Flanagan - Persona non grata: the death of free speech in the Internet age

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Copyright 2014 by Tom Flanagan

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SIGNAL ISBN: 978-0-7710-3053-6
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Then I went down to the potters house, and there he was, making something at the wheel. And the vessel that he made of clay was marred in the hand of the potter; so he made it again into another vessel, as it seemed good to the potter to make.

Jeremiah 18:34 (New King James Version)

INTRODUCTION

IN 2000, AMERICAN WRITER PHILIP ROTH PUBLISHED THE HUMAN STAIN, A NOVEL THAT DEALT with, among other things, academic life in the age of political correctness. The Human Stain won many prizes, became a best-seller, and was turned into a Hollywood movie of the same title starring Anthony Hopkins and Nicole Kidman.

The protagonist, Dr. Coleman Silk, is an aging classics professor at Athena College, a fictional institution in the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts. Silk has recently retired after long years as the dean of arts, in which he made many enemies by ceaseless attempts to upgrade the colleges standards. Now he has returned to teaching. In one of his classes, he regularly takes attendance to help him learn the students names. After several weeks, he notices that two students have never been checked off, so he asks the others in the class, Does anyone know these people? Do they exist or are they spooks? Both absent students happen to be African American, so they complain to the university authorities about the alleged racial slur. Then comes an academic mobbing, in which staff members whom Dr. Silk had hired and befriended turn against him while a weak president does nothing to defend him. An inquiry is set up, Dr. Silk retires, his wife dies from stress and then things start to get really interesting, but youll have to read the book or see the movie to find out more about this sprawling and engrossing story.

The Human Stain is based on real events. Roths friend Melvin Tumin, a well-known sociologist teaching at Princeton, used exactly those words when calling the roll in class and was subjected to an inquiry for similar allegations of racism. He was exonerated, but the very fact that he could be subjected to an inquiry is sinister enough. And stupid as well, like the case of the Washington, D.C., city staffer who was fired for using the word niggardly (fortunately this man was quickly rehired after the mayor consulted a dictionary).

Academic mobbing is now recognized as a subspecies of workplace mobbing, and a lot has been written about both. What happened to me in late February and early March 2013, in what I call the Incident, was something similar but also different. Colleagues at the University of Calgary didnt try to take me down; indeed, they were quite supportive, except at the highest level of the administration. Rather, I was assaulted by multiple political organizations and media outlets outside the university. It was a virtual mobbing, in which almost everything happened online. No one grabbed me and snarled, Up against the wall, motherfer. No one put a dunce cap on my head, Cultural Revolutionstyle, and forced me to sit on a stool in front of jeering students. No one shouted at me or picketed my office. Hardly anyone spoke to me at all. Everything happened through email, websites, and social media (death by Twitter), leading to subsequent coverage in newspapers and on television.

Human beings are social animals, so shunning, ostracism, and exile are cruel tactics, even when theyre not completely successful, as they werent in my case. Remember that Socrates was given a choice between exile and drinking poison. He drank the hemlock because he thought being sent away from friends and community was a worse fate than death. Those who engage so enthusiastically in virtual mobbing should stop to think that their actions are not that different from those of a lynch mob.

Not only was the mobbing virtual, it was virtually instantaneous. All the most important events occurred in the two and a half hours it took for me to drive from Lethbridge to Calgary on the morning of February 28, 2013. In that short period, while I didnt even know what was going on, I was denounced in extravagant language by leading politicians and fired from my position as commentator by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). Contracts were broken and speaking invitations were withdrawn. Media outlets everywhere in the country posted inflammatory stories on their websites, based on the completely false tagline of a single YouTube posting: Tom Flanagan okay with child pornography.

In Franz Kafkas novella Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning to find that he has been transformed into a cockroach-like species of vermin. Something similar happened to me. I left Lethbridge as a respected academic and public commentator and arrived in Calgary as persona non grata.

Virtual mobbing operates by attacking ones reputation, and with it the financial opportunities that come with reputation consulting contracts, speaking invitations, media appearances, publishing offers. Although not directly physical, it can have medical repercussions, and having been through my own mobbing, I can see how my health could have been affected. Fortunately for me, I got through it with the support of family and old friends and a lot of new friends too, people I hadnt known before but who care about free speech and fair play. Going through an experience like this makes you understand the importance of other people. The Beatles were right about getting by with help from your friends. And Blanche DuBois was right too; I also depended on the kindness of strangers.