[dlemire]

The original claim was "the overwhelming majority of pressure to cancel books and academics is directed at the left by the right, regardless of what gets column inches and think-pieces."

Many would say that the overwhelming majority of the academy is left of center. This makes it intuitive that if there is censorship of academics, then the recipients of the censorship would be people left of center. But I do not think it follows that the censors are on the right.

I argue that most of the censorship on campus, be it people being uninvited or forced to resigned, comes from the academy itself. It is true that, quite possibly, the vast majority of the people being censored are on the left, but I think it is also true that the vast majority of the people censoring are also on the left.

The right simply occupies very little room in the academy. It mostly exists outside of the academy.

This is not to say that people on the right (mostly from outside of the academy) do not come in with censorious intentions... but my impression is that most universities are very well protected against external interventions. It is simply not the case that a business leader or a radio show host can easily censor a professor on campus.

So if we are thinking about, say, college professors, I would say that we are mostly dealing with a left-left censorship.

That is, the left is not this uniform block.

Kathleen Stock is a leftist: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-sussex-59084446 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathleen_Stock

Bret Weinstein is a leftist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bret_Weinstein

Verushka Lieutenant-Duval is a leftist: https://arts.uottawa.ca/visualarts/people/lieutenant-duval-v...

The people doing the cancelling were on the left.

[dragontamer]

The majority of school boards and other local-government structures in the USA are conservative / on the right.

Which means that they'll levy the most censorship / control over the academics. Its the nature of the beast. If local school boards want to force the teachers to teach "intelligent design" and remove references to Thomas Jefferson, it will happen (and does happen regularly).

The whole "Critical Race Theory" stuff going on is just the newest push by the right to reshape education into their mold. Whether this works or fails, we can be certain that in a year or two, another educational issue will pop up and the right will use it as a rallying cry to change education again.

Thomas Jefferson, Intelligent Design / Creationism, Critical Race Theory. Just a few of the culture wars that the right has waged in the past decade and more will come.

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Welcome to educational politics. We didn't start the fire. It was always burning, since the world's been turning. This "censorship" stuff has been going on for decades.

[stevenicr]

"majority of school boards ... are conservative / on the right" - If you;d said police/sheriff I wouldn't even think about it, but as far as school boards (and teachers in general) - I've always felt that those folks were more high-brow / liberal / progressive / book types, or at least more moderate than say conservative... but I could see looking at the map of US and seeing that a lot of square miles are more likely conservative folks in general - so I asked startpage/goodle..

It would appear that the average school board in the US is only about 31% conservative ( https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2017/... ) at least as of 2017 - I expect this to shift a bit post 2022.

"The whole "Critical Race Theory" stuff going on is just the newest push by the right to reshape education into their mold" - not sure I disagree with this, but the way it comes off is like 'the left' and 'the moderates' have not been trying to reshape education in their mold.. and I would say I think since about 12 years ago there has been an aggressive pursual of more liberal pushing within the halls of various academia.

I am glad that more parents are taking a look at what our schools are teaching - I think it had been assumed the education we got it was today's kids are getting, and I think now more eyes are open that today's lessons may be very different - in some areas that is great and in some areas we may not want out schools teaching certain things in certain ways or at certain ages - we should all pay more attention and have more transparency across the board.

I see you mention the Thomas Jefferson thing again like it's an abomination that some conservative folks wanted it removed - this even after I showed you details of your own linking that says that headline was overblown and used in pop culture wars in a way to make conservatives look extreme / outrageous - when the actual doing was leaving all the history of Jefferson in the books, yet removing him from a list of very influential American originalists or whatever.

The funny thing is that the far left has been more active in removing historically famous old school folks from statues to murals, school names and more. There are those saying that washington and jefferson should be removed from public places the same as confederate generals. - So if cancelling Jefferson is an example of an extremist thing to be shocked by, there is, I believe, more demand from the far left to remove / cancel him than there is the far right.

RE your GP comment:

I don't know much about the Texas school board being conservative or liberal - I do recall some years ago that Texas' decisions about what goes into their school books had national repercussions, as the book inclusions they chose ended up making reprints the most affordable and so most or many of the school systems in the US ended up buying the same books -

The good thing is that brought national attention to subject matter included - and lots of discussions about supplemental material that should be xeroxed and added to the classes.

