Navigating Cancel Culture and Free Expression in American Education

Sam Abrams is a professor of politics and social sciences at Sarah Lawrence University and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute , and Danielle A Struppa is a world-renowned professor of mathematics and president of Chapman University .

I think we all probably agree that freedom of expression is a good thing , but what's apparently happening on many campuses and I know this from my own daughter , who happens to be at the same school as Sam is that right now , particularly if you're a Jewish student or a supporter of Israel , it's it you know you're sort of now dealing with , you know basically

open comments that would lead to , essentially , the annihilation of the Israeli population , and that , if you're a Jewish student , you feel threatened . So at what point ? It's a very difficult issue At what point do you say you can't say this and you can't say that ? So , Sam , do you want to start ?

Israel and Hamas , I think , is the latest example of it , but cancel culture has been a major problem on our campuses now for well over a decade . I noticed this first at Sarah Lawrence , where I teach , and one of the beauties of being at a very progressive left school is that I often see social trends before they , I'll say , infect the rest of the country .

Sarah Lawrence is usually a few years ahead of this , and when we think about cancel culture , it's not just Israel , hamas , it's really a situation where we have an administrative apparatus often called diversity , equity , inclusion . At Sarah Lawrence , it's justice , equity , diversity and inclusion .

Jedi , like the Star Wars films , and this is a worldview that has now been propagated on our students long before they even arrive on campus .

They're given readings , they're given materials to familiarize themselves with well before they said foot , and it's a worldview that I think is inherently un-American and incredibly dangerous , because what it basically says is that the world is based on power who has it and who doesn't , who are the oppressors and who is oppressed and based on that sort of very foolish

identity based dichotomy if you are an oppressor , you must be taken down . If you are an oppressed , you can do almost anything you'd like to punch up to take those down . Who are the oppressors ?

So we've seen for quite a while this flare up where if you are white of some sort and look like you're of some dominant class , anything can be said and done against you . If you are Asian , same sort of thing , and the rules of our applied differently .

So while schools have rules about conduct , ethics , morals and general behavior , what is considered dangerous , what is considered a threat and so on , those rules are applied and viewed differently based on who says what and in what context . So if I said something against a person of color , I would be committing something that would be outrageous . That could be .

That could result in my dismissal , even though I'm tenured In the other direction , as we're seeing in Hamas , israel , my faculty colleagues say horrible things . They have been posting and sharing things that basically call for my own death . That's fine , not a problem .

So you know , israel Hamas is a very powerful example of how scary the cancel culture situation is , but it's not new and it's been around for about a decade , and one of the few silver linings of what's going on with Israel now is at least this is no longer hidden . This is no longer an issue that I have to beat the drum over .

I've been writing about it for a decade . Most people won't listen . Most people don't take it seriously . I think everyone is taking it seriously now , the Jewish community in particular , who basically said hey , you're crazy , we're all allies here and I said we are not . I would like to be , but I can see from your rhetoric that we are not .

Jews are having one heck of a reckoning right now , and I think that's probably a good thing .

So I don't have a problem with that analyzing the world by the instrumental power . What I think is silly about the super left movement is the overlay of power onto race , ethnicity , gender , sexual orientation , so that if you are of a certain color , then you're an oppressed . So this idea the white are oppressors .

You bring it to the Appalachian mountains , where it shows how stupid the idea is . You don't need to even argue about it . So this idea that we identify certain groups and then we analyze everything on the group , that's where the real mistake is .

So , in terms of the cancer culture , I think that it's definitely true what Sam was saying , that offensive languages look differently depending on who are you offending . Every year I used to meet with our honor students and we talked about free speech and we talk about the burning of the flag .

And everybody agrees that you should be burning the American flag because it's my right , it's my freedom and I agree with that , no problem . But then when I said , what if I go out and I burn the Mexican flag Because I think there are too many immigrants , then all of a sudden that is not acceptable .

I can burn the Israeli flag because we know the Jews have been oppressed in the world I don't know how exactly , but for centuries apparently . So that is OK to burn . But if you burn the flag of Palestinians , then all of a sudden , so there is this . Now I don't think we saw any instance in which this has become the law .

But the greatest form of cancer culture is a self-censorship that people impose on themselves . So if you go in the Atalla Piazza , you're in the center of Chapman and you say that the Palestinians really need to be taken down , nobody's going to do anything to you . We are not going to punish you , just like we don't punish the people who say it .

From the river to the sea , palestine will be free , but the obroborium , the social disgust that you will have to endure , is enough for people not wanting to say that . So I think that that is very subtle . Well , now it's not so subtle anymore , but it's a very insidious form of censorship . It's a sense of you know what .

