6th April 1792
“It says here you have been cancelled,” said the professor, putting down the London newspaper.
“Have I been cancelled?’
“Yes – it says so.”
“What does that mean?”
The professor explained exactly what it meant, with great confidence.
“Thank you for explaining to me that I am cancelled, as I would never have realised otherwise.”
He nodded, and his mind now turned to other, more important matters.
“Please forgive my curiosity professor, but can you tell me how that news report ends? I would very much like to know the rest.”
The professor, irked by this interruption, picked the newspaper back up.
“The report ends by saying that you have not actually been cancelled, as such, just that a literature course has rotated to a new annual author.”
“I am not cancelled?”
“Not as such, not cancelled, no not formally, but we can agree the principle is exactly the same.”
“Can you tell me how the principle is exactly the same?”
The professor explained exactly how the principle was exactly the same, again with great confidence.
“Thank you for explaining to me how the principle was exactly the same, for I would never have understood.”
The professor nodded, with satisfaction.
“You see, there are those who want to prevent others from discovering the beauty of your work and appreciating your deft use of irony.”
The professor now returned to the silent contemplation of more important matters, and he was not to be disturbed again.
***
No: Stirling University is not ‘dropping’ Jane Austen.
As The Telegraph concedes at the end of their article, Stirling’s Special Authors module changes focus every year. This year it is Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison
Course description contains nothing about decolonisation https://t.co/XeBLJaRCih pic.twitter.com/FPSoq5w8oK
— Generic English Teacher (@TabitaSurge) April 5, 2022
***
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Well, heaven forfend that a university’s Special Authors module for its English students should focus on a person whose work in English won the Nobel Prize in Literature almost 30 years ago.
I wonder what they’ll study next year. Perhaps Rabindranath Tagore. Or Wole Soyinka. Or Kipling. With such a wealth of authors to choose between, it would be shame to stick the same ones year after year. Particularly on a module that changes focus on an annual basis.
Best tweet: from @foreverheady (who, as I understand it, played first class cricket for Sussex, but is now an English teacher) : “It is a truth universally known that a cultural war attention seeker must be in want of an outrage.”
Have just RTd the poor fellow
Surely this news item is nearly a week late: should have been last Friday?
This is indeed a DT, DM, Express style “outrage”. However, I cant help suspecting based on other comments you have made elsewhere that instead of seeing it as part of the endless opinions masquerading as news wars between the DT et al and the Guardian et al, you dismiss the idea of cancel culture.
It is very much alive. In Britain a good example would be the unsuccessful attempts by the ex-Vice Chancellor of Cambridge to introduce language that would allow censorship of intellectual thought under the guise of policing for intolerance, and the hounding of professors for questioning some of the more extreme transgender literature.
In the US a shocking example is the canceling and silencing by Harvard of Roland Fryer, a brilliant black professor from the ghetto, who embarrassed the elite professors who make a living out of victimhood. Harvard took unprecedented action against him in contrary to the recommendation of their own investigation and one aggrieved CRT professor urged that his tenure be terminated which has never been done. https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/harvards-war-against-its-superstar?s=r.
Jane Austen has been the predictable target of decolonization and de-slavery campaigns along with demand not to study dead white authors. The irony is that she is generally believed to have been anti-slavery and her brother and sister were openly so (her father was trustee for a plantation which may have given them insights into what was happening).
How can anyone dismiss the idea of ‘cancel culture’ when those who have been cancelled tell us so from national and international platforms?
Plenty of “progressives” dismiss the notion. Indeed that was very much the theme of the Virginia Governor election.
I can’t help but suspect that there is more than a bit of cold, calculating misdirection going on here.
I appreciate that there are many differences between politics in the US and the UK, but across the Atlantic we see that an agitating section of the political spectrum is using FUD (in the traditional sense of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) to attack things like Critical Race Theory (for example). I’m not sure which state was concerned – I think it might have been Florida, but in at least one case a Governor declared that he was banning the teaching of CRT from schools in the state… when it had never been *taught* in schools. But the FUD factor was enough to provoke parents in to action and now we see this misdirection prompting a groundswell of activism, with extremists taking over school boards and a range of other public offices and exerting more and more extreme political influence on education.
I get the impression [no basis of fact, mind] that the strategy is a combination of politicising otherwise neutral public service roles, combined with a longer term attempt to set societal agenda by gradually influencing what is taught, to “shape the conversation”.
It can be tempting, sometimes, to look across the Atlantic and think, “Oh, thank goodness things aren’t quite so extreme in the UK…” But this is dangerous: things are often worse in the UK – it is important to remember that the US is still a very young country by comparison: they simply haven’t had as much practice at corruption, or at hiding it.
I guess times change: when I sat my GCE English exam in the mid-80’s, our reading list saw Shakespeare (Merchant of Venice) accompanied by “Animal Farm” and “Lord of the Flies”. I just can’t see either of those works making it within a proverbial country mile of a secondary school these days…
As a note, my son (yr 10) is doing Lord of the Flies for his GCSE English, and has done Animal Farm in yr 9.
It was Virginia followed by others including Florida. The “CRT isn’t taught in schools” is a canard. The concepts are widely used. One example is the need for teachers to file a diversity and equality initiative statement (DEI). This isn’t simply an affirmation of commitment to equality and diversity. It is a requirement to demonstrate activities that conform to a vision that is straight out of the CRT handbook. So much so that people now give counseling on how to beef up your DEI with CRT style achievements.
The pushback was highlighted in a couple of schools in California and the Loudon County Schools District in Virginia. Loudon School Board’ cover up of a rape as a result of its aggressive transgender policies and its attempt to have the victim’s father jailed as a white extremist was not FUD. Nor was the cancelation of merit based entry to the elite state schools in NY and California because it favored Asian Americans.
“New Math Theory” in California is another example. Billed as a way to promote maths among minorities it dumbs down by postponing or eliminating key steps to STEM university entrance. Emphasis is on social justice in maths. As one minority advocate commented, you achieve social justice by teaching maths not by teaching social justice as maths. This is Prof Fryer’s point: minority children are not less intelligent or language challenged, they are simply badly taught (maths is a universal language so language cannot be a barrier).
This mantra that logic, literacy, maths, the “right answer” are white cultural impositions on minorities is not some FUD. It was openly displayed in an exhibition at the Smithsonian Museum of African American History: immensely insulting to Black Americans suggesting that ambition, family, rational thought, punctuality and schedules, hard work, individualism, property rights, and more are white impositions as if these are all alien to black nature. The museum encourages teachers and parents to explain to young children how being white oppresses minorities.
Some of the backlash is no better than what it is reacting against. Some is dumbed down – by both sides – into things like “dont say gay” but much is an awakening to a subversion of schools by a small group that has accelerated in the last 10 years. It goes beyond schools. Victimhood and racial identity is being promoted instead of diversity.
‘Arguments in academe are so vicious because the stakes are so low’. Ordinarily squabbling academics are simply there for amusement. But this whole cancel thing and arguments about CRT and gender identity has opened a whole new can of worms and multiple power grabs. Ably assisted by has-been actors.
Almost as if most societal progress has stopped, no really new things on the horizon, the things we have don’t really work and now we are scratching around for little ways to be nasty to each other. We seem to be leaving behind the age of enlightenment and entering some new age of psychological sniping.
TBH I find a strong urge to chuck Ms Austen’s work across the sitting room, Mr Sheridan’s work much less insipid stuff.