CHOTINER: I suppose I’m wondering whether we’re all drawing the line somewhere, and therefore if in fact both you and people to your left who you view as restrictive are drawing lines on a spectrum, rather than there being some giant chasm about what the meaning of liberalism is.
WILLIAMS: I think it’s right and not right. I think it’s absolutely undeniable that nobody really advocates for complete total speech without any consequence or absolute freedom of expression. There’s a line that most of us agree on somewhere. We wouldn’t want calls for pedophilia. But that’s not actually what we’re talking about. We’re not saying that there are no standards or no lines. This letter is about the climate of censoriousness and self-censorship and fear that happens when people are made an example of on social media with no recourse and there are calls for their stigmatization. That’s the part of it that goes beyond just speech or disagreement within the bounds of civility. It’s this extra step that seeks to punish and also banish from the community a respectable opinion. What happens is that your employer is contacted and you must be fired from your job, but then you’re supposed to not be employable anywhere. The really seriously troubling case that I can think of that happened recently is David Shor. That’s a quintessential example of what we’re talking about.
CHOTINER: Right, so David Shor was a researcher who tweeted a research paper done by Omar Wasow, whom I have interviewed, and who is a very smart guy who studies how protests affect elections. People on Twitter criticized Shor, and then his employer, Civis Analytics, panicked and fired him. I think most people who have been following these issues view that case as pretty disgraceful. Are there other cases where you think that people have been fired and have been told they should never be hired again for sins that minor?
WILLIAMS: This is not my personal example, but I think there was a great amount of debate over [the resignation of former New York Times opinion editor] James Bennet. I wasn’t organizing a letter around something like that, because I think that gets in the way of making a larger point.
There have been many, many academics who have been silenced. There was a U.C.L.A. professor who got in serious trouble for just reading “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” [William Peris, a lecturer in political science, reportedly came into conflict with students over his decision to read aloud the N-word in King’s letter and show a documentary about lynching. U.C.L.A. told The New Yorker that there was no formal investigation, but that the situation was being “reviewed.”] There is an academic at the University of Chicago who questioned some aspects of the orthodoxy on Black Lives Matter. [Harald Uhlig, a professor of economics, compared Black Lives Matter activists to “flat-earthers and creationists.” A student then claimed that Uhlig had made racially discriminatory remarks in his classroom. The university conducted an investigation and found that there was no basis for further proceedings.]
