It's interesting that you're using, as an example of someone "cancelled" on the left, an academic getting a 5 year employment contract. Though "cancelled" is kind of a nebulous term, so sure I guess that like $700-800k of guaranteed money could still be getting "cancelled"
A contract job is not the same as a tenured job. For a Board of Trustees to cancel for political reasons a tenured job that was supported by the faculty, the provost and the chancellor is a violation academic free speech as normally practiced.
It directly disputes some of the claims in your article (which are likely based on the initial article in the NYT). As it turns out, no decision has even been made yet by the UNC board of trustees (they delayed the review of the faculty's recommendation for full tenure until Jne). These are boring procedural details, but I think fairly important in creating an honest account of the facts.
The point is she would have had no employment at all, except for the university using a legal loophole to offer her a temporary position that they couldn't deny. So their intention is exactly that - to remove her entire employment. But beyond that, the intention is to say that people who study certain topics like "race" in a specific way will not be employed, with the goal of also intimidating other people on campus who lack her profile. Which is at its core "cancel culture"
But doesn't the hypocrisy go full circle? Someone correct me if this is wrong, but I have vague memories of NHJ tweets dismissing recent job terminations as not-the-end-of-the-world punishments for violations of one or more progressive taboos. Her failure to get immediate tenure could be similarly dismissed, if one wanted to play these games. I don't write this to take a particular side, but simply to suggest that consistent defenders of small-L liberalism are a tiny fraction of the population. My reading is that the vast majority of participants in the cancel culture debates are purely opportunistic in their deployment of "free speech".
Samuel Johnson's comment, with even casual familiarity with history, doesn't carry much bite. History records no "drivers of negroes" at Lexington and Concord where the revolution began, and Great Britain at the time was loaded with slaves and slavers in the West Indies. Great Britain held no little responsibility for imposing a continuation of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, as Jefferson noted in the draft Declaration, enumerating the American complaints against Britain: "captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither." America's tragic history of slavery has no business in the mouth of Great Britain in 1776.
Johnson actually freed a slave he did not own -- Frances Barber, whose legal defense he supported and helped write. That's more than can be said of the vast majority of Americans in 1776.
So let me get this straight: you don't think the decision had anything to do with NHJ being a proven liar on more than one occasion, her breaches of core journalistic ethics, her refusal to correct her errors or engage her critics, and her unprofessional hypocrisy? She shouldn't even be a professor of anything, let alone one with tenure. Trying to sweep her character under the rug by conflating this into an issue of politics or free speech is an attempt at obfuscation.
Any academic up for tenure whose principal claim to fame was widely and publicly savaged by famous authorities as false, misleading, unsubstantiated, poorly argued, etc., would have zero chance at tenure, faculty opinion be damned
"famous authorities" in this case refers to a handful of very old, exclusively white, notoriously cranky academics. The vast majority of the historical profession realizes that the debates around 1619 are productive issues of interpretation and have not engaged in the politically motivated dog pile.
Remarkably, "famous authorities" can be, and in this case were, old, white and (you say) cranky. Doesn't mean they're not right. Especially in circumstances, such as these, where younger academics, especially of color, are not crazy enough to destroy their careers by speaking up for the truth. (Indeed, some admitted as much publicly.) If you read the famous letter you'd know that the old white men certainly acknowledged issues of "interpretation." But some things are established facts, not subject to interpretation, and the author here apparently could not accept that where it contradicted her thesis.
Many younger scholars have jumped into the 1619 debate in a productive way -- in seminars and journal articles that engaged in the actual scholarly controversies around it (the history of slavery being for many decades one of the most productive and contentious fields in the discipline). What they didn't do -- what only a handful of old, white historians did -- was engage in a public dogpile that was based on an absurd assertion of authority (premised on the idea that American history only belongs to academic historians, or maybe just Ivy League academic historians) and feeding intro reactionary fears.
Did you read the link? The author of the article is very critical of the people you cite as "famous authorities" and in particular Wilentz. The sub-head is literally "the attacks from its critics are much more dangerous."
I'm aware of that. It does not make her critique of the methodology of the author any less compelling. If any, it makes it more credible. That's kind of the point here: one can be on the side of wanting more attention paid to, say, slavery in American history, without defending the sloppy nonsense that she insisted on including her despite the efforts of such historians as this one.
FYI - you have a typo in the paragraph starting "In an essay for The 1916 Project, Linda Villarosa wrote of 19th century doctors in the slave South..." - I think you meant 1619 Project.
It's interesting that you're using, as an example of someone "cancelled" on the left, an academic getting a 5 year employment contract. Though "cancelled" is kind of a nebulous term, so sure I guess that like $700-800k of guaranteed money could still be getting "cancelled"
A contract job is not the same as a tenured job. For a Board of Trustees to cancel for political reasons a tenured job that was supported by the faculty, the provost and the chancellor is a violation academic free speech as normally practiced.
