Noise is not wisdom, and obscenities are not the foundation of reasonable argument.
Those facts were lost on the graduating students who booed and hurled obscenities at Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav during the May 21 commencement ceremony.
Members of the Writers Guild of America picketed outside Nickerson Field, and it was the union’s strike that fueled the debacle.
If the intent was to bring about an end to the strike with a favorable outcome for writers, it was a pointless display. If the desired effect, however, was to engage in disruption for disruption’s sake, then the sorry show was a hit.
An angry Robert Brown, retiring president of Boston University, called out the alums for “cancel culture.” As the Herald reported, Brown slammed the students “who were appallingly coarse and deliberately abusive to Mr. Zaslav.”
“Our students were not picking a fight,” Brown wrote in a post on BU’s website Wednesday. “They were attempting to implement the cancel culture that has become all too prevalent on university campuses.
“The hundreds of virtually identical protest emails we received in my office in advance of Commencement came with an explicit ‘cancel’ hashtag, indicating an aim to prevent Mr. Zaslav from speaking,” Brown added.
Brown is right about this being a fresh example of cancel culture, but it’s also the latest stunt in the growing trend of disruption theater.
Like the “awareness raisers” who throw food at museum masterpieces to fight climate change, or slash tires of vehicles they deem bad for the planet, or anti-whatever demonstrators snarling traffic to a gathering crowd and cameras, the message is the same: look at me.
All those students and parents who wanted to appreciate and enjoy the milestone that is a graduation ceremony – too bad for them.
Disruption is the both the ends and the means, it’s a politically charged offshoot of a TikTok challenge. Instead of licking tubs of ice cream and putting it back in store freezers, they’re chaining themselves to barrels or smearing paint on the glass surrounding a Degas sculpture.
None of these acts will ease climate change or end the writers strike, but that’s lost on the attention-seekers who engage in them. Real progress in the labor dispute between the Writers Guild of America labor union and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers will be made at the negotiating table, not at Nickerson Field. The disruptive action in this case, the strike itself, was called as a bid to spur negotiations. Their silent keyboards speak louder than those who shout expletives at a studio CEO.
President Brown echoed campus leaders from around the country who’ve witnessed cancel culture invading the halls of learning. “The attempt to silence a speaker with obscene shouts is a resort to gain power, not reason, and antithetical to the mission and purposes of a university,” he wrote.
It speaks to a pathetic paradigm in higher education: freedom of speech is sacred, unless we don’t like what you say. Cue the shouting.
