[3grdlurker]

I don’t think that there’s enough information in the article to take the side of Western academia or of the professor in question. The word used was “harassment”, so I’m not sure that that’s still the same as what people refer to as “cancel culture” which is really just disagreement, which people are free to do.

[chuckee]

Cancel culture usually refers to calls for someone to be fired or deplatformed, i.e. to harm their livelihood and prevent others from hearing what they have to say. Applying it to mere disagreement would be abusing the term, in my opinion.

[3grdlurker]

It’s still just an airing of disagreement by the end of the day. The people who lash out on Twitter don’t have the direct agency to fire or deplatform the object of disagreement. It’s still the platform or the university that decides that, and those entities are not necessarily doing so for the same reasons as the crowd that’s disagreeing.

It’s not even as if the people who “cancel” strangers for deliberately making bigoted and hateful remarks or committing workplace sexual harassment are the same people who “cancel” professors from speaking about a difficult topic in the academia. You can call it a culture, but it’s not the same people with the same ideals. Plenty of those who are vocal against bigotry would agree that professors who research on difficult topics must be allowed to talk in universities, as long as the content of their talks are actually academic/scientific, and not just outright bigoted.