Academic freedom,freedom of expression and cancellation: Response to Sari Hanafi

Abstract

Responding to Sari Hanafi's article on academic freedom and freedom of expression in a conjuncture of societal polarization, this paper argues that, while it is pertinent to examine cancellation practices by the conservative camp, as Hanafi suggests, drawing an equivalence between these practices and what is labelled by them ‘wokeism’ is problematic. Such equivalence obscures the socio-historical contexts from which these movements have emerged and conflates the denunciation of what I call ‘stigmatizing discourses’ with an ideological assault on the left and on universities. The framing of the student protests demanding a ceasefire in Gaza as terrorist propaganda and antisemitism was part of this assault. In a second part, the response engages with Hanafi's analysis of key aspects of the societal polarization surrounding the Gaza war.

Based on his critique of what he terms ‘symbolic liberalism’, which he views as politically illiberal, Sari Hanafi (2025) advocates for a dialogical sociology as a response to growing societal polarization and intolerance, which manifest in ‘wars of culture’. His paper provides examples from academia, attesting to a restriction of academic freedom, and then focuses on the societal polarization surrounding the war in Gaza. I will address these two issues.

Academic freedom and freedom of expression

The restriction of academic freedom reflects growing societal polarization and intolerance, for which, according to Sari Hanafi, both the right and the left bear responsibility. Rather than engaging with opposing viewpoints through dialogue, individuals increasingly resort to ‘cancelling’ those with whom they disagree. For this reason, Sari Hanafi extends the notion of ‘cancel culture’, which was initially employed by US conservatives to criticize what they label ‘wokeism’. It is extremely pertinent to acknowledge that conservatives also engage in cancellation practices, but the use of the term ‘cancel culture’ to encompass progressive and conservative actions altogether seems problematic to me. It creates between the two an equivalence and a symmetry, that obscures the socio-historical contexts from which these movements emerged.

The ‘woke’ and #MeToo movements have called for the boycott of books which convey racist, sexist, or otherwise offensive representations of minority groups (notably LGBTQIA+), as well as of books authored by individuals who have taken such positions or committed acts of violence such as rape, assault, or murder. For the same reasons, these movements often call for the removal of such books from academic curricula. In my book Can we Dissociate the Work from the Author? (Sapiro, 2024), I argue that cancelling classical works does not appear to be the appropriate solution, as doing so would erase the symbolic violence these works exerted. Rather, it is more important to critically engage with and discuss this symbolic violence (on the concept of symbolic violence, see Bourdieu, 2001). And it is worth exploring not only why Durkheim did not denounce colonialism – who, after all, was doing so at the time in France? – but also why he did not produce a sociology or anthropology that justified colonization, as others did. Nevertheless, the calls to remove such books from the curriculum should be understood in light of the fact that these texts were taught for decades without any critical attention to their problematic passages, thus reproducing the symbolic violence and contributing to the reproduction of symbolic domination. And the challenges posed to the canon are interesting and invite discussions that raise awareness of representational and epistemological biases. I am aware, however, that this argument does not suffice to justify all the actions carried out in the name of these antiracist, antisexist and more broadly anti-offense values. One can wonder about the meaning of the burning of books in Canadian schools, framed as purifying rituals against the oppression of the Indigenous people and carried out in the name of reconciliation, instead of studying their harmful effects.

Sari Hanafi reproaches the left for betraying the principles of liberalism, by being ‘symbolic liberal’ while also ‘politically illiberal’. Liberalism is however an ambiguous term. In American English it commonly refers to politically ‘left-wing’ positions, yet left-wing politics has historically been divided among different competing currents, and one can hardly characterize the far-left as having ever been tolerant.

Far-left groups have often been accused of sectarianism, and their radical and intransigent stance may be explained by their marginal position, much like the way Max Weber conceptualizes sects in opposition to the Church. When a sect becomes more established and reaches a broader audience, the prophetic message becomes more ambiguous in order to be more inclusive. Occupying a dominated position in the field of ideological production and advocating on behalf of vulnerable groups, the Woke and #MeToo movements had to voice a radical message in order to be heard and to effect change in societal norms. This strategic radicalism has played a significant role in raising awareness about offense, prejudice, and misconduct directed at stigmatized minorities and women.

