I appreciate the stories of those who have survived cancellation and gone on to thrive, but these stories are sadly not the norm. All of the faculty discussed here were in pretty secure positions in their careers to start with all but one already having tenure. Cancellation is far different for those who are in contingent positions or at lower tier institutions, especially those where teaching is the dominant activity and research is at best luxury after putting in the first 60 hours of work in the week. These folks are not doing so well and are the true cost of cancel culture that the nation is paying. What do you think? Is there room for such a discussion?
Thanks for this! As someone going up for promotion next week, it's a particularly timely read.
One small point: The 2024 FIRE survey cited in para. 1 had a response rate of less than 6%, and I'm assuming selection bias (for many reasons) in favor of folks who experienced investigation, so I wouldn't extrapolate to estimate the # of total investigations. Maybe as an upper limit, but even then, I'd be pretty cautious.
As an alternative case study (I appreciate the success cases of course), I never found out what happened to Alice Goffman. She's an interesting case because she was a left-leaning scholar cancelled mostly from the left (although one case from the right). She ultimately left academia and I never heard what she did next. I taught about her cancellation for years in my qualitative methods class but I haven't taught it for a while and I never saw anything about her in the time since.
Hi Ashley! Nice to see you here. Just got off an HxSociology meeting organized by Jukka Savolainen -- you were mentioned as being there in spirit...
1. I *was* being conservative. Note that I wrote "tens of thousands" had been investigated. FIRE's results were 14% reported having been investigated. I did not do a deep dive, but asked ChatGPT how many profs are in the U.S. (includes nontenured, but, then, so did FIRE's survey). 1.5 million. 14% of 1.5m is not "tens of thousands" it is almost 200,000. So even if the survey overestimated investigations by 90%, which seems super implausible to me, it means there were something like 20,000. Which would still be evidence of academia gone mad.
2. Response rates are less important than they seem. Good survey methods stuff on this. The more important things are: 1. true random sample; 2. evidence of correspondence to demographics of the underlying population. Here is one excellent source:
Hi Lee! Thanks for the post and response! Oh no, I'm so jealous and sorry to miss the meeting (somehow I didn't know about it). Yikes! That's pretty horrifying. Honestly, I could fathom a 90% overestimate just because I think folks are more likely to respond to surveys on topics they feel riled up about and, importantly, for a long time, FIRE was (is still?) right-coded among faculty, so I imagine a lot of folks who haven't been investigated would simply shun the survey bc they think it's part of a conservative plot to smear academia. (The number of people who think leftist authoritarianism isn't real and that those of us who are worried about it are "brainwashed" is horrifyingly high.) I didn't look into whether they were randomly sampling and what sort of weighting they used, so that could fix the issue (if I'm right about the selection bias in who responds). So good call.
Separately, there's an even more mundane version than investigations and cancellations, which is just getting a "talking to." A friend assigned an excerpt from DuBois's famous book with one of the two N-words in the title and throughout the book and students complained (the irony of complaining about being assigned text by a Black writer because they don't like the words he uses apparently was lost on the students). The friend got a talking to, but ultimately refused to stop assigning the text and actually got away with it. But just thinking about the manpower hours lost having to have these unnecessary backroom conversations (cf a public discussion that would have some utility at least) and the stress of being called in to talk to a higher up.... And the chilling effect. Anyway, lots of food for thought in your piece so thanks so much! (And I really liked your answer to the other question pulling back the curtain on your productivity!)
Thank you, Lee, you were the first one to support me after the backlash I received when I wrote that gender ideology article (https://hxstem.substack.com/p/the-new-gender-ideology-is-being) that increased my troubles. I am so grateful for your help and for the help of all the individuals and organizations that helped me. I am also thankful to God and my family. It has been a crazy five years; it is like the world went mad.
