“Cancel culture” is a good thing for societies — at least, that’s what a course being taught to academics is claiming.
More than 100 British scholars are taking an online ‘anti-racism’ course called “Union Black” that is being taught by The Open University, which instructs students that “In relation to racial/social justice, cancel culture has been shown to realize benefits.”
Among the benefits, according to class materials, are “holding people or entities accountable for immoral or unacceptable behavior” and “promoting collective action to achieve social justice and cultural change through social pressure.”
Benefits also include “motivating allies to reveal themselves” and “mobilizing public opinion and sharing collective expressions of moral outrage.”
As noted by The College Fix, cancel culture has also become a thing in the U.S. as well (along with “anti-racism” instruction) though many on the left deny that it exists. The outlet, “however, recently identified nearly 200 cases over the past academic year in which professors, students, mascots, paintings, honorary degrees and the like were either canceled or protested on campus. To date, The Fix’s Campus Cancel Culture Database has collected over 1,500 examples of cancelations or attempted cancelations.”
“For people who claim that cancel culture is a made up right-wing phenomenon, I invite them to scroll through page after page after page of our Campus Cancel Culture Database,” noted Jennifer Kabbany, editor in chief of The College Fix, following the release of the analysis.
“You can’t go a week without something on campus being memory-holed, erased, fired, renamed or what have you,” she said. “Thank God for the database, or America could easily lose track of how many things have been censored and purposely forgotten by this country’s colleges and universities.”
Union Black documents urge “due diligence before effectively ‘canceling’ someone,” but also consider calling out people for their transgressions as “a last-ditch appeal for justice.” The course goes on to advise that social media can be “a place to sow discord.”
The Open University started up the course last year and since then it has spread to 90 universities in the United Kingdom including institutions in Bristol, Leeds, Liverpool, and Imperial College London. The course was funded with a 500,000-pound investment from Santander.
“We are proud to have worked together with Santander on developing this course which is aimed at increasing awareness of racism and building allyship to support inclusion,” an Open University spokesperson told The Telegraph.
“Feedback from participants on the course has been extremely positive, and we are recommending it to staff and students across all UK universities,” the spokesperson said.
In its report on cancel culture incidents just last year, The College Fix noted:
Over the past 12 months, professors’ comments or their research were most likely to lead to some sort of cancelation, whether the scholar was fired, suspended, disinvited or shouted down. There were a total of 41 such incidents during the 2021-22 school year, with 20 professors outright canceled and another 21 who faced protests.
In May, for example, Princeton University fired longtime classics Professor Joshua Katz, who had criticized his black peers’ racial justice demands.
At Concordia College in March, administrators suspended a professor after he criticized “woke dysphoria.”
Amid pressure from students, a George Washington University professor in February stepped down from teaching a class after saying the “n-word” aloud when reading it off of a famous Norman Rockwell painting.
