Campus Insanity, Vol 83

The Censorial Mob Cancels a Balanced Journalist

Most readers are familiar with Sirius radio and CNN host Michael Smerconish. In an era of increasingly polarized politics, where the loudest voices on the far right and far left often garner the biggest ratings, Smerconish is an old-fashioned centrist, a lawyer by training who tries striking a reasoned balance on even the most contentious issues.¹ Listeners to Smerconish filter him through their own world views. His effort to stay in the middle means he is not someone who would seem likely to get cancelled as a university commencement speaker.

But that is precisely what has happened at Dickinson College, a premier Pennsylvania-based liberal arts school, that has rescinded its invitation for Smerconish as the school’s 2024 commencement speaker. It also cancelled an honorary degree it had planned to give him.

What did he do wrong?

A Muslim-Arab first year student wrote an opinion piece in the student newspaper that Smerconish supported racial profiling of Muslims and Arab Americans. The evidence? In a book Smerconish authored 20 years ago, Flying Blind: How Political Correctness Continues to Compromise Airline Security Safety Post 9/11, he wrote: “The TSA should at least be paying extra attention to those who share characteristics – either racial or circumstantial – with those who have been known to commit terror acts in the past. Makes sense to me.”

That was, claimed the student, “as blatant as it could possibly be. In no uncertain terms, Smerconish advocates for racial profiling.”

The class of 2024, he wrote, “deserves better than Smerconish.”

That article sparked pro-Palestine student protestors to set up an encampment on campus with a key demand that Smerconish be cancelled from the commencement.

Smerconish, as is his style, offered an olive branch, saying on his radio show that he would reread Flying Blind. “Chances are, that given the acquired wisdom of the last 20 years and all the knowledge that I have gleaned, and you know, reflecting on my life’s experiences, my hunch is I will probably stand behind every single word in the book.”

How did that go over at Dickinson?

“His statements were not a sign of the times,” proclaimed the student newspaper editorial, “but remain his own enduring prejudices.”

“This should be a cautionary tale for anyone in America who believes in fairness, common sense, the free exchange of ideas, rational decision-making, and the importance of leadership in the face of hysteria,” Smerconish wrote in a public letter he shared today.

Nothing in Flying Blind was considered controversial when it was published in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. It still is not. However, activist students combed it looking for some sentence, anything at all that they might use to cancel him. It was not really about something they thought was objectionable from two decades ago, it is because they have disdain for someone who is not an advocate for their current anti-Israel/pro-Palestine passion.

This past Saturday, the same College President, John Jones, who had invited Smerconish this past January — “On a personal note, and as a long-time acquaintance and admirer of your career, I am excited to welcome you to campus” — wrote and withdrew the invitation.

Schools cancelling a speaker is nothing new. But those speakers are usually themselves firebrands whose hard-edged views run counter to the progressive ideologies that are the permitted “one think” at many schools.

That even a moderate like Smerconish can run afoul of the censorial mob is evidence of both the closed mindedness of the protestors and the cowardice of school administrations to stand up to them. Those in power at many universities have abdicated their decision making to a tiny minority with the loudest megaphone.

Dickinson was founded in 1783 by Dr. Benjamin Rush, a slavery abolitionist who was also one of the original signers of the Declaration of Independence. “Rush believed in freedom — freedom of thought and freedom of action,” the school proclaims on its website.

It appears the school has modified the concept of “freedom of thought.” Unless someone objects, of course, and especially if that objection is couched in the modern language of racial or gender victimhood. Such a complaint does not need to be true. It just needs to be voiced and then craven school administrators race to placate the aggrieved students. Throw in a few radicalized professors, and you have the perfect storm in which a moderate like Smerconish becomes someone the student newspaper concludes is “undeserving of the honor of commencement speaker.”

Smerconish, in his public letter, summed up the danger of judging a 20-year book through the prism of today’s political filters: “Times change, people change, circumstances change. Statements in books written decades ago, if penned by the well-intentioned with a history of tolerance and advocacy of unity, cannot in a just and rational society be the basis for judging someone’s soul or determining their fitness to be part of the national conversation. And it certainly shouldn’t obliterate someone’s lifetime of reputation and performance. Those students who demanded I not speak had better hope that twenty years from now, when they are looking for a job, no one will look at everything they said and did two decades earlier, yanking it out of context and using it as a weapon of personal destruction.”

An oft-quoted thought from a German Lutheran pastor during World War II is,

“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”

When cancel culture comes for middle-of-the-road commentators like Smerconish, it is strong evidence that no one is safe. At least no journalist who reaches conclusions based on facts and evidence that somehow is on the prohibited list at today’s college campuses.

I am not holding my breath for any commencement address invitation coming my way any time soon.

1. Full disclosure: I have been a guest more than a dozen times on Smerconish’s radio and TV program, talking often about the JFK assassination, and other times about 9/11, the Vatican, even the pharmaceutical industry.