Daniel Jacobson on Freedom of Speech at Universities in the Age of Cancel Culture

The title of this post links to an interview with Daniel Jacobson. I am proud to have served on the search committee that chose Daniel Jacobson for his current position at the University of Colorado Boulder. As a teaser, here are some quotations from this interview (bullets added):

I have become increasingly alarmed at the lack of intellectual and political diversity in philosophy and academia, as well as by its political biases and even bigotry. Scholars with heterodox views — conservatives, libertarians and classical liberals — are widely discriminated against and called racists for supporting race-neutral principles.
In my experience, some universities practice hiring and admissions policies that are blatantly illegal, even at public institutions in states that have more stringent anti-discrimination laws. Meanwhile, Jews and Asian-Americans are discriminated against openly …
… universities increasingly accept a dubious ideology that demonizes whatever it considers “whiteness.”
The University of Colorado, to its great credit, has a conception of diversity that includes opinion, not just identity group.
The series is about the rapid increase in social coercion of speech and the narrowing of the range of socially acceptable opinion among elite institutions. More and more, scholars and journalists with politically unpopular views are being harassed and personally attacked for questioning prevailing dogma. In the current phrase, they are being canceled — or at least people are attempting to cancel them.
This is antithetical to the proper mission of universities and the media. It is also exactly what those of us who have been defending freedom of speech predicted would happen once classes of opinion were put beyond the pale with terms such as “hate speech.” That creates an incentive for those who would silence unpopular opinions to classify their opponents as being motivated by hate or fear (as with the tendentious “-phobic” suffix). It seems absurd, but Martin Luther King Jr. would be guilty of committing “microaggressions” according to official University of California guidelines, which are unofficially accepted far more broadly in academia.
We humans are deeply conformist, and we tend to accept uncritically the opinions of those around us. This makes the ideological takeover of academia and prestige media especially harmful to the intellectual development of students.
I have taught advanced undergraduate courses where most students had never been exposed to the arguments for the morality of capitalism, for example. They were entirely unaware of arguments in favor of market-based economies over central economic planning. Somehow senior majors in PPE (Philosophy, Political Science, and Economics) had never read Hayek, Friedman or Thomas Sowell.