SEE MORE ARTICLES

In 2020, a tragic farce unfolded around the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) conference. Five lesbian feminist academics submitted an abstract proposing to study the effect of social media on scholarly life. Originally highly lauded by the organizers, the academics were told the final paper would be considered for inclusion in a volume of the conference’s best work. Then something strange happened on the way. An influential feminist commentator attacked the abstract on Twitter, and almost immediately, the organizers did an about-face, publicly denouncing the work on Twitter and privately discouraging the academics from presenting it. And so, a research project about scholars being cancelled on Twitter was cancelled. By scholars. On Twitter. I don’t imagine the academics found much consolation in having their work validated in such a way.

This vignette is not a one-off bad call. As a scholar of digital culture and higher education, my research indicates that AoIR’s actions are sadly representative of the common academic practice of silencing academics and their writings using social media — what I call “academic cancel culture.” Since the mid-2010s, many academic institutions and faculty have traded integrity for social media “clout.” In brazenly ignoring academic norms for the better part of a decade, universities lost public confidence and provided a blueprint for the Trump administration’s hyperfocus on controlling campus life. If the academy is to defend against further incursions by the Trump administration or other bad actors, scholars and institutions will have to clean house and recommit to the spirit of open inquiry and academic freedom.

Inside the ivory towers that dot the American landscape, the response to the administration’s actions has been anger, uncertainty, and incredulity. On one hand, these feelings are well-founded — Trump’s tendency to employ a chainsaw when a whittling knife would be the more appropriate tool is abundantly clear. Detaining a PhD student over an op-ed, intervening in the running of an academic department, and cutting grant funding in punitive retaliation over a Title IX dispute are just a few examples of severely misguided overcorrections.

At the same time, many university actions in the last decade have horrified many small-l liberals, regardless of party affiliation. Institutions have stymied uncomfortable research topics and speech, usually to pay lip service to left-wing culture war issues. They punish academics unequally by political persuasion, often for questioning campus orthodoxies. This happens because universities are out of step with mainstream culture. Whereas the illiberal, far-left ethos that seemed to grip mainstream society in the late 2010s/early 2020s has largely abated, this is not true on campus. As though encased in amber, for universities, it’s always the summer of 2020 (or, perhaps, the 1960s). As such, what would otherwise have remained esoteric in-house disputes spilled into public discourse through social media, eroding public trust. Academics did themselves no favors either, behaving on social media more like adolescent trolls on 4chan than respectable experts.

Two things can be, and are, true at once — the Trump administration is wildly overstepping its enumerated powers while also ham-fistedly revealing legitimate issues on campus. Neither Trumpian over-broadness nor institutional censorship bodes well for free inquiry, expression, or speech. This is the true crux of the matter. Historically, when those in power control what can be said, non-majority group members are the first to be stifled (e.g., sexual and racial minorities or the gender-nonconforming). In some cases, this involves excluding gay or bi university employees from staff groups for the “wrong politics”, while including straight “allies.” This is the opposite of social justice. At the very least, it’s certainly the opposite of “diversity” and “inclusion.”

Still, many academics downplay how much universities have lost their way as a knee-jerk defense against the right-wing onslaught. Yet, #NotAllAcademics. Clear-eyed readings of the contemporary moment have also appeared. Writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education, humanities professor Michael Clune places blame on universities and scholars themselves. His piece, “We Asked for it”, notes that since approximately 2014, “many professors and fields began to reframe their work as a kind of political activism.” This is wrong-headed, he argues, because most academics’ expertise is in disciplinary knowledge, not partisan politics. In a similar tenor, social psychologist Lee Jussim published a crowd-sourced research bibliography cautioning against the politicization of scholarly inquiry. Titled “We Tried to Warn You”, Jussim criticizes academics for letting the university become a “club for those on the political left” and “embrac[ing] and advanc[ing] the politicization of academia in everything from research and teaching to bureaucracy (DEI!) as if it was some sort of good thing.” Jussim also captures just how ill-suited academia is to change minds: “Half the country voted for Trump. Half. And many academics think they are racists and fascists.”

