The Real Reason Academics Keep Cancelling Each Other

As the head of the Free Speech Union, I frequently have to come to the rescue of academics who are in the process of being cancelled, usually at the behest of their colleagues. Scarcely a week goes by without an ‘open letter’ circulating in which hundreds of lecturers are calling for the scalp of a heretical co-worker.

For instance, we’re currently in the process of defending an American scholar called Nathan Cofnas who was kicked out of his Cambridge college after writing a controversial blog post about race and IQ that led to protests outside the Philosophy Faculty and a petition demanding his dismissal signed by over a thousand people. We’re helping him sue the college for belief discrimination (and you can contribute to his crowdfunder here). To date, we’ve had to defend 160 academics being mobbed by their co-workers.

At first I was shocked. Aren’t professors supposed to value academic freedom? How are the frontiers of human knowledge to be extended if reigning orthodoxies can’t be challenged? If Galileo was alive today, would his fellow astronomers start a petition to have him thrown out of the Royal Society for daring to suggest the Earth goes around the Sun? The answer, I’m afraid, is yes.

In his new book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows, the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker has a fascinating theory about this. He starts by asking why it is that tyrants are able to stave off popular revolt in spite of widespread discontent. It’s because the citizens are unaware of how ubiquitous this unhappiness is. Provided the tyrannical regime swiftly punishes anyone who dares to speak up, its opponents don’t know how numerous they are. As Pinker says: “People will expose themselves to the risk of reprisal by a despotic regime only if they know that others are exposing themselves to that risk at the same time.”

A good example of this self-censorship was provided by Václav Havel, the great Czech dissident. In a communist society, he said, it’s easy to imagine a greengrocer displaying a sign in his shop window saying “Workers of the World Unite”, even though his faith in Marxism has long since lapsed. He displays it because a failure to do so might be taken by the authorities as a sign of disloyalty. So he puts it in his window and his customers, who are equally sceptical, assume that they’re alone in dissenting from communist dogma.

The suppression of what Pinker calls “common knowledge” – knowing that a particular point of view is widely shared, as well as knowing that those who hold it know it’s shared – is also how ideological dogmas are enforced in universities. Those dogmas may only be adhered to by a tiny minority, but so long as anyone challenging them is dealt a swift punishment beating in the form of a social media mobbing – or worse – the extent of the dissent isn’t common knowledge.

To understand this, take the example of a group of professors at the University of Auckland, who were targeted by their colleagues four years ago.

In the autumn of 2021, seven professors wrote a letter to the New Zealand Listener that took issue with a proposal by a government working group that schools should give the same weight to Māori mythology as they do to science in the classroom. That is, the Māori understanding of the world – all living things originated with Rangi and Papa, the sky mother and sky god – should be presented as just as valid as the theories of Newton, Darwin and Einstein, which the working group labelled “Western science”.

The authors of the letter, ‘In Defence of Science’, were careful to say that indigenous knowledge was “critical for the preservation and perpetuation of culture and local practices” and should be taught in New Zealand’s schools. But they drew the line at treating it as on a par with Physics, Chemistry and Biology.

In a rational world, this point of view would be incontestable. Surely, the argument about whether to teach schoolchildren scientific or religious explanations for the origins of the universe and the ascent of man was settled by the Scopes Trial a hundred years ago? But the moment it was published all hell broke loose. The views of the authors were denounced by the Royal Society of New Zealand, the Association of Scientists and the Tertiary Education Union — as well as their own Vice-Chancellor.

Needless to say, two of the authors’ colleagues issued an ‘open letter’ condemning them for causing “untold harm and hurt”. They invited anyone who agreed with them to add their names to the letter – and 2,000 academics duly obliged. Who do those witch-hunters remind you of? Why, our old friend Havel’s greengrocer. It’s inconceivable that they genuinely believed that scientific knowledge has no greater claim to being true than Māori mythology. As Steven Pinker says, “If scientific beliefs are just a particular culture’s mythology, how come we can cure smallpox and get to the moon, and traditional cultures can’t?” And you can bet your bottom dollar that if any of the signatories of that ‘open letter’ suffered a heart attack, their first telephone call would be not be to a Māori healer.

Yet the fact that, deep down, they probably all thought scientific knowledge was superior to Māori mythology was not common knowledge. On the contrary, they harboured this belief like a guilty secret and felt obliged to advertise their fealty to what they took to be the prevailing orthodoxy for fear of being singled out as heretics if they didn’t.

This, Pinker says, is why academics are so quick to participate in mobbings against their colleagues. They’re terrified of being cancelled themselves, particularly if they’re only precariously employed, which many of them are. In private, most professors would scoff at the woke nonsense they feel obliged to pay lip service to. But because their scepticism isn’t common knowledge, these orthodoxies not only survive, but are energetically enforced by people who’ve long since stopped believing in them.

I think there’s a great deal in this and I wish I knew what the solution was, apart from defending those brave academics who find themselves being targeted by a their pitchfork-wielding colleagues.

I’ll be speaking about the current threats to academic freedom at a conference organised by the Committee for Academic Freedom on Wednesday. For more info, click here. A shorter version of this article was published in the Evening Standard.