Why They Cancel

What–and who–motivates the targeting of scholars on college campuses?

At Heterodox Academy, we strive to advocate for open inquiry in higher education. To do that effectively, we need to understand the etiology of constraints on scholars’ academic freedom–where constraints come from, who is responsible for them, and the forms they take.

In the interest of that, as a senior researcher for HxA, I have been mining the Scholars Under Fire database from FIRE. This database contains information about the targeting of scholars on campuses and includes information about the ideological direction from which the targeting took place, who initiated the targeting, and descriptions of the targeting incident. 

In my last post for Free the Inquiry, I showed that there are patterns in who initiates the targeting based on whether that targeting comes from the right or left of the political spectrum. In today’s post, I dig deeper, looking at common themes and patterns in ideological (left and right) targeting.

As I detail below, analysis of the FIRE data makes clear that–as I reported in my previous post–students are central actors in the targeting incidents originating from the left. 

While students are also involved in many targeting incidents originating from the right, it appears that Turning Point USA is heavily involved in those incidents. In fact, when exploring the data, I find a considerable number of incidents in which Turning Point USA (TPUSA)–a nonprofit organization advocating for conservative causes on campus–seems to be involved in advocating that students and parents contact the university with a complaint about a scholar. 

TPUSA’s involvement in issues of higher education are not new; back in 2016, HxA condemned TPUSA’s “professor watchlist.” But the FIRE data shows how prominent the group is in cancellation attempts: Incidents in which TPUSA were involved came to 16.5% (N = 95) of the entire Scholars Under Fire database. 

As shown below, in the targeting incidents from the right, we also see the word ‘termination’ appearing more so than we do on the left. This suggests that central to targetings originating from the right are efforts to get targeted scholars fired. 

To be clear, this does not mean that targeting events from the right are more likely to involve calling for the firing of scholars, but rather that the word “termination” groups more closely in two of the themes identified. Finally, we see greater emphasis on race (as indicated by frequency of the term ‘black’) and harassment in targeting coming from the left.

Themes in targeting from the left and the right:

To analyze the possibility that leftwing and rightwing attacks on scholars follow certain themes, I ran a method known as a Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). Put simply, this is an approach to identify clusters of words that appear together frequently. Once those words are identified, it is up to the researcher to make sense of the clustering. 

I ran an LDA for incidents from the left and from the right in the FIRE database, and then pulled the top three clusterings (based on coherence scores) for each. I subsequently fed the output to GPT4o to help solidify the themes. 

For targeting incidents from the left, the top three topics identified in the targeting descriptions were:

1. Students demanding actions be taken or rights for students.

Keywords: student, law, demanded, university, issued, complaint, black

Examples:

“Students protested and demanded Borna's termination for calling the campus police on a black male student who refused to change seats.” (Ball State University in 2020)

“The Black Law Student Association filed a complaint over Curtis' participation in a campus law symposium two years after he quoted the ’n-word’ when discussing the Brandenburg v. Ohio decision in his Constitutional Law course.” (Wake Forest University in 2022)

2. Issues of harassment or allegations.

Keywords: student, comment, sexual, allegedly, black, harassment

Examples:

“Thibeault was fired for sexual harassment without notice shortly after he made comments regarding the school's sexual harassment policy.” (East Georgia College in 2009)

“Hart asserts that he was the victim of targeted harassment by campus security officers after the school intensified safety protocols in response to the ongoing pro-Palestinian encampment.” (Columbia University in 2024)

3. Investigations or complaints involving university courses or faculty.

Keywords: university, student, faculty, course, filed, investigation

Examples:

“A student complained via TikTok about Turner's course assignment involving a rape scenario.” (University of Pittsburgh in 2023)

“Rose resigned after the dean asked him to implement within his department new courses and to add diversity material to the curriculum.” (Sacred Heart University in 2023)

Above is a word cloud of the relative frequencies for words found in the targeting incidents which originated from the left. 

For targeting incidents from the right, the top three topics identified were:

1. Parental concerns and Turning Point USA activism. 

Keywords: student, called, university, parent, contact, regarding, turning, USA

Examples:

“Turning Point USA called on parents and students to contact the university regarding Yankah's article, ‘Can My Children Be Friends With White People?’” (Yeshiva University in 2022)

“​​Parents complained that Schwartz and his co-instructor, Michell Sellers, invited Hunter Biden to speak in their course, ‘Media Polarization and Public Policy Impacts.’” (Tulane University in 2021)

2. University actions against individuals.

Keywords: university, terminated, suspended, state, backlash

Examples:

“The administration considered it a policy violation that several faculty leaders wrote a letter opposing proposed state abortion legislation and defending a colleague.” (Indiana University – Bloomington in 2022)

“Egan was terminated after overseeing the campus newspaper when it reported that the school's president planned to increase the school's retention rate by dismissing students for poor academic performance.” (Mount Saint Mary’s in 2016)

3. Disciplinary actions or controversy that prompted demands for university responses.

Keywords: university, termination, faced, comment, demand, action

Examples:

“Students demanded Walker's termination for using the term ’minor-attracted people’ to describe pedophiles.” (Old Dominion University in 2021)

“Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) called for Daugherty's termination for threatening to fail a student if he wrote only about Trump’s political view regarding abortion without also including the president’s personal history relative to that topic.” (Illinois Central College in 2020)

Below is a word cloud of the relative frequencies for words found in the targeting incidents which originated from the right. 

The order of the keywords within each theme above represents their centrality to the theme. Below you can see a representation of the top 100 words found in the targeting descriptions, their overall frequency (y-axis) in the data, and the relative frequency of their appearance in targeting incidents from the left versus right. Words that appear more frequently overall show up higher on the graph, whereas those that appear more often in descriptions of targeting from the left appear further to the left (and vice versa for targeting incidents from the right). 

It is important to note that there are limitations with this type of analysis. Given that I was analyzing FIRE’s summary of what transpired, it is possible that there are inadvertent biases in how the events are represented in the summaries. This is not to say there are any inaccuracies, but rather that certain words may simply co-appear more regularly for targeting events led by students rather than activists, for example. Further analysis could be done evaluating news articles surrounding these targeting events to add context. But while this analysis is rudimentary and preliminary, it does suggest that there are innate differences in the centrality of themes or actors between targeting incidents which originate from the left and right.

The bottom line? 

Both the left and right seem to assume a position of mutually assured destruction. Unlike nuclear deterrence, mutual assured destruction means that everyone loses.

And we see good reason to believe faculty know this is the rule of war they are living under. Qualitative research has shown, for example, that faculty feel as though they’re “walking through a minefield every day" and that “hyperpartisanship makes [teaching] perilous”. Lord knows I have felt the same way during my time as a professor. Importantly, this approach means that not only are the scholars attacked constrained in terms of their academic freedom; virtually all faculty are so constrained, because they are aware of the reality.

De-escalation seems essential to the functioning of a thriving academic community. Without a shared commitment to viewpoint diversity, open inquiry, and constructive disagreement, academia risks becoming not a battleground of ideas, but a graveyard for them.