You mention the school board and censoring in Texas, but the article you cited is not talking about school board demands, it talks about a Texas lawmaker wanting to know about books in public schools..

I don't know enough about the list of books you cited or the others mentioned in the article.. although "V" is one of my two favorite movies, and I think everyone should see it more than once.. I can understand that different types of parents may have objections to certain types of books that may be available to all the kids.

I don't see transparency about books in high/middle/elementary schools as a bad thing - and I don't think if some books were blocked from access in those schools is really the kind of censorship we should worry about.

If lawmakers were demanding that Amazon, Barnes and noble, etc are to remove books - then it's stand to make noise.

"The Underground Guide to Teenage Sexuality: An Essential Handbook for Today's Teens" - mentioned in the article - I would advocate that all schools should have multiple copies of such a book - however I would not object to it being only available to students who's parents have opted in to allowing such material.. and the cover being on the shelf, but the book being being the library counter.

What is right for each kid is going to be different for each kid and each family and at different ages. Each local school needs to take those things into consideration.

"Censorship, especially censorship applied to schools and education, is simply a tool of those in power to remain in power. In my experience, the conservative states seem to do it the most." - I wonder what you really mean by 'those in power' - is this a racial thing? a church vs non-church thing?

I'm not sure I am buying into the conservative state vs liberal here - I think it depends on each district within and even teacher by teacher.

"conservative states also force upon the textbook writers things like "Intelligent Design" or whatnot." - I'll need to research this more.. I did see an article where Louisiana made a law saying it had to also be offered, and maybe other states have done similar -

However most of the country teaches evolution as settled science - (around 59% ) https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/evolution-educati... )) - the ban on teaching that in TN ended in 1970 - a lot has changed since then.

I've got to add that I'm more concerned about what colleges are banning, and what they are not teaching... It's one thing to ban / burn a book.. but it's not much different to have all your faculty pushing exclusively a certain set of books.

Parents should be more involved in providing additional / limiting certain things for kids / teens.. but that option is not really a thing after 18.

I think we all need to know more about what the various schools are offering children and young adults, and what they are not offering - our collective future is certainly being affected by it unfortunately.

[glangdale]

To be clear, I don't approve of these "cancellations".

Public universities are not well-protected in the United States from conservatives seeking to defund programs with which they disagree. One might be well-protected against being fired directly for saying something controversial, but if your whole department is closed, you can be gotten rid of, even with tenure.

https://www.boisestatepublicradio.org/education/2021-04-07/l...

There's an echo chamber out there that amplifies the notion that there is some sort of epidemic of "woke cancellations" and critical race theory etc. - this is heavily emphasized by conservative media. There's plenty of ridiculous behavior by students - e.g. at Reed College - which I am aware of a massive amount of left-on-left cancellation - someone I know had their career upended by the unlimited claims of the rather stereotypically woke students there. But stupidity at places like Evergreen and Reed will beget endless think pieces and have left cancellation magnified endlessly.

Meanwhile, conservatives' own role in cancellation is minimized to the point of ridiculousness: so Bari Weiss can straight-facedly claim to be a fan of academic freedom.

There's a quieter, but considerably more effective, campaign to defund entire departments among conservatives - the model is a narrow "university as career prep". This means getting rid of the humanities and social sciences in favour of business/law/engineering/CS (good for us, I guess?).

In Australia, the conservative governments have been fairly unabashed in raising the cost of a humanities degree (paid for via our "HECS" scheme) in a way that seems pretty much Amazingly, this gets considerably less press in the echo chamber than some jackass left students acting like jackasses. I wonder why...

I'll agree with you that most of the noisiest and embarrassing cancellations are left-on-right or left-on-left, but this a narrow slice of "actions taken against academics", and their noisiness is not indicative of their effectiveness. Some of these cancellations are simply part of right-wing grift: schedule a talk from someone with credentials designed to enraged the "woke left" somewhere on their home turf, then enjoy the newfound credibility when you get cancelled and get to be a Free Speech Martyr.