Furthermore, one may question whether it is accurate to equate the practices of these movements with an ‘intolerance of opposing views’. Freedom of expression concerns the right to express opinions. But not all forms of expression, ‘views’, or beliefs are permitted in the public sphere. Incitement to crime is prohibited in all countries – including incitement to terrorism, a point to which I shall return. The same holds true for hate speech. I prefer to call this kind of speech ‘stigmatizing discourse’, since the term ‘hate’ refers to the speaker's emotional state, whereas ‘stigmatizing’ emphasizes the performative effects of these discourses on vulnerable individuals or groups: these can be understood as ‘speech acts’ in John Austin's terms (Austin, 1962), discourses that ‘stigmatize’ (in reference to Erving Goffman's concept of ‘stigma’; Goffman, 1963) individuals on the basis of their social characteristics, such as race, gender, or sexual orientation, thereby exerting symbolic violence (Sapiro, 2020). In France, as in other countries, hate speech is banned on the grounds that it constitutes incitement to discrimination. And figures on the far-right – for example, Éric Zemmour – have denounced such legal restrictions as infringements on freedom of expression.

It is not by chance that ‘hate speech’ appears among the 150 words forbidden by the Trump administration in grant proposals submitted to the US National Science Foundation, along with discrimination, ethnicity, inequalities, justice, LGBTQ+, stereotypes, and even women. Indeed, the same far-right, and more broadly the conservative camp, has been practicing ‘cancellation’ from above in a much more systematic way, and this is not a recent phenomenon. When the Front National won the Orange municipality in France in 1996, the mayor imposed budget cuts to suppress cultural programs and initiated a purge of the public libraries. Since 1990, the American Library Association (ALA) lists the books that are challenged, and the large majority are condemned from a conservative perspective. (For instance, among the Top 10 most challenged books in 2023, Maia Kobabe's Gender Queer came first because of LGBTQIA+ content and accusations of being sexually explicit, an accusation that was also stated against Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye – the 6^th most challenged book – in addition to its depiction of rape and incest, and to Equality Diversity and Inclusion content.)

The pressure has increased in recent years. The ALA notes a change in the origins of book censorship attempts in 2024: parents account for only 16%, whereas 72% of the demands to censor books in school and public libraries were initiated by pressure groups and government entities (including elected officials, board members and administrators). The ALA explained that ‘the most common justifications for censorship provided by complainants were false claims of illegal obscenity for minors; inclusion of LGBTQIA+ characters or themes; and covering topics of race, racism, equity, and social justice’. ¹ Similarly, in August 2023, the New College of Florida's board of trustees voted to direct the administration to abolish the university's gender studies program, and to suppress the core courses in sociology, which were replaced by their own version of US history. The governor, Ron De Santis, had appointed new members of the board, notably Christopher Rufo and Charles Kesler, with the mission to ‘revive classical liberal education’ against what was identified as left-wing activism. Thirty-six professors who had protested were laid off or pushed to resign. Christopher Rufo is known as the architect of the anti-‘critical race theory’ movement, and Charles Kesler is a member of the Claremont Institute who contributed to the setting up of Trump's 1776 Commission, which produced a report offering a conservative version of US national history. Moreover, the University of New College library has been ‘purged’ of books relating to gender studies, feminism, LGBT+ and diversity (Walker, 2024).

These examples mix freedom of expression (the case of the public libraries) and academic freedom (academic curricula), which Sari Hanafi rightly distinguishes. While freedom of expression is an established human right, academic freedom is a freedom specifically attached to the university. For this reason, it is sometimes criticized and attacked as a privilege rather than a right. The justification for academic freedom is that it promotes the development of science and knowledge, which in turn benefits society as a whole – a benefit enshrined as a human right in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (article 27): ‘Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits’. ²

In liberal democracies, academic freedom should in principle be respected by all universities, regardless of whether they are public or private. This includes freedom of research, freedom of teaching and freedom of expression – for professors as for students. However, while public universities in illiberal countries such as India, Turkey and Hungary have been directly targeted by governments that impose ideological restrictions – for example, the banning of gender studies in Turkey and Hungary, or the dismissal, arrest, and prosecution of professors in Turkey for signing a petition in favour of peace – academic freedom in liberal democracies has been restricted in a different manner by neoliberal policies. As Sari Hanafi points out, university managers have promoted a ‘culture of safetyism’, leading to what some call a ‘therapeutic turn’.

What is currently taking place in American academia represents an unprecedented restriction of academic freedom, driven by an ideological and cultural war. This includes, as already mentioned, the banning of certain words in research and the termination of academic contracts. These measures have brought the United States closer to the conditions found in illiberal states. Although this recalls the persecution of academics suspected of Communism during McCarthyism, the present trend arguably exceeds that historical precedent. The justification of these measures – through the framing of unsettling academic knowledge as mere ideology – is not merely a reactive backlash against so-called ‘wokeism’. Rather, it has been long in the making. The conservative offensive against left-wing academics began in the wake of May 1968 and is rooted not in a genuine defence of ‘liberal education’, but in the protection of economic interests and social privileges. This is comparable to the Cold War context, where the struggle against Communism was driven less by a commitment to ‘freedom’ and more by the imperative to defend capitalism – as demonstrated by American support for Latin American dictatorships. (This argument, of course, should not be read as a defence of the Communist regimes, which severely restricted and oppressed the freedoms of their citizens in the name of ‘equality’ in an authoritarian manner.)