Regarding your output, how is it physically possible to publish 13 papers so far this year, on top of frequently writing long essays here, on top of all your other roles and teaching? I don’t ask this in an accusatory or negative way, but do you have a team of paid staff who help but just don’t necessarily end up as authors? I just don’t see how it’s possible! Or maybe I am just super unproductive?? It’s impressive but also a little disconcerting! I don’t think I have anywhere near that ability/capacity
2. I have long been skeptical of people who pub double digit papers every year. Consider: a 20 paper year means pubbing a paper ~2.5 weeks. WTLF? I can't write one paper that fast, let alone 20.
3. To your q:
a. There is a random component to date of pubs. Some can take years, some a year or less. Submit something, rejected, revise it, submit again, rejected, put it aside, then some opportunity comes and boom! Others (like our short DEI review) was done in less than a year, which gets me to:
b. I am 1st author on only 4 of the 13. I have excellent and highly productive collaborators and grad students. Not just saying that -- its how I got 9 non-first authored papers this year!
c. Remember, this is a high water mark for me. Never did it before, and not likely to do it again anytime soon. Because of the random component to when things come out, I actually have a kinda light queue of things in the works right now.
d. I have not taught a course since 2020. Now, 2018-22 I was Psych Dept Chair, and 2023-2024 chair of anthro. Let's just say there were problems in the dept. and they failed to produce a chair. Did some writing then, but the chair thing is a big timesuck. Chairing anthro was the "difficult situation" the deans asked me to walk into -- depts (for good reasons) HATE having an outside chair imposed by the deans. And that is what I parlayed into that big raise (short version: "If you are going to ask me to do something this difficult, you need to pay me for it." And they did). And they did hate me -- for me about 6 weeks. I was denounced by one of the faculty for arguing that race is indeed a scientific concept (which I stand by; that statement is not the same as saying there are human races, and race has a big role in evolutionary approaches to speciation and a quick Google Scholar search yields tons of stuff using the race concept, though usually for things like aphids). There was also a letter from the grad students to the deans not exactly denouncing me, but calling on them to remove me. ("thick skin" anyone?). Nonetheless, despite my sometimes aggressive style on X and even at Unsafe Science, I can be strikingly diplomatic when it is called for. The deans knew this, it was true, and after those first few weeks I won them over. It was smooth sailing after that.
e. One perk of the chairing was all this teaching release. RU's policy is to give chairs teaching release after their term is over, to just recover and to get their scholarship back on track. So, for over a year now, I've been able to write write write. And yea, most of the Unsafe Sci posts that are by me take me a long time; this one was most of 3 days to track down all the background, links, and updates for the other six people here. But with the teaching release? I have enough time to play tons of tennis, hang out with my grandkids, do podcasts, travel widely (often exploiting conferences as a jumping off point for pure fun type travel) and still write write write.
f. Been doing this for 40 years. When I am writing about stuff I know & have written about before, its easy and just flows. But I consider myself a slow writer, because when I write something new, it is much harder and much slower (like our TikTok paper, but I was not lead on that, so it was not so bad).
g. 8 of the 13 were chapters. These are much easier/faster than journal articles.
And there you have The Story of How I Came to Pub 13 Papers This Year (possibly more, if some of the in press stuff comes out in 2025).
Thanks for the info! You made it sound marginally more humanly possible, but still crazy impossible to me. But hey, that's why you're the man!
Given what you know of my interests and perspectives, if you ever need or want to add a low-level author to a project and want to throw a bone, feel free to contact me! I am trying so hard to network and join projects, but no luck!
(also, just secretly, I may have an opportunity in the US soon. I hope to run into you if I make it there!).
Wow - I'm glad to see you read the comments thoroughly. And your response was not a surprise in tone, but included a lot more 'fuck(s)' than expected. Suffice it for me to say that I come from a very different academic environment (and a different culture with different communication styles) than you and those who share your rhetorical style. Nevertheless, I admire much of your postings here (and I have shared this admiration in prior comments) if not your choice of words, so I expect to continue reading this Substack for now.
