According to political folk wisdom, “a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged” and, contrariwise, “a liberal is a conservative who has been arrested by the police”. Carol Tavris recalls American faculty members being “mugged” by Cold War university bureaucrats and, more recently, by student radicals. She is sticking by her liberal academic principles. Her family were the victims of the McCarthyite Red Scare in 1950s America – her half-brother was kicked out of the US Army in the 1950s because of his “known association” with their father, briefly a member of the Communist Party in the 1930s. “I was optimistically, if delusionally, certain that the liberal commitment to free speech, open debate and scientific evidence would prevail if the tables were ever turned”, she writes. However, she now despairs of the cancel culture that she believes is prevalent in American universities.
In her TLS lead review Tavris endorses Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott’s thesis, in The Canceling of the American Mind, that the left too often equates “freedom of speech” with “hate speech”. Ironically, market power favours the censors: “Once students became high-paying consumers rather than, well, students, administrators had to retain them no matter how badly they behaved”. Along with Jonathan Haidt, Lukianoff has previously argued that the coddling of American youth by overprotective parents has led to a generation of students fearful of views that hurt their feelings. John Sutherland’s Triggered Literature shows more sympathy for “woke” students and the trigger warnings that alert them to contentious materia
