Cancel Wars: How Universities Can Foster Free Speech, Promote Inclusion, and Renew Democracy by Sigal R. Ben-Porath, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023

Sigal Ben-Porath’s Cancel Wars represents a level-headed attempt to mediate ongoing conflicts over truth and inclusion in US universities, and to suggest how educational institutions might play a leading role more broadly in bridging social and political divides and strengthening democracy. The book builds on and refines arguments from her 2017 book Free Speech on Campus, arguments centred on the key concepts of “inclusive freedom” and “dignitary safety.” Further, it continues a line of thinking that she developed in the pages of this same journal in her 2016 response to Eamonn Callan’s paper “Education in Safe and Unsafe Spaces.” That issue’s special invited symposium also included my own, somewhat less generous response to Callan, and so the present review of Ben-Porath’s latest effort might be considered a continuation of that discussion – a discussion that now benefits from eight additional years of scholarship, activism, and hindsight, informed by such developments as the Trump presidency, the COVID-19 pandemic, and a genocide of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Central to Cancel Wars is the premise, laid out in chapter one, that the US and other ostensibly democratic states suffer from increasing polarization. Ben-Porath cites scholarship and public debate supporting this claim, although she also cites research suggesting that it is, in reality, an exaggerated “perception of polarization rather than polarization itself that causes negative attitudes about the out-group” (p. 162–163, n23, emphasis added). Nevertheless, if we accept that polarization is truly as severe as Ben-Porath implies it to be, I posit that efforts to effectively address it might benefit from determining who or what is most responsible for causing it. Assigning blame would contradict her conciliatory posture, but the examples of polarization that Ben-Porath offers are telling: racist, sexist guest speakers pushing for the inclusion of more “conservative and right-leaning views” in universities (p. 8); “rising support for authoritarian populism” (p. 13); and the January 6, 2021, attack by Trump supporters on the US Capitol. She continues: “Some influential scholars … trace much of our current polarization to the rise of right-wing newspapers and TV shows and the propaganda such outlets disseminated, later spreading to social media platforms” (p. 23). Moreover, “[i]t can be argued that polarization is rooted in racial distrust or prejudice,” particularly toward “Black Americans and other visible minorities” (p. 21) – what some might simply call white supremacy. It follows that what Ben-Porath frames as polarization could more accurately be referred to as a resurgence of conservatism and even ultra-conservatism, and a dramatic rightward shift in the locus of mainstream politics. Unfortunately, Ben-Porath dismisses “accusations of fascism” as unwarranted hyperbole, equating it with “accusations of socialism” on the other side (p. 12) and failing to account for pre-eminent academic experts such as Robert Paxton (2021) who have indeed identified Trump and his most ardent supporters as fascist. Chapter 2 goes on to attribute polarization to the lack of a shared epistemic foundation, a problem that universities are particularly well-positioned to help solve. But once again the examples put forth illustrate that the problem principally tends toward one side of the political spectrum: disputed US election results, climate and COVID-19 denialism, willful ignorance regarding systemic racism, and mass delusions such as QAnon all reflect a sweeping “populist rejection of expertise” (p. 34). And rather than acknowledge that it is actually right-wing ideology and ruling class power that supports and enables this populist rejection, Ben-Porath generally gestures toward “lenses of values and ideology” (p. 26) as the problem. Her simple assertion that “[i]deology … is a choice” (p. 47) contradicts the scholarship theorizing ideology as an unconscious phenomenon. …