Thanks again for honoring my comments whether you like them or not...
I genuinely appreciate your graciousness here. Rare. Very rare. And you are not completely wrong, either. Nick's story includes his getting into unnecessary trouble for gratuitous profanity...
Thank you for highlighting these cancellation cases. Last week, I published a detailed account of my own academic cancellation. It is available at my Substack, which is called The Nuzzo Letter. Please feel free to share the story with others. One of the unique aspects of the story is that I used a Freedom of Information request to obtain internal university emails that show the cancellation process in action.
My Academic Cancellation Story
A Freedom of Information Request Reveals Feminist and DEI Staffers Schemed to End My Affiliation at Edith Cowan University
Not actual anymore but very actual back then. Here's how current very actual 'serious' journals work:
A few weeks ago, Nature Reviews Psychology published an editorial urging authors to “diversify” their scholarly citations by exploring “relevant studies from a diverse group of researchers” and by including “a citation diversity statement”.
For confirmation, consider this sentence from the journal’s model citation diversity statement:
Every attempt has been made to reference relevant research in a manner that is equitable in terms of racial, ethnic, gender and geographical representation.'
This one made my day. Thank you for these stories of survival; I know, it seems profanatory to use the word in a no life/death situation, but surviving a cancelling mob is survival nonetheless.
Really, Hellish2050 made the list? That is scraping the bottom of the barrel for sure. And isn't this mostly old news? How many faculty and researches have been fired at the behest of the current regime in the US? How about Nikole Hannah-Jones, denied tenure by the political appointees at UNC? And how about faculty and students who have been targeted for opposing genocide, fired, jailed and in some cases deported. There are two sides of many issues that academics are well positioned to examine.
NHJ had absolutely 0 academic credentials (her doctorates are honorary, placeholders promoted by virtue signalers). She should not have been hired in the first place; her hiring is a DEI feast that can/should be studied and used as an example of nonsense promoted by indoctrinated academics.
So what, she was recommended for tenure by the faculty and the politically appointed board of governors cancelled it, an unprecedented move at UNC. If you look at her work you will find she had exceptional credentials for journalism faculty, editing a very well received book is quite notable. She is half Czech, was she fulfilling the diversity requirement for Czechs on the faculty?
You are unlikely to see me discussing Jimmy Kimmel or JKRowling here, either.
If one cares about politicization leading to denial of positions (also not the topic of this post), a better example would be Yoel Inbar, whose consideration was effectively terminated after a grad student outrage mob protested his opposition to DEI statements and support for institutional neutrality -- a clear case of viewpoint discrimination given his stellar teaching and research records.
I had written a book, criticising Islam. Nothing to do with my work at the university.
It felt quite surreal to be questioned about my views on Islam, by the head of the Physics department!
Surreal, because it is 4 centuries since Galileo had to defend his ideas in Physics, against the theologians. I wonder what Galileo would think of my circumstances?
I have subsequently written 20+ more books on Islam. If they had not deprived me of my job, I might not have written any more!
I appreciate the stories of those who have survived cancellation and gone on to thrive, but these stories are sadly not the norm. All of the faculty discussed here were in pretty secure positions in their careers to start with all but one already having tenure. Cancellation is far different for those who are in contingent positions or at lower tier institutions, especially those where teaching is the dominant activity and research is at best luxury after putting in the first 60 hours of work in the week. These folks are not doing so well and are the true cost of cancel culture that the nation is paying. What do you think? Is there room for such a discussion?
Thanks for this! As someone going up for promotion next week, it's a particularly timely read.
One small point: The 2024 FIRE survey cited in para. 1 had a response rate of less than 6%, and I'm assuming selection bias (for many reasons) in favor of folks who experienced investigation, so I wouldn't extrapolate to estimate the # of total investigations. Maybe as an upper limit, but even then, I'd be pretty cautious.
