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There is a fundamental misunderstanding between two very closely related but irreconcilable positions on the state of academia, both of which can be summarized as "it's been captured by woke and that's bad". One position is that the academics themselves are culpable because this makes them complicit in nebulous sins against the American people. The other position is that the academics forced to parrot spurious diversity statements to keep their jobs are, you know, the victims, with ideologically-captured admin as the bad guys. The second position seems trivially the correct framing to me, and wanting to punish the academics as collaborators looks about as absurd as saying you're going to topple a tyrant to liberate the people, then executing anyone who ever saluted the tyrant at gunpoint.
The admin didn't force the professors to put Foucault on more syllabi than Shakespeare; Marx and Judith Butler over Plato; Said over Locke. Mill, or Aristotle; Fanon over Machiavelli and Hume.
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My personal experience is that, with the exception of a handful of autistic math and econ professors, the academics are 100% complicit. The entire history department at my major state university was made up of proud, self-professed marxists. Professors would regularly stop teaching in the middle of class to go on political rants. 80% of surveyed academics admitted to engaging in deliberate discrimination against conservatives.
I don't buy the poor, hapless academic argument. They've been happily leading the charge for the politicization of the academy for decades.
Even so - surely the entire point of being mad about the politicization of the academy is to rescue whatever fraction of professors do live in fear of cancellation. What else would even be the point?
To destroy enemy centers of power.
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The point is to rescue the students, and therefore the next generation of professors. To the extent it's convenient to save the careers of the good ones, we should try to do so, but I'm not overly concerned about mathematicians who just kept their heads down catching strays. We need to take academia back down to the foundations before rebuilding. That's inevitably going to result in some collateral damage. The non-crazy professors had literally decades to set their house in order. If they wanted moderation they should have advocated for moderation sometime before social justice started lapping McCarthyism in terms of body count.
I care more about the educations of my future children than I do the careers of some scientists too timid to stand up against the last decade-plus of woke star chambers. I'm perfectly happy to sacrifice an entire generation of academics to this project.
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Uh, rescuing the students?
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To prevent the academy from being used as a political weapon against oneself. Which does not require rescuing anyone.
This is isomorphic to left-wing cancel culture, equally morally bankrupt, and equally un-American. The only ethically justifiable mandate for fighting cancel culture is to restore intellectual freedom and freedom of speech. If you abandon that justification then you are as hypocritical and craven as your enemies, and, if nothing else, you have no high ground from which to criticize Tao.
It isn't, though, that's the thing. Presuming Tao were being targeted (something which I don't think is evident, but we can presume it), it would be for signing off on an ideological document that commits to him to an ideology that explicitly rejects things like objectivity and reason as tools of White Supremacy for oppressing minorities; the ideology openly and proudly prefers personal testimony labeled as "lived experience" to ascertain "their truth" which is just as valid as anyone else's. This is fundamentally incompatible with mathematics, which relies on logic to make objective statements, or generally the academic pursuit of truth, at least for commonly understood meanings of "math" and "truth." Now, people can paper over and ignore or mitigate fundamental incompatibilities for a long time, but likely not forever, and so such ideological commitments a major handicap in an academic being able to credibly produce truth.
This is the general problem that this ideology runs into when trying to claim victimhood of cancel culture. By its very nature, the ideology is about redefining and subverting our understanding of basic concepts like "truth" or "reason" in a way that's incompatible with academia as we know it. And if academia were transformed according to the ideology, it would no longer be academia in terms of the functions it serves our society (i.e. knowledge generation & education), but rather a church. And so rejecting ideologues of this stripe from academia isn't cancel culture in a symmetrical way to the now-traditional leftwing cancel culture, which has to do either with opinions that are orthogonal to the person's ability to do a job or with chains of "logic" that fall apart under the smallest scrutiny (e.g. this CEO disagrees with me on gay marriage, which means he must have bigoted antipathy, possibly subconsciously, against gay people, which means he cannot be relied on to be their boss in a fair way).
