions toward other human beings.
Ken, I would like to see respond to someone who has questioned your position on the initial calls for the speaker to be disinvited prior to the event and whether or not those are cancel culture (or evidence thereof) rather than taking the easy, cheap shot at someone with a less substantive comment.
As I have argued in my own comment, I believe that the initial calls for the speaking engagement to be canceled are an example of cancel culture, but I also believe that they are justified. This is due to (1) the obvious power of someone booking a speaker at a private institution to permit or rescind permission for that person to speak at that institution and thus for others to hear them there and (2) the right of members of an institution to complain to its management when said management has made a decision regarding their experience without consulting them and with which they disagree.
I will agree with your second paragraph, sort of. I wil modify it by saying “if this is cancel culture then cancel culture is fine.” The school made an expressive, ceremonial choice of someone to represent its values at commencement. This isn’t a situation where students can have an alternate commencement or invite their own speaker to commencement. It’s a criticism of the school’s speech and a suggestion that they should have chosen someone else. If that’s cancel culture, then let’s have more of it. By contrast, if the school let students invite him to speak to a club, and other students said “you shouldn’t have let those students invite him or permitted him on campus to speak,” I think that would be the kind of cancel culture we should oppose.
I accept the amendment. In my longer, standalone comment, I included the qualification "in such contexts" when saying that "Cancel culture is [. . .] legitimate speech." I did not include such nuance here, and you are right to add it.
If cancel culture includes writing emails trying to convince a University president to change speakers, then cancel culture is even more useless as a term than I suspected. And the stakes could be much lower than that. For example, parents writing to school administrators to change a school play for being "woke" doesn't seem like cancel culture. Now if the parents show up and yell during the play or sue to stop it when their request is denied, etc. then that is different. Attempts to get someone to change their mind should not get dragged into the cancel culture discussion.
"They couldn't have possibly thought they were going to influence"
And yet, here we are talking about it.
We're not talking about anything substantive regarding the relative positions of Warner Brothers or the Writers Guild though. I doubt the writer's negotiators have hardened their position now that they know rowdy college students at commencement are in their corner, or industry is now going to cave because of it.
Right, but my point is that they couldn't have anticipated that we, specifically, would be talking about them. Actions have consequences. Sometimes those consequences are hard to predict.
I suspect you are right that the consequences of the protest won't lead to much with regard to the labor dispute. But, not protesting is guaranteed to have no influence. Sometimes you work with what ya got and hope you can bring the mountain to mohammed. What was the practical alternative that was open to the students/graduates? And, at a minimum it let the people on the picket lines know that they had support.
Nihilism isn't always an option, and I say that as famous nihilist, Karl Hungus of Lebowski fame.
Well, they could have organized an on-line movement to have people cancel streaming services that carried WB produced content, but that would have required effort.
It was literally demanded in their letters.
So are we now cancelling requests to cancel? It is hard to keep up with this nonsense whining.
IMO, this is explained simply: people seem to generally lack the sophistication to keep more than one Current Thing They Don't Like in mind at one time, so everything becomes cancel culture. What they really object to in cases like this is something called "The Heckler's Veto", which is not free speech but also requires disruption to the extent that the speaker can't speak or the willing audience can't hear.
The student protest was relevant and appropriately directed and , in effect did no more than draw attention to a very topical issue. But White’s defense of it the protest is merely pragmatic. Yes, the protests didn’t silence this speaker, but that’s because the event was large, the university was prepared, and the proportion of attendees protesting was small. Not all speakers are so privileged: most events are far smaller, are not so well supported, and it’s easy for them to be overwhelmed by protestors.
I think the protestors would have been fine with silencing the speaker. There’s certainly no evidence that they had some sort of coordinated agreement to go so far and no further in disruptive behaviour. For what it’s worth I believe White is *also* opposed to the hecklers’ veto and would have criticised the protestors, too, if they had succeeded. But that puts us in the unsatisfactory position of defending protests only as long as they’re ineffective. I’d like to see some more principled response, because my experience (outside the US) has been that the knowledge that their events are likely to be disrupted by protests has meant that less privileged groups are effectively silenced.