As an alternative case study (I appreciate the success cases of course), I never found out what happened to Alice Goffman. She's an interesting case because she was a left-leaning scholar cancelled mostly from the left (although one case from the right). She ultimately left academia and I never heard what she did next. I taught about her cancellation for years in my qualitative methods class but I haven't taught it for a while and I never saw anything about her in the time since.
Hi Ashley! Nice to see you here. Just got off an HxSociology meeting organized by Jukka Savolainen -- you were mentioned as being there in spirit...
1. I *was* being conservative. Note that I wrote "tens of thousands" had been investigated. FIRE's results were 14% reported having been investigated. I did not do a deep dive, but asked ChatGPT how many profs are in the U.S. (includes nontenured, but, then, so did FIRE's survey). 1.5 million. 14% of 1.5m is not "tens of thousands" it is almost 200,000. So even if the survey overestimated investigations by 90%, which seems super implausible to me, it means there were something like 20,000. Which would still be evidence of academia gone mad.
2. Response rates are less important than they seem. Good survey methods stuff on this. The more important things are: 1. true random sample; 2. evidence of correspondence to demographics of the underlying population. Here is one excellent source:
https://www.academia.edu/106214726/The_Accuracy_of_Measurements_with_Probability_and_Nonprobability_Survey_Samples_Replication_and_Extension
A quote from their findings:
"The same consistency in accuracy between 2004 and 2012 was apparent for
the probability sample internet survey data, despite a 10-percentage-point
drop in response rates (AAPOR CRR1: 15.3 percent in 2004, 4.6 percent in
2012)."
Hi Lee! Thanks for the post and response! Oh no, I'm so jealous and sorry to miss the meeting (somehow I didn't know about it). Yikes! That's pretty horrifying. Honestly, I could fathom a 90% overestimate just because I think folks are more likely to respond to surveys on topics they feel riled up about and, importantly, for a long time, FIRE was (is still?) right-coded among faculty, so I imagine a lot of folks who haven't been investigated would simply shun the survey bc they think it's part of a conservative plot to smear academia. (The number of people who think leftist authoritarianism isn't real and that those of us who are worried about it are "brainwashed" is horrifyingly high.) I didn't look into whether they were randomly sampling and what sort of weighting they used, so that could fix the issue (if I'm right about the selection bias in who responds). So good call.
Separately, there's an even more mundane version than investigations and cancellations, which is just getting a "talking to." A friend assigned an excerpt from DuBois's famous book with one of the two N-words in the title and throughout the book and students complained (the irony of complaining about being assigned text by a Black writer because they don't like the words he uses apparently was lost on the students). The friend got a talking to, but ultimately refused to stop assigning the text and actually got away with it. But just thinking about the manpower hours lost having to have these unnecessary backroom conversations (cf a public discussion that would have some utility at least) and the stress of being called in to talk to a higher up.... And the chilling effect. Anyway, lots of food for thought in your piece so thanks so much! (And I really liked your answer to the other question pulling back the curtain on your productivity!)
Thank you, Lee, you were the first one to support me after the backlash I received when I wrote that gender ideology article (https://hxstem.substack.com/p/the-new-gender-ideology-is-being) that increased my troubles. I am so grateful for your help and for the help of all the individuals and organizations that helped me. I am also thankful to God and my family. It has been a crazy five years; it is like the world went mad.
You are an inspiration, Marisol. Thank goodness your admins had spines and good judgment.
Thank you Lee!
Regarding your output, how is it physically possible to publish 13 papers so far this year, on top of frequently writing long essays here, on top of all your other roles and teaching? I don’t ask this in an accusatory or negative way, but do you have a team of paid staff who help but just don’t necessarily end up as authors? I just don’t see how it’s possible! Or maybe I am just super unproductive?? It’s impressive but also a little disconcerting! I don’t think I have anywhere near that ability/capacity
1. Totally reasonable q.
2. I have long been skeptical of people who pub double digit papers every year. Consider: a 20 paper year means pubbing a paper ~2.5 weeks. WTLF? I can't write one paper that fast, let alone 20.
