Keller @ Large: Is a backlash to "cancel culture" brewing?
BOSTON - It made international headlines on May 21 when some students attending the Boston University commencement heckled and turned their backs on Warner Brothers CEO David Zaslav during his commencement address.
The grads say they were just showing support for striking writers.
But the school's outgoing president, Robert Brown, says the demonstration went against the school's fundamental values. In a statement today on the BU website, he writes: "Our students were not picking a fight. They were attempting to implement the cancel culture that has become all too prevalent on university campuses."
Zaslav forged through his speech with no direct reference to the protesters or the strike, although he did say at one point to a chorus of boos: "You're gonna have to figure out how to get along with everyone, and that includes difficult people."
But the whole episode and Brown's public scolding signal to civil rights lawyer Harvey Silverglate of Cambridge, a co-founder of the campus watchdog group Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, that "a counter-revolution is brewing."
He says ugly scenes of "cancel culture" in recent years are prompting a backlash.
"If you claim to be a liberal arts college, you have to tolerate speech and ideas that you don't like," Silverglate said. "Counter-revolutions begin with a drop in the bucket. Somebody drops something in the bucket and it makes others think. Every drop in the bucket really helps."
Judging from the dozens of supportive comments from parents and alumni on the BU website angry that a milestone moment was marred by all the noise, that bucket is starting to fill up.
"The politically correct agenda in this country has lost its power to terrorize people into thinking they're saying something wrong or immoral," claims Silverglate.
So where is all this headed? Silverglate points to a string of faculty firings over speech issues as a force behind organized faculty pushback at Harvard and MIT.
And perhaps most telling - a rise in big-money alumni donors withholding contributions from institutions where free speech is going unprotected.
You know the old saying - money talks, and everything else walks, even in academia.