And it’s not just Trump voters. Most Americans aren’t too keen on academics either. A Gallup poll showed public confidence in higher education in free fall, from 57% in 2015 down to only 36% in 2023. Hovering around the public approval levels of Congress and the band Nickelback, this figure is the lowest on record. The American public, by and large neither anti-intellectual nor stupid, can see that something is amiss in American universities. Headlines blare of often nonsensical conflicts on campus while social media renders the ivy-covered walls more transparent than ever. Presented this window into the minutiae of university life, the American public has been decidedly underwhelmed by what it has seen.

Over the past 10 years, the public has glimpsed universities devolve into one anti-intellectual meltdown after the next, often due to the operationalization of radical ideologies as institutional policy. Critical race theory, queer theory, or fat studies may well be useful orientations for analyzing social life, but they are viewpoints, not fact. And yet, they have been smuggled into the larger culture as unquestionable truths, as philosopher Susan Nieman argues in her book Left is not Woke (2023). What binds these ideologies is their reliance, often implicitly, on what is known as “repressive tolerance” — the notion that the speech and ideas of some should be repressed as a means of rebalancing social inequality. The concept provided a theoretical grounding for institutional censorship that is anathema to the American free speech tradition, but nevertheless took root in American academic life, silencing anyone who questioned the dominant orthodoxies. And it is these repeated and increasingly outrageous silencings and petty repressions that create headlines and, in part, explain the public’s contemporary dissatisfaction with the academy.

Repressive tolerance, writ large, with institutional backing. What credibility-tarnishing decisions have universities made in recent years? A few examples: Hamline University terminated an adjunct art historian’s contract following baseless and unreasonable accusations of “Islamophobia.” USC removed a professor from class for using a Chinese pause word (e.g., “like” in English) that sounded like an American racial slur. Johns Hopkins University fired a professor who used bolt cutters on a building that protestors had chained shut, so he could access servers relevant to his work. In other instances, universities have taken positions on hotly contested cultural issues: MIT cancelled a scientist’s lecture based on his criticisms of DEI. Princeton dismissed a professor for, pretenses removed, criticizing faculty groupthink and being skeptical of institutional policy.

None of these incidents — merely the tip of a colossal iceberg — breeds confidence, and they all occurred before the current cycle of plagiarism accusations. Harvard’s former president, its top diversity officer, and a professor who studies the subject of “honesty” have all had their research practices called into question. Not to be outdone, MIT hired two deans of diversity, equity, and inclusion who seem to have a similar problem with lifting others’ work. Are these the academic norms of free inquiry and scholarly practice that Trump is purportedly upending?

No conflict has engendered such strong feelings as trans issues, both on campus and online. The University of Rhode Island unsuccessfully tried to censor a feminist geneticist and gender studies professor for an essay she wrote on the impossibility of physically changing one’s sex. Similarly, after reciting some “banal facts about human biology”, Harvard biologist Carole Hooven was so bullied by her colleagues, she chose to depart the school. In conflicts like these, universities perform an absolutist version of repressive tolerance. They allow no dissent from whatever the prevailing dogma says is social justice this week. Yet, the considerable vitriol these women face — and it's almost always women — comes primarily from their scholarly peers. These colleagues, suffused with a sense of self-righteousness, launch campaigns against any scholar who even questions aspects of their gender catechism. Convinced of their own moral superiority, the “cancel initiators”, as I call them in my research, treat their “cancel targets” (feminists, in this case) as though they were violent extremists. To me, these kinds of incidents were fertile ground for analysis.

Since 2017, I have tracked over 50 cancellation campaigns, many of which are still being litigated either on campus or in court. Drawing from approximately 2,000 public tweets and 5,000 interactions on social media, I was able to outline a template for how academic cancel campaigns occur. They begin with an accusation of a legitimate social grievance (e.g., racism or transphobia). However, in the case of academic cancel culture, these accusations often misconstrue the arguments made by the person targeted. Once appropriately mischaracterized, the cancel initiator uses social media to link to a longer denunciation and requests sympathetic signatories. At this stage, there are two possibilities. If the academic institution is amenable to the cancellation, the research is silenced.

