Because I’ve been reading her columns for a number of years I can tell you this isn’t the first time Michelle Goldberg has said something sensible about cancel culture. In fact, back in the summer of 2020 when BLM was taking over the streets and “defund the police” was the new hot idea on the left, Goldberg admitted there was a problem.

The mass uprising following the killing of George Floyd has led to a necessary expansion of the boundaries of mainstream speech. Space has been created for daring left-wing ideas, like abolishing the police, that were once marginalized. Cultural institutions are reckoning with the racism that leads to mostly white leadership.

At the same time, a climate of punitive heretic-hunting, a recurrent feature of left-wing politics, has set in, enforced, in some cases, through workplace discipline, including firings. It’s the involvement of human resources departments in compelling adherence with rapidly changing new norms of speech and debate that worries me the most…

One reason many on the right want to be seen as free speech defenders is that they understand that the power to break taboos can be even more potent than the power to create them. Even sympathetic people will come to resent a left that refuses to make distinctions between deliberate slurs, awkward mistakes and legitimate disagreements. Cowing people is not the same as converting them.

Goldberg has waffled a bit on that stance over time. In 2021 she wrote a column which I viewed as downplaying the problem of cancel culture on the left. She did sort of reverse course on that a few weeks later though.

In any case, Goldberg has a new column up today criticizing a left-leaning school for it’s handling of an art exhibit.

The work of the Iranian American artist Taravat Talepasand is cheeky, erotic and defiantly anticlerical. One painting in her new midcareer survey, “Taravat,” incorporates Iranian bank notes whose images of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini have been dosed with LSD. A graphite drawing, titled “Blasphemy X,” depicts a veiled woman giving the finger while lifting her robe to reveal high heels and a flash of underwear. There are sculptures of women in niqab face coverings with enormous exposed breasts. On a gallery wall, “Woman, Life, Freedom,” the slogan of Iran’s recent nationwide protests against the morality police, is written in neon in English and Persian.

When “Taravat” opened late last month at Macalester College, a left-leaning school in St. Paul, Minn., with a focus on internationalism, some Muslim students felt it made a mockery of modest Islamic dress, and thus of them. They expressed their outrage, and this month Macalester responded by temporarily closing Talepasand’s show, and then, apparently unaware of the irony, surrounding the gallery windows with black curtains.

Those curtains astonished Talepasand, an assistant professor of art practice at Portland State University. “To literally veil a ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ exhibition?” she exclaimed to me.

Goldberg notes that the issue at Macalester College is connected to another incident that happened at nearby Hamline college last year. If you missed that, here’s the short version.

Erika López Prater, an adjunct professor at Hamline University, said she knew many Muslims have deeply held religious beliefs that prohibit depictions of the Prophet Muhammad. So last semester for a global art history class, she took many precautions before showing a 14th-century painting of Islam’s founder.

In the syllabus, she warned that images of holy figures, including the Prophet Muhammad and the Buddha, would be shown in the course. She asked students to contact her with any concerns, and she said no one did.

In class, she prepped students, telling them that in a few minutes, the painting would be displayed, in case anyone wanted to leave.

Then Dr. López Prater showed the image — and lost her teaching gig.

One senior in the class complained about the image and from there other Muslim students on campus joined in. Dr. Lopez Prater was canceled and labeled an Islamophobe. The school’s president signed a letter saying respect for Muslim students “should have superseded academic freedom.”

Dr. Lopez Prater ended up getting a job at Macalester and it was during a discussion of the incident she’s been involved with at Hamline that someone first complained about the art exhibition on their own campus. That’s how the show wound up behind black curtains.

Ultimately, Macalester handled the student complaints better than Hamline did. No one was fired, and after being closed for a few days, “Taravat” reopened. But the administration’s response was still distinctly apologetic, demonstrating the anxious philistinism that can result when bureaucratic cowardice meets maximalist ideas about safety.

In a message to campus, the provost, Lisa Anderson-Levy, said that Macalester understands “that pieces in the exhibition have caused harm to members of our Muslim community.” The black curtains came down, but they were replaced with purple construction paper on the gallery’s glass entrance and frosted glass panels on its mezzanine windows, protecting passers-by from “unintentional or nonconsensual viewing,” in the words of the administration. A content warning is affixed to the door. Next to it, some students put up a yellow sign asking potential visitors to show solidarity with them by not going in.

In case it’s not clear, no one was harmed by the images in the exhibition. But universities these days seem primed to respond to cries of victimization even from seeing something that offends you out of the corner of one eye.

Ultimately, Goldberg still thinks the bigger threat to free speech is on the right but she deserves some credit for calling out this level of stupidity on the left. As is often the case, there are some good comments:

Finally some voices on the left are beginning to speak out against the repression of freedom of speech, groupthink, and the stifling atmosphere of conformity in the American academy. This is long time overdue, but it’s not enough. The reason why the academy exists is to foster critical thinking, free pursuit of knowledge, and fearless – and contentious- dialog. It does not exist to protect the tender sensibilities of believers. Whether your belief system is social Justice, Islam, Christianity or anything else, you have no right to silence unbelievers. If you think that somebody who does not accept your theology or ideology “disrespects” you by speaking out, you need therapy, not a veto power. The left plays with the fire of totalitarianism by giving in to such demands. To quote Orwell, freedom of speech means my right to say what you don’t want to hear.

I like that “social justice” was included in a list of great world religions. That’s what it is. In this case the complaining students were Muslim but the dynamic of these complaints (and the response of the administration is all based in the kind of grievances routinely made these days by woke students.