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You might recall that an adjunct professor was let go from Hamline University after a Muslim student complained about a depiction of the prophet Muhammad shown in class. The immediate responses were not terribly surprising to me. Given past incidents, I assumed that college administrators would have an interest towards affirming the student's complaint, no matter how unreasonable it was. This panned out, with the university president issuing a very bizarre statement where she presented non-sequiturs like:
What do the demographics of the university president have to do with academic freedom? Fuck if I know.
Similarly, I also assumed that non-profit organizations would have an interest to bolster their profile by seizing upon the incident. This too panned out, with the local Minnesota Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) chapter condemning the professor as Islamophobic. The local chapter's executive director even dismissed the fact that the professor went out of her way to add a content warning and said "In reality a trigger warning is an indication that you are going to do harm."
Since then, things have changed. First, the national CAIR organization felt the need to step in and rebuke the local chapter, and issued a (tepid) defense of the scorned professor. Then, Hamline University faculty just voted overwhelmingly (71-12) to ask the president to step down. For a defense of freedom of expression, the statement they issued is (at least on its face) pretty good.
Both of these developments surprised me, and it made me wonder whether this is a sign of a potential turning point on the topic of suppressed freedom of expression on campus.
Yes, standard accusations of Islamophobia. But also:
-Jaylani Hussein, executive director of the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations
Based Chris Rufo demonstrates how to deny the heckler’s veto.
My impression of Rufo is in line with my impression of De Santis: these guys are getting soft-balled. It's almost staged. Not to say they aren't sincere or competent – they are – but it's not some political brilliance to flip the board (of trustees), it's making use of available resources in an allowed way. This woman in the video is blatantly trying to overstep her authority with a two-bit safetyist sermon based on a low-effort anonymous threat, she's a predictable villain of the week, and she's alone – physically at least. This also suggests that conservatives who got heckled out of colleges and demonized within the prestigious discourse were drooling morons who couldn't navigate their own spaces. I guess this looks plausible today to some (e.g. Hanania), but it hadn't been the case during the slow purge. So how come they lost so hard?
The hard stuff is not politely standing your ground before an old crone who wags her wrinkly finger and tries to make you feel like a naughty child – though I suppose for decent prosocial people (as well as for simple folk with poorer impulse control than what a snake in a suit like Rufo can display) that may be hard too. It's withstanding pressure in tens if not hundreds of dimensions; from direct physical intimidation and obstruction, to your own family beginning to feel shame for you, to business boycotts, to vilification coordinated by large orgs who can rope in public icons, to actual legitimate decrees, to plain apathy of your network which is sane, myopically, and so doesn't feel like fighting such an uphill battle is worth the effort.
Manipulation of procedural outcomes relies not so much on high-IQ plays as on slow march through the institutions and seizing control over many nodes at once, to the point it's redundant. When you know that there's at least one friendly Board above any Board that your enemy may coordinate to seize, it's hard to lose. Unless you decide to throw the match, or implode from within.
Perhaps like the mainstream media: at the start of Fox News it did lean left, though not as heavily. Fox drew a lot of right-wing people which made the media be perceived as even more left-leaning, combined with the polemics against this which also drove conservatives away into their own networks because the rest of the media was seen as a leftist province. Polarization begets polarization.
There is a difference of course: conservatives didn't run away from school altogether. So why the rout? Well, I suspect that's where civil rights law and DEI initiatives come in. Cons could still go to schools, and still go to less "woke" subjects but the university's social policy had to be subject to Title IX and other "woke" laws (shaped by ideology in spaces dominated by the left and enforced by administrators who may have been woker than the median professor) and, especially, how the government du jour interprets them.
If anything, what makes Rufo and DeSantis effective is that they understand that part of the game is about the law and changing institutions, not just dispositional concerns that other, more left-wing critics of cancel culture raise which boil down to "just stand your ground if the cancellers come for your employees" or "maybe only cancel really bad people guys!"
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