I mean, different things are different.
Yes, I have specifically opposed shouting-down tactics that genuinely prevent speaking and hearing. I reference that in this very post. This is not anywhere near that. It’s not any threat of becoming anywhere near that. Instead, it’s a form of protest that is familiar and traditional at all sorts of political, social, and academic events. Saying that it’s bad because you can imagine a scenario where it could involve enough people that eventually it could have the effect of stopping speech is a non-sequitur to me. That would be an excuse to disapprove of almost any form of protest because you could imagine it being taken to an extreme that prevents speech.
Let’s be specific if we’re being specific. This was against the wishes of <em>some</em> of those graduating.
It’s impossible to invite a commencement speaker that everybody is going to be happy about. More so if the invitee has anything interesting to say.
Thanks for the link to Gerald Ford's speech!
Imagine the frothing if Biden or Harris used that same quote!
(For the Tl;Dr crowd, Ford quoted Mao, and then went on to riff on the differences between China & the USA).
I would say that the pre-commencement appeals to uninvite the speaker were cancel culture. I would also say that they are unambiguously legitimate speech deserving of as much protection and respect as any request from members of an institution and its community to its management regarding an issue of institutional operations that will affect them. We need not even reach the constantly retreaded argument that even objectionable speech deserves protection, because there is no legitimate objection to the head of an institution receiving constructive feedback from its members and community.
Suggesting that an institution must never be questioned when it chooses to give a platform to a particular speaker is simply wrong. The same goes for a private institution choosing not to give a platform to a speaker (or a government institution choosing what not to express as government speech) and by extension calls for it to (not) do so. Cancel culture is, thus, legitimate speech in such contexts.
Whether this legitimate deplatforming argument can then be legitimately leveraged against protesters is an interesting question, as it suggests that this value can be allowed to cannibalize itself. To avoid the paradox and err on the side of free speech, I would say that it cannot.
Right. If a university allows a student club to invite a speaker you hate, there are many remedies to show disapproval — among them having your club invite a contrary speaker. But when a university makes an expressive, ceremonial choice to pick a commencement speaker to represent values at the graduation, what do you do? Hold another graduation?
It’s entirely appropriate to say “this was a bad choice and the school should make another.”
Now, I can see how it’s “cancel culture” if you are opposing a speaker because they have expressed a controversial view. But that’s not what’s happening here.
I think a number of people find the AMPTP's negotiating positions to be "controversial"—some of them are even striking about it—and despite the speaker's constant remarks about how much he loves writers, I'm not aware of the company he heads adopting a separate stance. And that was, after all, what the protesters were protesting about.
Does it not count as speech because it's in the pursuit of economic interests? It is not attributable to this speaker because it's by a trade group he's only one component of? Is the subject matter not controversial because it's not on a culture war topic? We could argue over those points, but I'm not sure that the discretion provided by allowing such line-drawing exercises would do anything but allow us to carefully tailor our definition of "cancel culture" to apply to only those deplatforming attempts it suits our interests to label as such. I therefore disagree with your conclusion.
It's not 'begging the question', it's 'raises the question'.
Nah, it’s begging the question —- assuming as a premise the conclusion to be reached. In other words, assuming that speech was prevented as the premise.
Right - I don’t know the details. If it’s a few random people that are not really organized, that doesn’t seem to be a truly concerted effort with much potential for disruption.
But it doesn’t seem that the intent is all that different. I would guess that those who did it in this case would be happy for the speaker to stop, give up, etc. And if so, criticism of them seems fairly legitimate.
I would just add - while the effectiveness/value of this kind of protest is widely debated, I wouldn’t want it to be curbed, exactly. But I also agree that deciding “who gets to speak” in this way is generally offensive.
But any protest can be criticized on the grounds that “if too many people did this, or did it in a different way, it could prevent speech.” Isn’t that a grounds to oppose almost any protest?
Making up rights that don’t exist is a fairly old tradition in this country too.
Glorious.