Censorship of a Different Style

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently published Why Academic Freedom’s Future Looks Bleak.

Last month Allyn Walker, an assistant professor of sociology who uses they/them pronouns, announced their resignation from Old Dominion University. The sequence of events that led to their ouster is one we have seen play out before. Walker made controversial public statements that stoked a wave of viral fury. In the resulting fracas, which included violent threats, Old Dominion placed Walker on leave; Walker then agreed to step down at the end of the academic year.

This sort of resignation under pressure has become a standard means of resolving such scenarios. By avoiding outright dismissal, the university may rid itself of an employee who had become a PR liability while maintaining the pretense of a commitment to academic freedom. In most of its details, Walker’s fate resembles that of other academic “cancel culture” victims. But the most influential advocates of Walker’s cancellation were not the “woke mob” we often hear about, but conservative media outlets such as Tucker Carlson’s top-rated Fox News show.

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This is not surprising. Appeals to academic freedom from across the political spectrum are often selective, if not cynical. An ideological ally’s victimization occasions the invocation of lofty principle, while an enemy’s analogous travails meet with indifference or approval. Walker, a nonbinary queer-theory scholar, looked like an enemy to this “anti-woke” crowd.

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 The backlash to Walker’s research offered an opportunity for the cultural right to flex its muscle in an arena where many of its causes have been forfeit. More typically, it has retreated into the opposite position: Rather than defending longstanding taboos, conservatives now position themselves as advocates of permissiveness and freedom from censorship. But as more perceptive voices on the right occasionally acknowledge, their objection to the constraint of expression is not a repudiation of censorship as such, but to the fact that it is directed against their own views and values.

Doesn't Declaration of Independence mention liberty? 

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12/9/21