Academic freedom does not imply that anything can be said within the university, nor that any individual may hold any speech there. Academic freedom is committed to knowledge production and to certain values, such as truth and science, as well as to certain forms of discussion that require argumentation. Yet the boundaries between academic freedom and freedom of expression remain unclear and unstable. On the one hand, professors are not allowed to use the classroom to try to influence the students politically. This is the principle enunciated by Max Weber in his famous lecture on ‘Wissenschaft als Beruf’. (Weber uses the term ‘Wert frei’ – free of values – and not that of ‘axiological neutrality’ in research, as is often wrongly translated and argued; Weber, 1946.)

On the other hand, since academic freedom includes freedom of expression of professors and students, the expression of political opinions should be allowed within the university outside of the classroom, as long as it remains pacific and does not infringe the restrictions of freedom of expression. This was at the core of the debate surrounding student protests and encampments against the war in Israel–Palestine. Moreover, the disinvitations mentioned by Sari Hanafi are often justified on the grounds of a potential breach of the peace. Such concerns are typically weighed against the principle of freedom of expression – or, in academic settings, academic freedom. This is not to legitimize these measures, but rather to contextualize them within a legal and procedural framework governing institutional decision-making.

Sari Hanafi frames the repression on campuses targeting students’ protests against the war in Gaza and the threats and sanctions directed at professors who supported them or took a stance, as part of the ‘cancel culture’. I tend to disagree with this framing because of the reservations I have expressed above concerning this term and to the equation between hate speech and political opinion. However, what conservative practices do have in common with what is referred to as ‘woke’ culture is the denunciation of opinions or expressions held by some members of the academic community – whether students or professors – by others, and the appeal to university administrations, or even external authorities, to arbitrate by sanctioning the adversaries, in the name of moral values which are partly codified in law: racism, sexism, and transphobia on one hand, antisemitism and terrorist propaganda on the other.

Yet, as Sari Hanafi rightly argues, the invocation of categories such as antisemitism and terrorist propaganda has in most cases been applied in an unfair manner – particularly in the United States and Germany, but also in France and other countries. Nor should the parallel obscure the fact that the attacks targeting the pro-Palestinian mobilization were part of the broader conservative offensive against academia.

I have not studied this mobilization so I cannot analyse it in depth, but what is interesting – and explains its resonance among students and youth – is that the pro-Palestinian mobilization converged with the Woke and the feminist and LGBTQIA+ movements. Even though some messages were not unambiguous – from denial of Hamas’ responsibility for the massacres and rapes on October 7 to some unambiguous prophecies that ‘there would be another 7 October’ – most of these students’ protests were peaceful and primarily called for a ceasefire. At UCLA, the peaceful students’ encampment – I can personally attest to its non-violence, having been present for several days – was violently attacked by a group of pro-Israel counter-protesters on April 30, 2024.

Although it relates more to freedom of expression than to academic freedom, the mobilization of students for a political cause is not a new phenomenon, and dates back, on a large scale, to the Vietnam war and to May ’68. The principle of academic freedom forbids the police from intervening on campus without the agreement of the university president or provost. During the encampments, some presidents were placed under pressure and called the police against the students, whereas others who did not repress the protests, like the presidents of Penn and of Harvard, Elizabeth Magill and Claudine Gay, were accused at the Congress hearings of not having repressed antisemitism and calls for a ‘genocide’ of the Jewish people – referring to Intifada chants – and forced to resign. At Columbia, the president received a vote of no-confidence from the faculty for having called the police.

The attempts to outlaw pro-Palestinian mobilization were based on accusations of antisemitism, terrorism and the apology of terrorism. The category of terrorism is commonly used in authoritarian and illiberal countries like Russia or Turkey, to criminalize opponents and their supporters. However, this has also occurred – albeit to a lesser extent – in liberal democracies. The anti-anarchist laws passed in France in the 1890s were denounced by the defenders of freedom of speech as ‘lois scélérates’ (‘evil laws’), and they were used to prosecute political opponents of the supposedly liberal Third Republic. Since the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, most of the 20 industrialized and emerging countries (G20) have adopted anti-terrorism laws that, rather than remaining confined to states of emergency, were incorporated into permanent legal frameworks, thereby restricting civil liberties. In France for example, the state of emergency declared after the terrorist attacks of November 13 and 14, 2015, was used to ban the Global Climate March that was scheduled to take place during the COP21 conference for security reasons. The state of emergency was extended and most of its exceptional anti-terrorism measures were eventually integrated into ordinary legislation.