I told this to my friends many times In the past . We had to worry about the kings , the emperors , telling us what we can and cannot do . Now we don't need that . We don't need the police to tell us what we can and cannot do . We have the mob that is telling us .

We have become our own imperial power and that is very scary , and especially for young people , and I know that we have young people here that really don't feel comfortable saying what they'd like to do . I had three children . I went to school here . My son is very conservative , so we'll take him out of the equation .

But my two girls , they are really like the ignorant typical young kids . Ok , so they're nice girls , they're wonderful people , but they don't have any .

But they both told me about the constant indocination in so many of the classes and they figured it out and obviously they've learned that you don't really speak out , you do what you think the professor would want to see and that's not right .

For instance , my daughter gets stuff from her sociology teacher which is completely biased , and you have a teacher who's marching in anti-Israel rallies . Well , what is it , a little Jewish girl , supposed to think about this ?

And I found with my students not just the indocination which , by the way , my minority students also didn't like but the fact that they're not being told any history Like what's the history of Palestine ? Who controlled it ? The majority of young people think that Gaza is under the control of Israel , which is kind of ridiculous .

Is there something we can do to check the kind of indocination that starts in high school but really hits a crescendo in college ?

But if a sociology teacher uses this incident to discuss the notion of occupation and colonialism and social resistance , they should do that . And there is no way that you can limit the bias that they bring in , because we are all human and they will bring their own bias .

The real problem is that through what Gramsci and later on Rudi Ducke and Marcuse called the long march to the institutions , the institutions are now almost monolithic in their bias . I , honestly , I'll be very honest , I don't mind people having bias , I'm biased .

Okay , you are my friends and you know I'm very pro-Israeli , so that's my bias , and I don't pretend to be right at all . I mean so if I have a conversation , that bias comes out . So the bias is not the problem .

The problem is when the bias is almost uniform in a group and then it's really difficult for people to hear different views , and but that is something that has been done , with great ability , I think , by the left throughout the , in Europe certainly , but also in the United States .

And the idea is that , now you know , every statistic will tell you in sociology department that the balance is about nine to 10 , I mean nine to one , eight to two . In fact , I'm kind of curious to know how Sam is surviving . I mean I have that as a conversation , but so I don't think there is much that can be done .

But the fact is her silence which and let me just contextualize this for all the viewers and listeners when we had a storm about a year ago , a hurricane that prevented a number of students from coming to school on time from Florida , there was a page long email expressing deep sympathy , deep understanding and offering therapy and counseling services over a storm .

Now that's real . I do not want to diminish the fact that the hurricane .

She could have simply offered support . She chose not to do that , at which point I said we obviously know your silence is sharing what , where your views are on that .

The second reason I'm okay and I'm very open about this is that by being in the New York area , there is an awful lot of diversity of opinion , diversity of people , and I'm not in a small college town . I can exist outside a small school bubble . This would be very different in a place like Middlebury or Western Connecticut or something like that .

As for dealing with the bias , I have no problem with bias as well . I think bias isn't is inevitable . There's not much we can do to get rid of it .

But what we can do is , instead of indoctrinating our students into a progressive identity laden set of biases when they set foot on campus as first years , we can teach them how to be thinkers , I mean as a math person . That's exactly what the hard sciences do . What we can do in social sciences is say , hey , what are the different tools ?

What are the different approaches ? How do we answer questions from a scientific method ? Which is what I like to try to do , and we could teach our students to be increasingly skeptical . We could teach our students to ask are there other views ? Why are you saying this view only ? Are there alternative views ?

The fact is , as I say , when we talk about abortion , for instance , in my own courses , if there aren't three or four legitimate viewpoints on how to think about this , then we have a problem . And the fact is there are numerous legitimate viewpoints .

Our students need to be empowered and supported by administrators , which we can do to say hey , are you presenting this adequately , fairly ? Are you giving enough room for students to talk ? I certainly respect academic freedom .

I need it , I lean on it , but I take my responsibility very seriously when I teach to make sure that I have conservative and liberal voices present in the room and the readings and I let the students know .

In fact , the first thing any student who presents a reading in one of my classes is required to do is what's the bio of the reader , what is the bias of the writer , what is the bias of the writer and why ? And what are the facts , what are the arguments , what are the theories ? And let's talk about it .

And that can prevent it , but this is not going on . We could force more workshops , we could work with our students outside of the individual department biases to try to fight this , and one of the things I'm very confident about our current students is that , when we look at Jen's years today , they deal with this online all the time .