3. To your q:
a. There is a random component to date of pubs. Some can take years, some a year or less. Submit something, rejected, revise it, submit again, rejected, put it aside, then some opportunity comes and boom! Others (like our short DEI review) was done in less than a year, which gets me to:
b. I am 1st author on only 4 of the 13. I have excellent and highly productive collaborators and grad students. Not just saying that -- its how I got 9 non-first authored papers this year!
c. Remember, this is a high water mark for me. Never did it before, and not likely to do it again anytime soon. Because of the random component to when things come out, I actually have a kinda light queue of things in the works right now.
d. I have not taught a course since 2020. Now, 2018-22 I was Psych Dept Chair, and 2023-2024 chair of anthro. Let's just say there were problems in the dept. and they failed to produce a chair. Did some writing then, but the chair thing is a big timesuck. Chairing anthro was the "difficult situation" the deans asked me to walk into -- depts (for good reasons) HATE having an outside chair imposed by the deans. And that is what I parlayed into that big raise (short version: "If you are going to ask me to do something this difficult, you need to pay me for it." And they did). And they did hate me -- for me about 6 weeks. I was denounced by one of the faculty for arguing that race is indeed a scientific concept (which I stand by; that statement is not the same as saying there are human races, and race has a big role in evolutionary approaches to speciation and a quick Google Scholar search yields tons of stuff using the race concept, though usually for things like aphids). There was also a letter from the grad students to the deans not exactly denouncing me, but calling on them to remove me. ("thick skin" anyone?). Nonetheless, despite my sometimes aggressive style on X and even at Unsafe Science, I can be strikingly diplomatic when it is called for. The deans knew this, it was true, and after those first few weeks I won them over. It was smooth sailing after that.
e. One perk of the chairing was all this teaching release. RU's policy is to give chairs teaching release after their term is over, to just recover and to get their scholarship back on track. So, for over a year now, I've been able to write write write. And yea, most of the Unsafe Sci posts that are by me take me a long time; this one was most of 3 days to track down all the background, links, and updates for the other six people here. But with the teaching release? I have enough time to play tons of tennis, hang out with my grandkids, do podcasts, travel widely (often exploiting conferences as a jumping off point for pure fun type travel) and still write write write.
f. Been doing this for 40 years. When I am writing about stuff I know & have written about before, its easy and just flows. But I consider myself a slow writer, because when I write something new, it is much harder and much slower (like our TikTok paper, but I was not lead on that, so it was not so bad).
g. 8 of the 13 were chapters. These are much easier/faster than journal articles.
And there you have The Story of How I Came to Pub 13 Papers This Year (possibly more, if some of the in press stuff comes out in 2025).
Thanks for the info! You made it sound marginally more humanly possible, but still crazy impossible to me. But hey, that's why you're the man!
Given what you know of my interests and perspectives, if you ever need or want to add a low-level author to a project and want to throw a bone, feel free to contact me! I am trying so hard to network and join projects, but no luck!
(also, just secretly, I may have an opportunity in the US soon. I hope to run into you if I make it there!).
"...a commenter upbraided me..."
Wow - I'm glad to see you read the comments thoroughly. And your response was not a surprise in tone, but included a lot more 'fuck(s)' than expected. Suffice it for me to say that I come from a very different academic environment (and a different culture with different communication styles) than you and those who share your rhetorical style. Nevertheless, I admire much of your postings here (and I have shared this admiration in prior comments) if not your choice of words, so I expect to continue reading this Substack for now.
Thanks again for honoring my comments whether you like them or not...
I genuinely appreciate your graciousness here. Rare. Very rare. And you are not completely wrong, either. Nick's story includes his getting into unnecessary trouble for gratuitous profanity...