You seem like an honest broker, and while we probably won't agree on whether this is "cancellation", I do want to point your attention to this story:
https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/education/article251692383.html
It directly disputes some of the claims in your article (which are likely based on the initial article in the NYT). As it turns out, no decision has even been made yet by the UNC board of trustees (they delayed the review of the faculty's recommendation for full tenure until Jne). These are boring procedural details, but I think fairly important in creating an honest account of the facts.
The point is she would have had no employment at all, except for the university using a legal loophole to offer her a temporary position that they couldn't deny. So their intention is exactly that - to remove her entire employment. But beyond that, the intention is to say that people who study certain topics like "race" in a specific way will not be employed, with the goal of also intimidating other people on campus who lack her profile. Which is at its core "cancel culture"
But doesn't the hypocrisy go full circle? Someone correct me if this is wrong, but I have vague memories of NHJ tweets dismissing recent job terminations as not-the-end-of-the-world punishments for violations of one or more progressive taboos. Her failure to get immediate tenure could be similarly dismissed, if one wanted to play these games. I don't write this to take a particular side, but simply to suggest that consistent defenders of small-L liberalism are a tiny fraction of the population. My reading is that the vast majority of participants in the cancel culture debates are purely opportunistic in their deployment of "free speech".
it’s possible not every situation is equivalent
Or that even equivalent situations are not recognized as such.
Samuel Johnson's comment, with even casual familiarity with history, doesn't carry much bite. History records no "drivers of negroes" at Lexington and Concord where the revolution began, and Great Britain at the time was loaded with slaves and slavers in the West Indies. Great Britain held no little responsibility for imposing a continuation of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, as Jefferson noted in the draft Declaration, enumerating the American complaints against Britain: "captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither." America's tragic history of slavery has no business in the mouth of Great Britain in 1776.
Johnson actually freed a slave he did not own -- Frances Barber, whose legal defense he supported and helped write. That's more than can be said of the vast majority of Americans in 1776.
So let me get this straight: you don't think the decision had anything to do with NHJ being a proven liar on more than one occasion, her breaches of core journalistic ethics, her refusal to correct her errors or engage her critics, and her unprofessional hypocrisy? She shouldn't even be a professor of anything, let alone one with tenure. Trying to sweep her character under the rug by conflating this into an issue of politics or free speech is an attempt at obfuscation.
Any academic up for tenure whose principal claim to fame was widely and publicly savaged by famous authorities as false, misleading, unsubstantiated, poorly argued, etc., would have zero chance at tenure, faculty opinion be damned
"famous authorities" in this case refers to a handful of very old, exclusively white, notoriously cranky academics. The vast majority of the historical profession realizes that the debates around 1619 are productive issues of interpretation and have not engaged in the politically motivated dog pile.
Remarkably, "famous authorities" can be, and in this case were, old, white and (you say) cranky. Doesn't mean they're not right. Especially in circumstances, such as these, where younger academics, especially of color, are not crazy enough to destroy their careers by speaking up for the truth. (Indeed, some admitted as much publicly.) If you read the famous letter you'd know that the old white men certainly acknowledged issues of "interpretation." But some things are established facts, not subject to interpretation, and the author here apparently could not accept that where it contradicted her thesis.
Many younger scholars have jumped into the 1619 debate in a productive way -- in seminars and journal articles that engaged in the actual scholarly controversies around it (the history of slavery being for many decades one of the most productive and contentious fields in the discipline). What they didn't do -- what only a handful of old, white historians did -- was engage in a public dogpile that was based on an absurd assertion of authority (premised on the idea that American history only belongs to academic historians, or maybe just Ivy League academic historians) and feeding intro reactionary fears.
Or, they could have listened to people like this young, Black, female historian at a non-Ivy (but illustrious) university and perhaps avoided the issue entirely. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/03/06/1619-project-new-york-times-mistake-122248
Did you read the link? The author of the article is very critical of the people you cite as "famous authorities" and in particular Wilentz. The sub-head is literally "the attacks from its critics are much more dangerous."
I'm aware of that. It does not make her critique of the methodology of the author any less compelling. If any, it makes it more credible. That's kind of the point here: one can be on the side of wanting more attention paid to, say, slavery in American history, without defending the sloppy nonsense that she insisted on including her despite the efforts of such historians as this one.
FYI - you have a typo in the paragraph starting "In an essay for The 1916 Project, Linda Villarosa wrote of 19th century doctors in the slave South..." - I think you meant 1619 Project.
Fixed! Thanks.