There's a huge amount of flow in . How do you figure out what's true , what isn't ? How do we figure out whom to listen to and who to ignore ? We need to cultivate those skills . We need to cultivate those skills starting in middle school .

I'm looking at schools for my kids right now here in the city , and one of the things they keep talking about is online literacy . That is , how do we not end up in dark , creepy corners of the web ? This is something that we need to be doing much earlier . How do we evaluate evidence ? How do we figure these things out ?

That's creating the polarization , is what makes the money , and so what's really ? We only account for a relatively small percentage of the , you know , of the of the neuronal activity that is going on inside of our students brains . Increasingly , the social media people and the spillover to traditional media are taking a larger and larger portion of that .

How do we effectively compete against that to be able to create the critical thinking you're talking about ?

So if you ask me , I'm a math teacher and you say , daniel , what is your job as a professor of math in the university , I would tell you this to develop the mathematical ability of my students is to provide them whatever mathematical knowledge is the course that I'm teaching , whether it's algebraic , geometry or topology or complex analysis , but most important , the

ability to learn new math and to use those instruments to answer mathematical questions . If you have the same question of many faculty in the non-stem disciplines , you will find a slightly different perspective . Their perspective is that they believe , and they believe it honestly .

So I'm not really accusing them of anything , but they believe that their job is to help students change the world . That's one of the things that we hear all the time when people graduate go out and change the world . So you're moving from a scholarly perspective . Which is what ? When you graduate in mathematics , I never thought I was going to change the world .

My job was to be the very best mathematician I could be and solve the very hardest problem that I could find . But if you are in the other discipline , you will hear a lot about this change in the world . So you go from a scholarly perspective to an advocacy perspective and the teacher indoctrinates .

I believe and I hope I'm not too naive they are in good faith because this is the job . The job is to create the future of the society and this society , in their view , is fundamentally corrupt , is fundamentally decomposing , and their job is to create the new society . That's why we have this . What is happening in the classroom is different perspective .

Now to your question . I'm sorry for having taken your time to elaborate my thinking on that , but the question how do we compete with the social media ? That's another very , very hard thing to do . I teach and I see students all the time . When they get bored , these things appear and you have to say you know , joe , do you mind ?

Oh , sorry , sorry , professor , you know , yesterday night I was cooking for my students . I was cooking before coming to your event .

I was cooking a beautiful dish from Sicily and the students are there with me in the kitchen and I'm trying to explain the origin , the Arab origin , of this food and all this stuff and you see people getting on their little phone . So it's not only when I teach math that I understand may not be the most exciting of topics , so it is a hard competition .

I think what happened is that the use of this thing has decreased the attention span of people . I find myself looking at my phone when I watch a movie . Now , when the movie gets low , I find myself picking this up because I need to be stimulated .

So this , I think , is like a drug that is entering in the brain of our students and , frankly , all of us , and I don't know how you can make education win that battle .

You know there are a few kids who are incredibly dedicated , incredibly passionate , and they will actually seek the real dialogue , but many of them are fundamentally tied to their success in having as many likes as they can , in having their students , their friends , liking what they do , and so I'm not very hopeful with that .

Like in the previous answer , I'm holding virtually no hopes of what you guys would like to see .

Because I'm studying this sort of stuff Two to three years after I finished , in the 2008 , 2009 , 2010, . That area , you're a . Rather it shifted from ivory tower scholarship for the sake of being scholarly and answering questions to of why and how , to scholar activism .

I mean more often than not , you see people say activist , writer , scholar , teacher , something like that . It's activism . You're completely right .

Schools and administrators can say you're welcome to do that on your own time , you're welcome to do that vis-a-vis extracurricular , extramural work , but we're here to teach you how to think , not necessarily what to think , and that seems trite , but it really matters today .

As for these things , the fact of the matter is that I certainly was addicted to this , like everybody else . It's designed to do that , and I turn mine off before I teach and I ask every student to turn theirs off . You're the same .

I have no laptop , no laptop policy and no iPad policy and no tech policy , and it is absolutely thrilling because for one hour and 50 minutes for each seminar I am fully engaged , fully present . I will tell you that the one hour and 50 minutes goes by like that . It is so much fun . I found my voice again , I figured out how to be a teacher again .

No more droning on or looking at an ending digital media . It's , we're present , we're here , we're working on something and it is a lot of fun and the students have to do that and that's a prerec to walking into the room . I can tell you that again it's looking someone looking for schools for my kids here in the city .

