Cancel Culture
Bruce Gilley vs Cancel Culture
Professor Bruce Gilley of Portland State University is a man not unfamiliar with controversy. In 2017, he wrote an article titled “The Case for Colonialism,” which argued that Western colonialism was “both objectively beneficial and subjectively legitimate in most of the places where it was found.” Soon after
The Denial of Cancel Culture
On August 3rd, Remi Adekoya, Tom Simpson and I released a 120-page Policy Exchange report on Academic Freedom in the UK. The report received bipartisan support. On the Left, Ruth Smeeth, an ex-Labour member of Parliament, wrote the foreword and Ruth Kelly, another former Labour MP, backed the report. Lord
The Floridian Inquisition
I’m an attorney representing a professor at the University of Central Florida who is being subjected by the university to what can only be called an inquisition after expressing opinions on Twitter that led to widespread calls for his firing. UCF is a public institution—an instrument of the
How to Fight the Enemies of Academic Freedom
According to a 2019 Cato Institute study, 75 percent of immigrants who are American citizens are very proud to be American compared to only 69 percent of native-born Americans. Based on my own experience, I expect the discrepancy to be much greater if you compare the sentiments of all immigrants
PODCAST 103: Evolutionary Biologist (and new Quillette Managing Editor) Colin Wright on the State of Academic Science, Gender, and His Latest Career M
Quillette Managing Editor Colin Wright explains why scientists no longer always feel free to speak up in the face of pseudoscience, and why he gave up his hunt for a job as a professor in the field of evolutionary biology for a career in journalism. Colin recently wrote about being
Cancel Culture and the Republican Concept of Liberty
In June, an opinion piece published in the New York Times by Senator Tom Cotton arguing for federal troops to rein in the protests in Minneapolis sparked a political firestorm. The piece led to the firing of the editor in charge and a rare corrective from the op-ed department. The
PODCAST 97: Professor Eric Kaufmann on America's Maoist Moment
Politics professor Eric Kaufmann talks to Toby Young about his Quillette essay The Great Awokening and the Second American Revolution. Professor Kaufmann believes America may be going through something akin to China’s Cultural Revolution in which many aspects of American society, from the constitution to the name of
PODCAST 73: George Orwell's biographer on the 70th anniversary of his death
Richard Bradford, author of Orwell: A Man of Our Time, talks to Toby Young about why Orwell still has a great deal to teach us 70 years after his death. You can read Richard’s recent piece about how Orwell anticipated both Brexit and Boris Johnson’s election