Thank you for highlighting these cancellation cases. Last week, I published a detailed account of my own academic cancellation. It is available at my Substack, which is called The Nuzzo Letter. Please feel free to share the story with others. One of the unique aspects of the story is that I used a Freedom of Information request to obtain internal university emails that show the cancellation process in action.
My Academic Cancellation Story
A Freedom of Information Request Reveals Feminist and DEI Staffers Schemed to End My Affiliation at Edith Cowan University
https://jameslnuzzo.substack.com/p/my-academic-cancellation-story
Time to get militant:
“Get Me Off Your Fucking Mailing List” is an actual science paper accepted by a journal
https://www.vox.com/2014/11/21/7259207/scientific-paper-scam
... but not by an actual journal.
Not actual anymore but very actual back then. Here's how current very actual 'serious' journals work:
A few weeks ago, Nature Reviews Psychology published an editorial urging authors to “diversify” their scholarly citations by exploring “relevant studies from a diverse group of researchers” and by including “a citation diversity statement”.
For confirmation, consider this sentence from the journal’s model citation diversity statement:
Every attempt has been made to reference relevant research in a manner that is equitable in terms of racial, ethnic, gender and geographical representation.'
https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/progressives-have-destroyed-the-human?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=828904&post_id=177719177&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=6mos7&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
This one made my day. Thank you for these stories of survival; I know, it seems profanatory to use the word in a no life/death situation, but surviving a cancelling mob is survival nonetheless.
Really, Hellish2050 made the list? That is scraping the bottom of the barrel for sure. And isn't this mostly old news? How many faculty and researches have been fired at the behest of the current regime in the US? How about Nikole Hannah-Jones, denied tenure by the political appointees at UNC? And how about faculty and students who have been targeted for opposing genocide, fired, jailed and in some cases deported. There are two sides of many issues that academics are well positioned to examine.
NHJ had absolutely 0 academic credentials (her doctorates are honorary, placeholders promoted by virtue signalers). She should not have been hired in the first place; her hiring is a DEI feast that can/should be studied and used as an example of nonsense promoted by indoctrinated academics.
So what, she was recommended for tenure by the faculty and the politically appointed board of governors cancelled it, an unprecedented move at UNC. If you look at her work you will find she had exceptional credentials for journalism faculty, editing a very well received book is quite notable. She is half Czech, was she fulfilling the diversity requirement for Czechs on the faculty?
Hilarious!
Actually, despite some controversy, NHJ was *awarded* tenure at UNC.
https://www.unc.edu/discover/trustees-approve-tenure-for-nikole-hannah-jones/
She declined the position.
You are unlikely to see me discussing Jimmy Kimmel or JKRowling here, either.
If one cares about politicization leading to denial of positions (also not the topic of this post), a better example would be Yoel Inbar, whose consideration was effectively terminated after a grad student outrage mob protested his opposition to DEI statements and support for institutional neutrality -- a clear case of viewpoint discrimination given his stellar teaching and research records.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/08/us/ucla-dei-statement.html
Amusingly:
1. That decision violated the UC system policies governing use of DEI in hiring at the time. From that policy:
“…it is not about penalizing faculty who do not promote EDI but rather providing a mechanism by which those who do such work can be credited”
2. Shortly thereafter the UC Regents banned the use of DEI statements in hiring.
One more for your files:
https://reason.com/2025/03/02/how-to-get-rid-of-a-tenured-professor/
I have myself been cancelled from a university.
I had written a book, criticising Islam. Nothing to do with my work at the university.
It felt quite surreal to be questioned about my views on Islam, by the head of the Physics department!
Surreal, because it is 4 centuries since Galileo had to defend his ideas in Physics, against the theologians. I wonder what Galileo would think of my circumstances?
I have subsequently written 20+ more books on Islam. If they had not deprived me of my job, I might not have written any more!
https://hellish2050.substack.com/