We're seeing more and more schools require that phones be put in lockboxes and they're not allowed to be used . They are taken out one or two times during the day for emergencies . Parents or whatever know if there's an emergency you can always call the front office . They'll get the kids .

But we see stats that I've seen one statistic come out from Pew that says that the an average teenage girl girls are higher than boys in this case checks their phone 490 times a day . Let's try to make that a lot less right .

I have loved teaching again in the last couple of years because I've had the phone away and I love being present again .

I forget sometimes how amazing you know that I used to observe very seriously the Jewish Sabbath , how amazing it is to have 12 or 24 , whatever you choose to observe a complete disconnect from technology and you're only present in the immediate world around you , your friends , your family , that immediate community .

It's incredibly powerful and we're forgetting those traditions . So , you know , I think colleges can model that . I think colleges actually can say we really need you to go device free in certain courses , Absolutely .

What techniques do you find that get them to do that ? And do you find the same reticence ?

But a big part of it , I find at least , is I expose myself , not obviously inappropriately , but emotionally expose myself and and I make them aware of who I am and what I care about and whom about . And I usually say I'm gonna have to throw the first two , if not three , sessions away and when I do that , I find that I try to connect with the students .

In the second or third session I'll often go do an activity or we'll do something in New York City to connect and have that social bond . Once that's created and we realize we're all people here , we're in this together , a lot of those walls fall very , very quickly .

And when the walls fall you can begin to ask those questions and the dialogue and discourse can really Open up and you can have these conversations . But it it's slow , it's a , it's a lot of work , it requires some money . Sometimes you know that the schools may have to say look , I want to take my kids out , the students out for pizza .

Food , as we all know , is the lubricant of social ability and sometimes I mean eat a couple hundred bucks to do it , but I've noticed that it works very , very well . But it again , it's a very heavy lift . But I would say , since doing this , identity politics in the classrooms have disappeared . We no longer get as a this person , this person of this person .

We all know what these people are . Talk to me about what you think , talk to me about the ideas and then how your experience is given . Those categories , which are often immutable , you know , play out . But it's it's a heavy lift and requires the trust .

But I can tell you that we have talked about incredibly contentious things over the last four or five years . No one's reported , no one goes out of class crying . I haven't had a biased response team approach anybody about anything in any years and Almost every student says I've learned something and that's our job .

But I could use a break and I can lie about that , but let me ask that I don't want to talk it too much .

Is there any standard or any policy that that an administration can do to encourage the kind of things that Sam's doing ?

I like the idea of you know , obviously I cook for them . That's an example of .

I think that most of the people you would talk to they would tell you that they do that and I think they may think they do that I I honestly don't think that there is a ill will of at all costs into three-nate students , that there is a . They give them readings and maybe they give them also alternative readings .

But then in the discussion , I think the , the pers , the perspective , comes out . It's very hard for faculty to hide their perspective when you teach social issues , and that's what I think the difficulty . So we encourage our faculty to you to think diversity , not in term only of the skin , of the color , but diversity of opinion .

It's actually in our description of what diversity is . The diversity of opinion is there . The diversity of political points of view is there . I think we call it viewpoint diversity .

So , and everybody on paper agrees to that , the challenge is that when you do it , your bias comes out and and I I think that that's what is almost impossible to avoid , because that's what is human nature .

You know that , that things are mandated , that you will teach this this way , and that's something that we would like to avoid in higher education , although my sense is that many professor colleagues of mine could use a Innovation injection when it comes to experimenting with new ways of communicating with students and , in fact , may not really know Of new techniques

that could really create greater engagement . I don't know what's your sense about that . How , how , directive , what an intentional can you be at the at the higher education level ?

I gave you yesterday night over dinner . I gave you a couple of examples , but there are . He's just frightening . You know , two semesters ago or two years ago , I taught a class about the birth of the Communist Party in Italy and it was an opportunity to explore what it meant to try to create social change in a society like the Italian society .

Students didn't know anything about World War . One student didn't know anything about the Soviet Revolution . Students never . You know they all are Marxist , but none of them has read a single word of Karl Marx . They didn't know who Stalin was . They didn't know who Lenin was . So this makes them really liable to be easily twisted .

When I was in high school , I remember we spent three long years of doing philosophy in a very heavy way . We read significant amount of Plato's dialogue , we read the significant amount of Aristotle . That's in the first year we read the St Agrostein , we read the significant pieces from the scholastic .

I remember reading the Prolegomen of Kant and so on and so forth . So when a teacher comes up with stuff , I had some instrument . Now our kids don't have those .