Now, one could argue that the benefits of these ideologues, given their ability to still pursue truth thanks to compartmentalization and cognitive dissonance, outweighs the harms of them also laundering ideological falsities under the label of truth, as well as the harms of the continued self-discrediting of academia due to placing trust in someone who's ideologically committed against fundamental principles of academia, and therefore, these people ought not be "canceled" from academia. The strength of that argument would depend heavily on the specifics of the benefits and harm. But that's a different argument than one around symmetry.
This is kinda how your argument about the contents of the letter reads to me. It is certainly how it would read to anyone to my left. The impossibility of neutrally adjudicating which "chains of logic" of that type hold up, and which don't, is precisely why we need a society-wide norm that no arguments of that form will be considered, under any circumstances. I could as easily argue that no religious people should be allowed to work in STEM, because if they believe in miracles, their epistemology is clearly compromised in a way that is fundamentally incompatible with scientific truth-seeking. That's an argument that feels true to me on a deep level. I really think we'd have better science if all science was done by committed atheists. But I have never and will never advocate for setting such a policy. Arguments of this form are an indiscriminate superweapon that unravels societal trust when anyone starts breaking them out.
Please forgive me for dog-piling you. The thing is, I think there's a big case of 'two screens' going on here.
I respect your personal commitment to not discriminating against academics on the basis of religion, but the few Christian academics I knew when I was a PhD in STEM hid it very carefully even 10 years ago. Precisely because they knew they'd be discriminated against if their religion became widely known. And I have other stories about how academics were made to feel in danger, though relatively few smoking guns because people were in the closet already so I can't point to explicit discrimination.
From a right-wing perspective, all the stuff you're worried about already happened. It's been happening for years and it's been coming from inside the house (i.e. not just admin). This is the backlash.
You don't have to agree with that, of course, but I think it will help you understand where I and perhaps others are coming from. And it might explain why 'Trump's administration should stop people discriminating, without discriminating themselves' isn't seen as enough by many people - if you believe as I do that most academics lowkey want to discriminate, then a pause on discrimination will work only until Trump's power and attention wanes even slightly.
I'm well aware, and I'm against it. I'm a leftist at the object level while strongly disavowing cancel culture and persecution. This is an awkward position, awkward enough that I am not optimistic about the Left reforming itself from within. Hence, I view the anti-woke Right as potential allies in the shared project of bringing an end end cancel culture, with the aim of restoring a status quo that's better for everyone than a crab bucket where everybody is constantly persecuting everybody else.
And the thing is, this is an ideal that much right-wing rhetoric embraced; certainly much of the furore about Political Correctness/SJWs/cancel culture/Woke, over the last fifteen years, was pitched in terms of "these are dirty tactics, and our enemies are inherently rotten for using them, never mind whatever crazy stuff they're fighting for", not just of the more cynical "these value-neutral, highly effective memetic weapons happen to be in the hands of our enemies whose goals are crazy, and that's bad". Right-wingers who are dragging the anti-woke momentum in the direction of "we need right-wing cancel culture to even the odds" as opposed to "cancel culture delenda est" are defectors to the broader cause of principledness and civilization (within which the entire political Overton window should squarely sit, in a healthy body politic). I understand why they're doing it, at an emotional level, but they are, and I can't condone or excuse it, even as I sympathize.
In short: some very reproachable people on my side started using intellectual weapons whose use inherently degrades civilization; they're sure as hell not going to stop on their own, so the only hope was that the opposition would provide a credible alternative; for a while it seemed as though they might; but now they look like they're just content to stoop down to their enemies' level, abandoning all the high-minded principles they rightly criticized their enemies for flouting ten years ago. And thus we sink a little further towards total collapse. It is what it is, I'm not saying it's a surprising outcome, but there was hope of something better, and perhaps there still is, so I'm doing my bit.