Other times, universities show some spine. Here, the scholarship in question will remain or be published, often with caveats. Following a campaign to derail the publication of lesbian philosopher Holly Lawford-Smith’s Gender Critical Feminism (2022), Oxford University Press opted to not make the text available electronically, unlike the rest of its catalogue. The Press also increased the price of her second book, putting it out of reach of general audiences. Even when a campaign fails completely, collateral damage is often substantial for both the target and anyone who defends them. In my data, a defender of a then-untenured philosopher, Rebecca Tuvel, was accused of “doing violence” and “even triggering PTSD, just by calling for an open discussion” about transracialism. Suffice it to say, nothing about academic cancel culture is remotely collegial.

As terribly as cancel targets are treated by their peers, it is the underlying logic of academic cancel culture that should give the greatest pause to those concerned about the health of American intellectual life. There are two major, intertwined factors — what’s known as “essentialism” and a disregard for academic norms. To claim a piece of scholarly production is irredeemably transphobic, racist, or sexist presupposes that all people of the relevant group have a hive mind on said issue. This is essentialism. A trans academic within my corpus discusses in-group disagreement: “whether trans women have had male privilege is also a controversial point — it’s not an established doctrine that everyone has to agree with.” In their defense of Tuvel, this trans academic believed the response to her article was overwrought and histrionic.

Academic cancel campaigns use this essentialist thinking to deputize social media to be the judge and jury in intellectual disputes. This is a rejection of academic norms and expertise. Academia is predicated on peer review; research is presented, either verbally or in writing, to a group of experts in one’s field. They judge its soundness, innovation, and, hopefully, lack of plagiarism. There are some legitimate issues with peer review, including that it may be an ineffective process, but it is the reigning academic norm for scholarly production. The flippancy with which cancel initiators mobilize social media to intervene in — or worse, overrule — the process strikes at the heart of intellectual life. If peer review is being replaced by social media, the whole notion of credentialing becomes obsolete. Instead of searching for truth, the academic vocation would be a search for what is popular. Miseducation by mob rule. Hell, maybe the Earth is flat!

Long before President Trump’s advance on university life, academics themselves had stopped defending the sanctity of free inquiry and eschewed academic norms. Instead, they provided a schematic for the current crisis by gleefully weaponizing social media to wage war against their professional enemies. And universities did nothing to quell this growing trend. For years, often at the behest of activist academics, universities took highly politicized positions on the most vicious of culture war issues. For more than a decade, they painted a target on themselves and now genuinely wonder why they’re being fired upon.

And yet, this moment provides an opportunity for academics and universities to reflect and change course. The solutions remain simple. First and foremost, academia must rededicate themselves to truth seeking, even when those truths are uncomfortable. From a policy standpoint, institutions of higher learning should all adopt the University of Chicago’s laudable free speech manifesto known as the “Chicago Statement.” In doing so, they can rediscover the value of pluralistic inquiry. Outside of commitments to upholding academic norms, academic institutions need to become completely value-neutral. At the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) faculty conference last year, cancelled Princeton scholar Joshua Katz hypothesized that it would take decades to restore respectability to American academe. While I respect his insight, I take a more optimistic view. American free speech values are exceptional on the global scene. The public wants functional universities. They want to be proud of all their institutions. This is not an insurmountable goal for academia.

A free, pluralistic, and democratic society requires continued maintenance. Academics and universities, as stewards of knowledge, have some distinct responsibilities. Long a bastion of free speech, the university is central to creating an informed citizenry. When certain subjects or opinions become verboten, everyone in society — especially the most vulnerable — are worse off. American history is a compilation of minority group members challenging “common sense” assumptions about their inferiority and using free speech to successfully change minds and achieve equal rights. This tradition matters incalculably. Free speech is as American as apple pie. And as everyone knows, pie is best when shared.

We can restore trust in universities. The first step is for academics to stop acting like assholes online. At least according to my data.

Published May 30, 2025