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Earlier this week, Nikole Hannah-Jones, the New York Times writer in charge of Project 1619, was denied a full professor position at the University of North Carolina School of Journalism. The faculty recommended her for employment, and a committee headed by a UNC administrator expressed doubts about her suitability. Other directors have reportedly said they would not approve him for his tenure. The faculty responded by suggesting that she be hired for a fixed five-year term, and the committee and Hannah-Jones agreed.
Should we say that Hannah-Jones has been quashed, or simply held accountable by a university whose rules give its administration the ability to veto permanent appointments? Many who hate the term cancel culture suddenly found it appropriate for her, and a few who usually use it have found reasons not to use it here. The best argument for the board, an inherently political body in a state with a Republican legislature, is that its decision is no more political than the initial appointment. Hannah-Jones is a political journalist. By hiring him, the faculty surely intended to side with its side against the criticisms from left and right that have invaded his work over the past two years. How could hiring her not be political?
One of the roles of the board is to balance the political decisions of the faculty with its own. Its credibility depends, of course, on hardly ever doing so. The most reputable universities are run, in principle, by administrators who approve the professorial appointments of the university. The model for their intercession is Queen Elizabeth’s reign over the British Commonwealth. She is the queen of Canada and Australia, for example, and rules them haughtily. If she intervened in their governments by putting Justin Trudeau in the stocks, or by dissolving the Australian Parliament with a wave of her scepter, the outrage would be cataclysmic. This is why it seldom does, and why the selection of UNC boards was reckless at best and likely to inspire regicidal feelings among the UNC faculty.
But back to the idea of cancellation, a term whose abuse and abuse over the past week has finally made even its most zealous supporters question its usefulness. Prior to the Hannah-Jones incident, Democratic Reps Jamie Raskin and Jim Clyburn both described their GOP colleague Liz Cheney as an annulment victim after House Republicans impeached her as their leader. The term has also crossed the species barrier, as a kind of zoonotic disease. Horse trainer Bob Baffert has described his colt Medina Spirit as a victim of cancellation culture after testing positive for drugs and his Kentucky Derby victory has been in doubt.
The most common complaint about the phrase is that it is a high class whine by people who can’t stand criticism. You say something. Someone else is saying something back, and somehow that reaction is censored and your own statement, which may or may not have been even more obtuse than the response, was a matter of conscience. whose very statement made Amnesty International ring the red phone. Canceling culture is the proposition that some speech is free speech and some censorship, lawyer Ken White wrote on Twitter.
Here is the distinction that saves the term annulment from uselessness and hypocrisy: Cancellation is not critical; cancellation is the absence of criticism. It is the replacement of criticism by summary punishment. The punishment varies in severity and can include withdrawal from a job or just an invitation, but the salient point is that it is inflicted instantly and without deliberation, often as a result of mob action. When this switcheroo becomes a habit, the normal way of doing things, you can call it canceling culture, and that’s a sign of intellectual and institutional decay. The inability to distinguish cancellation from criticism is the source of the humor in VS Naipauls’ joke after Ayatollah Khomeini sent assassins to kill Salman Rushdie for writing The Satanic Verses. Naipaul called Khomeinis’ fatwa the most extreme form of literary criticism.
This annulment / criticism dichotomy is elusive in part because it does not parallel any legal or moral distinction: whether I choose not to associate with others, or to give them the courtesy of a retort carefully composed, I am simply exercising my legal rights of speech and association. Fuck yourself is, legally, a form of criticism. And sometimes something less rude would be outrageous. Political scientist Charles Murray was canceled when a mob physically assaulted him and did not criticize him rather than let him speak at Middlebury College. Did he also perpetrate a cancellation when he withdrew from an event upon finding out that right-wing troll Milo Yiannopoulos was a speaker? In explaining his reasoning to The Chronicle of Higher Education, Murray did not list Yiannopouloss’ flaws. He said, he’s a dastardly asshole.
Sounds like the right word to say yes, withdrawing from the event was a form of cancellation. The work of Yiannopoulos, the self-proclaimed dangerous queer, did not call for intellectual refutation, and for him one can favor cancellation and still prefer that it be used sparingly. Canceling culture is nothing more than the belief that his enemies are mostly Milo-type assholes, and that most of them should be treated that way, rather than debated. Plus, this belief encourages lazy intellectual habits, because calling someone an asshole or hitting them on the head is easier than, say, reading The Bell Curve and figuring out where it’s wrong.
Decisions made after careful scientific analysis of horse pissing do not constitute, by this standard, an annulment. Nor was the Republican Party’s decision to oust Cheney, which took place in broad daylight and based on reasoned discussions about whether she was bold enough to lead the Republican House conference. The politician who most vociferously makes the case for culture cancellation is Senator Josh Hawley, who is constantly criticized, and who continues to sit in Congress and take advantage of large platforms where he can respond as he pleases.
But a myriad of other cases of suspected cancellation culture matter, and Hannah-Joness is one of them. This is true even though Hannah-Jones has systematically declined complaints about the cancellation culture and at times engaged with her critics without grace and dishonesty. The Trump administration and various prominent historians have made their criticisms of Hannah-Joness’ work clear. The UNC board of directors simply said no, without an explanation that would explain the extraordinary circumstances that led them to thwart the incumbency process and cry stop. The hallmark of the annulment is the cowardly reluctance to argue with opponents and show decent respect for the opinions of others by explaining why they are wrong.
The jury may have communicated its reasons to the faculty in private. (I received no response to a request for comment.) But these reasons should not be kept secret. The opinions of others include not only Hannah-Joness, but also those of the faculty that hired her. The rejection of a candidate for a permanent position indicates a lack of confidence in the faculty. The council’s job is to oversee this faculty, and if it truly finds its collective judgment so horrific, the people of North Carolina deserve to know the extent of the rot. Otherwise, they should assume the rot is in the board itself.
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