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You could, but this would be a bad argument and fundamentally very different from the one I laid out. This is just an attempt at equivocating between very obviously different things. Believing in miracles indicates shoddy epistemology, but it doesn't explicitly commit oneself to rejecting the very idea of objective reality or logic. People can be shoddy in their reasoning, shoddy in their observations, etc. Academics can be and often are, because they're humans like anyone else. We should hold them to high standards, but not inhumanly high standards. Never making an epistemological error, especially when it comes to things in religious life that can be compartmentalized away from academics and profession, is an inhumanly high bar. Never signing off on a document that supports an ideology that explicitly rejects the very basis of one's professional academic endeavors isn't an inhumanly high bar.
I do guess that religious people likely, on average, make for less effective STEM academics, but I think empirical evidence indicates that whatever handicap they have isn't that severe, considering the achievements made by religious scientists and engineers. If we had enough qualified atheists on-hand to fully substitute current religious STEM academics with them, it could be worth the transaction cost, though I think the effects of introducing a religious test would generally be severely negative.
However, if an evolutionary biologist or astronomer or geophysicist loudly and proudly signed on to Young Earth Creationism, then that would be more analogous to this situation (though not quite, since YECs haven't practically taken over academia like this ideology has, and YEC is merely one "theory" (lol) about reality, rather than an entire epistemology of how we understand reality itself). The core beliefs of YEC is just fundamentally incompatible with our academic understanding of these fields in a way that does raise reasonable questions about qualification to do the job, in a way that merely "being religious" doesn't. Even then, one can reasonably argue that someone's ideological commitments to YEC should be excluded from consideration of their work as an evolutionary biologist, because of their ability to perform [task] that isn't hindered by YEC. But that's a different argument than saying that this is just as much "cancel culture" as firing someone for "being religious" or whatever.
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No, it isn't.
Probably not true, but even assuming it is, restoring intellectual freedom and freedom of speech does not require rescuing anyone.
How so?
"Rescuing such-and-such people" was just a fancy way of saying "lift restrictions on freedom of speech currently affecting such-and-such people". Imposing new restrictions on those same people, policing for the opposite quadrant of political speech, is… not that.
No new restrictions on those people based on speech are being added. The grants were all suspended (some are now unsuspended) and new grants aren't currently being made.
Has the Trump administration/MAGA at large explicitly denied the possibility of further punishment? Restrictions on left-wing speech are completely aligned with the illiberal right-wing vector, they'd be stupid not to. The question is whether the right's ascendance is complete enough to allow it; the general opinion ITT seems to be that it is not, but we shall see.
Edit: This post quite nicely sums up the actual opinion/driving animus of the new right. Prediction: the final vote count will end up around +20/-10.
Edit 2: Vote count as of Aug 21 2025, 22:11 UTC: +19/-5. Even less pushback than I expected.
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To prevent academia from leveraging the power that it has (to pronounce Official Expert Truth) in support of the Left.
Rescuing academics would be nice but the vast majority of people who weren’t at least lukewarmly woke left years ago, like me. And the ones who are left will find they can get a lot of mileage out of “of course I agree with you but if I say it in public Trump will pull our funding”.
Even if the admin have a woke score of 110 and the academics only have woke scores between 30-90, neither group actually likes me.
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Most of the academics didn't complain about being forced to parrot spurious diversity statements, nor even when those spurious diversity statements were made the foremost criteria in their hiring. They DO complain, loudly, when the Trump administration moves explicitly against those spurious diversity statements and other requirements. If they were really held captive by an ideologically captured admin, they should welcome the Trump administration as liberators.
If they don't, I see three possibilities
They actually agree with the admin. This is what I suspect is true.
They don't agree with the admin, but believe accepting the admin's dominance is preferable to the short-term pain Trump is imposing. If they believe this, they are, IMO, fools.
They think Trump will fail, and thus adhere to the admin in order to prevent later repercussions against themselves. In this case they are craven.
None of these cases demand they be given any sort of mercy.