The fact that Hamas is designated as a terrorist organization by many countries facilitated the framing of pro-Palestinian protests as terrorist propaganda. However, the instructions given by Minister of the Interior Gérald Darmanin to prefects to ban pro-Palestinian demonstrations were challenged by the French Conseil d’État (Council of the State), which reminded the minister that only the prefects have the authority to assess locally whether a demonstration – whether pro-Palestinian or pro-Israeli – is likely to breach public order. As a result, pro-Palestinian demonstrations could be held in France. In Germany, speaking Arabic in the demonstrations was forbidden, which is a severe restriction of freedom of expression (Meinel, 2025).

However, following a circular issued by the Minister of Justice on 10 October 2023, calling for the prosecution of discourses legitimizing the Hamas attacks, more than 600 proceedings had been launched by the end of January 2024. These included cases against representatives of La France Insoumise and the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste, who applauded the massacres of 7 October or framed them as acts of Palestinian resistance. Of these proceedings, 80 were prosecuted for apology of terrorism or incitement to racial hatred. Needless to say, no equivalent action has been taken against those who supported the mass killings in Gaza.

In May 2024, the French League for Human Rights filed a complaint against a Jewish supremacist French lawyer who held genocidal statements online, accusing her of apology for war crimes and crimes against humanity, but this complaint was dismissed. A new complaint was filed by the League in January 2025. This may now lead to a trial, as mainstream opinion appears to be shifting as I write this commentary. This shift is probably due to the arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, and Yoav Gallant, former Minister of Defense of Israel, following an investigation into alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity. It is also linked to the resumption of war in March 2025, after the ceasefire.

The polarization around the war in Gaza

Sari Hanafi discusses four key aspects of the polarization surrounding the war in Gaza: the memory of the Holocaust, the conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism, the nature of the Israeli state, and the representation of Hamas.

He rightly criticizes the instrumentalization of the Holocaust to justify war crimes in Gaza – some of which may also support the criminal charge of genocide, along with other crimes against humanity. This instrumentalization did not begin with the present conjuncture, but it reached its most paradoxical acme after 7 October. The very comparison of the 7 October massacres to the Holocaust is problematic, and it prevents an analysis of the specific nature of that horrific attack, while simultaneously eroding the historical specificity of the systematic industrial extermination of the Jewish people by the Nazis. The Israeli government certainly had an interest in promoting this comparison, in order to dissimulate its own responsibility for the scale of the disaster – one that would have been far more limited had several battalions not been redeployed to the West Bank to protect the settlers. The comparison also supported the argument for Israel's right to defend itself, a right which neither Western countries nor the United Nations initially contested, but which was soon exceeded by the disproportionate retaliation – the massive bombing of civilians, hospitals and schools, the blockade that prevented the distribution of humanitarian aid and food – all of which constitute violations of international humanitarian law (even in light of the continued attacks on Israel by Hamas rockets, as well as by Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen, since 7 October).

Regarding Sari Hanafi's critique of the conflation of anti-Zionism (not to speak of the critique of the Israeli government) with antisemitism, I can only agree with his analysis, having myself signed the Declaration of Jerusalem that he mentions. This does not mean however that some (not all) anti-Zionist claims are not motivated by some kind of antisemitism, of which there is a long tradition in certain currents of the far-left (in France as in the UK). But this should not justify the adoption by countries like Germany of the working definition of antisemitism by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) to restrict freedom of expression.

One could add to the paradox highlighted by Hanafi – the use of the Holocaust to justify war crimes and massacres that may support the charge of crimes against humanity and genocide – the invitation of Jordan Bardella and Marion-Maréchal Le Pen, both political heirs of Jean-Marie Le Pen, who infamously referred to the Holocaust as a ‘detail’ of history, to the conference on antisemitism in Israel. Their invitation, along with that of other far-right representatives, led to the withdrawal of many delegates from Jewish institutions around the world from the conference.

Sari Hanafi's discussion of Zionism is somewhat brief. Without being a specialist, I can argue that Zionism was never a unified movement; it has included both right- and left-wing factions, as well as religious and secular currents. There were religious Zionists from the outset, some of whom believed that the coexistence of Palestinians needed to be taken into account (Sand, 2024). The range of definitions today is broad, but I shall attempt to formulate a minimalist one and a maximalist one.