So I think that it's a it's vain to try to solve the problem at the college level when we really should put all of our energy in building significant K-12 system in which things are actually taught . And instead , I think you're right they pay a lot of attention to pedagogy but they don't pay any attention to content .

I haven't yet to see one math teacher of my kids know anything about math , and that really drives me insane , because they come home and it's clear that their teacher don't know anything . I have a good friend here that is fighting with all of his school all the time because he's also a mathematician and his kids are not learning anything in their high school .

And so the same is , I'm sure , is true for history . The same is true for literature . So we have all these teachers that are very adept in how to deal with the diverse classroom in how to make sure students feel comfortable in how , to make sure they can spot social problems in their lives , but they don't teach anything .

The school is where you need to teach stuff and I think it's becoming instead a replacement for the family . So there , I think , is where the real problem is . So when we come to college , we are unprepared I'm generally unprepared to deal even though I'm 68 now to deal with students who don't know absolutely anything , because it's very hard to find any hook .

You know , I try all kinds of connections and they all fall on flat ears and forget about when I teach math . I mean , when I teach math , it's just appalling what I have to deal with . But the same is true . You know , I was mentioning yesterday some example . Our kids don't know anything . They haven't read anything .

They don't know anything not only about philosophy , but they know virtually nothing about literature . They barely know any history , which , of course , is part of the problem . The topic we started with today , right , the Palestinian issue . Well , that's not a five years old issue , you know . Now everybody goes back to the war of 1967 .

Well , yeah , I'm sorry , this is a much older , much longer issue than the war of 67 . So , but these kids don't know anything , you know . They don't know where Italy is , they don't know where Israel is . It's just , I mean , I feel really saddened because we're trying to to work with kids who have been damaged by schools that have wasted their intelligence .

You know , in the K-12 period their brain is expanding at a speed of light . They have incredible ability to learn , to absorb , to , to , to condense , to connect . Those are the connections that you need to create , but we waste our time . I've seen the most , or even children going to school is a terrible experience in this country .

Because I don't know , sam , if you have kids , but God , it's great . It is Because the thing I can . You know , my daughter once came home and her job was to build a cube and to put facts about the periodic table of the elements . The periodic table of the elements is one of the greatest intellectual achievement .

Okay , sam and the lab came up with a really clever idea , not completely well formed . That's what you need to learn about the periodic table . Instead , do a little cube with different facts on every face . I was appalled by that . I was saddened by that . My daughter was an intelligent girl . Don't waste our time .

You make him do a stupid presentation with a cube . Any , I think you're huge , marshall .

Remember that outside of certain liberal arts colleges , published versus parish is what you have to do . We're overworked and underpaid . Most colleagues want to get out . How do you do that ? What time on teaching , isn't it doing your bizarre research for five people to read and say is great is going to get you ahead .

So that's the homo rationalicus there that we have to deal with on the K 12 . I agree with everything you said and two reactions to it are as follows . When people ask what do I teach of late , my answer is history . I have had to spend .

Whenever I have a year long course , I spend at least the first semester now doing history , because no one has any context to situate the present in the past . I regularly will assign something from someone like Marcus Aurelius or Cicero or Pliny . Go figure , I never thought I would do this . I love that I do .

I went to a Jewish day school and history was everything that you had to understand all of that . So this was just what I did . But you know , you know , for us your presence was right . No one else has this .

So I now say I teach politics and history , or more often , history and politics , where we're literally reading history , so people have some common sense , core understanding of okay , this is where we're going to situate the present . That being said , another big issue with K 12 is if we look at the history .

On that , one thing that I always like to point out is that schools K 12 were the anchors of their community .

It wasn't just teaching history in Latin great works of literature , which is what you need to do to understand the human condition , which we have seemingly forgotten how to teach people , but they also socialized our communities and our students into being good citizens .

So you would have to deal with questions of civility , questions of disagreement , questions of working with diversity . So we've failed on all those dimensions as well . So we get to college , they're stuck on these things . They haven't learned these critical lessons K 12 of how to really deal with diversity .

And it blows up when they suddenly have this freedom and instead of being taught history or classics , it's activist professors . And boom , you know , joel's daughter is being harassed on campus and sadly I understand that and I wish I didn't .

So thank you very much for for joining us here on the feudal future podcast .

You know , I mean it's going to be hard to change these institutions , but you know , when you see your , your children , whether it's in high school level or junior high level or at the college , not not getting the kind of education that I got , that I'm sure Marshall got , I'm sure both of you got , you know when you went to school to come out as a stronger

, more skeptical , more cultured human being . Somehow , if it seems to me , if the universities can't accomplish that , then what the hell do we need them for ?