I have no doubt that there are some true-believers. Though actually, I suspect that what academia has, ultimately, is a supermajority of normie liberals - people don't like cancel culture or having to parrot meaningless diversity statements, but agree with the left more than the right overall, and with a deep-seated distaste for Trump. Such people, I would describe as living under the yoke of the cancel-culture regime as much as anyone. If you take free speech seriously, then they're archetypal examples of victims of cancel culture. But they have every reason to believe Trump sees them as enemies anyway, and thus, correctly refuse to welcome the Great Liberator because they identify any call to do so as an attempt to divide and conquer.
More to the point, to whatever extent there are conservatives in academia whom cancel culture is preventing from speaking up, they are the people Trump is/should be trying to save. If everyone in academia is in fact a true believer in wokeism, then by definition cancel culture in academia would be a nonissue: there would be no wrongthink for cancel mobs to punish, and no free speech would be infringed. Attacking cancel culture in academia is only a worthy endeavor if you presuppose that there are, in fact, people currently forced to mouth insincere diversity statements that you want to rescue. An attack vector which hurts such people as much as their oppressors - even if they are a minority - inherently loses its justification.
Also, whether you describe #3 as "craven" or simply rational behavior depends a great deal on the object-level question of whether Trump will, in fact, fail. Say I, a closet conservative in academia, happen to believe he will fail, hard, with, say, >80% confidence. Wouldn't it be idiotic of me to throw off the mask now? You say craven, I say survival instincts. Don't online right-wingers tend to approve of hiding your power level?
Such people don't exist. The most "moderate" fringes of the enemy have still shown a voracious appetite for land acknowledgements, attaching black/brown/trans flags to everything, mandating everyone take the nlm loyalty oauth, cancelling nazis (everyone right of them), diversity quotas, and more of anything called "DEI".
There are no "normie liberals" who don't love all those things. If you think they do, then show me they exist.
Normie liberals don't tend to talk a lot about politics, especially not in public. Most of them are hanging out under real names, and their social circles include social justice warriors willing to cut them off for heresy. They're afraid to get thrown out into the Wilderness if they speak their minds.
(I'm legitimately unsure if @WandererintheWilderness's username references that article, because yeah, theMotte as a community has been cast out into the Wilderness even if doesn't fully have the "Wilderness nature".)
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No, the real victims of cancel culture are the ones who didn't get to be in that position because they are conservative. My preferred result is admissions officers being put in prison for decades of discrimination. What is happening is the compromise.
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Varies by department, of course, but at some point the ratios are so extreme I don't think it's reasonable to really consider them normie. Many are, sure, but cutting off half the normal curve suggests the left tail is going to be significant.
And I can't get the full text at the moment, but helluva statement from the abstract of this paper:
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Then they have chosen their side, and are correctly considered collaborators.
Those who cancel are perfectly happy to go after those who are only perceived to commit wrongthink, or to change the definition of wrongthink to catch those who were formerly right-thinkers, and thus to even cancel true believers.
As I said above, certainly not. If cancel culture has already pushed out everyone who is not a true believer, or I can't rescue those who have not been pushed out, it is still good to destroy cancel culture in academia as a step in either re-populating academia with non-wokes, or destroying academia in its entirety so the wokes cannot use whatever power and influence academia has to cause trouble in other areas.
No, it doesn't. If there's one oppressed person per 1000 in academia, and they are hurt as much as the 1000 by some measure, this is what's called collateral damage. No one is required to use a perfectly precise weapon.
Trump, however, must act as if he will succeed. And if he does, they were craven.
A phrase I associate mostly with the dissident right/neo-Nazis, actually. But keeping your head down when you're totally outclassed may be merely prudent. Keeping your head down when you have a chance at success is cowardly.
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Aren't the head "admins" typically drawn from the tenured faculty (sometimes hired across institutions)? I doubt there is a college president (or provost, or dean, or department head) out there without a doctorate. Maybe not all the mid-level admins ("Deputy Title IX Coordinator"), but those aren't intended to be steering the ship.
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