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"
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.
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
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"
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.
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
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.