The minimalist definition – shared by the vast majority of Israelis and by many Jews in the diaspora – holds that Zionism refers to the right of Israel to exist as a state, based on two justifications: historical presence of Jews on the land on one hand, antisemitism on the other. This primarily means a state for Jewish people – a principle that was not adopted as a constitutional law until 2018, and which makes problematic the status of non-Jewish populations within the state. For some (mostly leftists) who still identify as Zionists, this does not entail the inequality of status within the State of Israel, and it is fully compatible with the creation of a Palestinian state (but most of them would reject the idea of a single binational or multinational state for all its citizens, and many are reluctant towards a Confederation of Two States, a project promoted by the movement called A Land for All ³ ). The definition of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people naturally raises the question of who is considered as Jewish, a status determined in Israel by Orthodox authorities, with criteria that are much stricter than those used by the Reformists in the United States, for instance.

The maximalist definition refers to the supremacist conception shared by a significant portion of settlers in the West Bank, who advocate for a ‘Greater Israel’. They are ideological heirs of the far-right rabbi Meir Kahane, who called for the ‘transfer’ of the Palestinian population from the West Bank and who openly endorsed ethnic cleansing. This movement has grown considerably since the late 1980s. It includes those responsible for the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and those who now advocate for the recolonization of Gaza through the removal of its Palestinian population.

In between, there are various conceptions of Zionism, both secular or religious. One should remember that the most orthodox Jewish community is anti-Zionist and do not recognize the state of Israel, due to its secular character and their belief that such a state can only legitimately exist after the coming of the Messiah.

Beyond these different interpretations of the term, Zionism is closely tied to the definition of Israel as a Jewish state – a definition shaped by the ambiguous meaning of Jewishness, whether as a religion or as an ethnic identity. This ambiguity helps explain why, even under the most secular governments, a separation between state and religion has never been considered. It also accounts for the persistent tension, even within the most secular conception of Zionism, between democratic principles of equality and the structural preference granted to Jewish citizens.

Concretely, Zionist state policy includes a ‘Law of Return’ for Jewish individuals (who must provide a certificate of Jewishness) or for Israeli citizens who left the country long ago, regardless of their circumstances abroad. This Law of Return, which does not apply to Palestinians who were forced to leave the country or to their descendants, is accompanied by financial assistance for the first year and significant tax benefits, designed to encourage aliyah (immigration to Israel). Most Israeli citizens are unaware of these advantages, which are not extended to them, and it remains unclear what proportion of the population would support them if they were broadly known.

However, the burst of antisemitism since 7 October, which is a real phenomenon – 1676 actions in France in 2023 and 1570 in 2024, versus 436 in 2022, and this is the case also in Europe more widely ⁴ – running parallel to the political mobilization against the war in Gaza, makes Jewish people feel insecure and the rates of immigration from France to Israel, for instance, have increased by 500% since 7 October, despite the war and the missiles from Hamas, the Hezbollah and the Houtis (and Iranian attacks), while many Israelis leave the country because of the reforms conducted by the far-right government and the continuation of the war.

Finally, Sari Hanafi rightly criticizes the conflation of Hamas with ISIS and the associated Islamophobia involved here. Hamas was indeed founded in 1987 as a national liberation movement – albeit a religious one (it was initially a political and activist branch of the Muslim Brotherhood). It emerged in competition with the historical national liberation organization, the Fatah (PLO), which governs the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank (and with other organizations, such as the Palestinian Liberation Front). The Israeli government supported the rise of Hamas – reportedly including the transfer of large sums of money from Qatar between 2018 and 2021 – in an effort to undermine Fatah's leadership and to divide the Palestinian people, thereby obstructing the formation of a Palestinian State. Elected in 2007 in Gaza, Hamas has since then not organized new elections and has systematically pursued and killed its opponents from Fatah, as well as those accused of collaboration with Israel, as well as protesters against the war in March 2025. It is important to recall that Hamas does not represent the entirety of the Palestinian people, even though it has gained popularity through its attacks on Israel – at a time when the Palestinian Authority's capacity for political action has been severely constrained.

I would like to end on a more personal note. It is a privilege for me to have the opportunity to comment on Sari Hanafi's paper and thus to engage in a written dialogue with him. Although his vision of a dialogical sociology may seem utopian to some, Sari Hanafi is a sociologist and an intellectual whose practices are consistent with his discourse. He has consistently promoted dialogue within academia and beyond, including through exchange with Israeli colleagues and by visiting Israel himself. He is living proof that, at least in his case, we cannot dissociate the author from his work, and that is good news.