The Cancellation of Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie is out as Claremont McKenna College’s commencement speaker, the school’s newspaper announced in a May 14 story. Rushdie did not give a reason for withdrawing, according to the article, but earlier coverage leaves little doubt that many people were furious over the invitation of a politically incorrect figure. 

Some might imagine that having one of the most famous living authors deliver a commencement address would be a once-in-a-lifetime experience, a source of memories, reflections, and stories for many years to come. But the invitation for Rushdie to serve as a speaker at Claremont McKenna, a small West Coast liberal arts school, as the college bids goodbye to a class of young men and women provoked outrage and calls for cancellation on the grounds of thoughtcrimes in Rushdie’s work. 

According to an article earlier this month in The Claremont Independent, some Muslim students on campus objected to having Rushdie, whom they believe committed blasphemy against Allah in his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses, get up onstage and give a talk to the grads. Never mind that Rushdie would surely have delivered more than the boilerplate stuff about how humanity needs the talents of the kids heading out into the world. He might actually have spoken words of substance, but to do that these days, you will inevitably offend someone. His writing and his potential actually to get people to think and reflect are anathema to some members of the McKenna community, though others might well welcome him with open arms.

As the Independent reported, the Claremont Colleges Muslim Student Association put out an Instagram post bluntly condemning the school’s decision to host Rushdie at its May 17 commencement. Posters went up around the campus citing off-putting content in The Satanic Verses and arguing that “By platforming Rushdie, CMC legitimizes and endorses this harm. We urge CMC to reconsider. Disinvite Rushdie.”

The semantic sleight of hand in the above statement has grown so common that people have more or less ceased noticing it. Once, you welcomed visiting speakers and scholars, tolerating the right of others to express themselves as they saw fit. You allowed them to exercise that most fundamental of human rights. Now, failing to censor words and ideas has become not just a sin but a sin of commission—the conscious and deliberate act of “platforming” this or that. Those who platform the wrong speakers have actively infringed on the right of others to live in a safe space without ever taking offense. Permitting speech becomes a moral offense as bad as you can conceive.

Yes, some of us might have thought that the impulse would be to encourage and welcome speech from Rushdie, of all people—in recognition not only of his accomplishments as a writer but of his having soldiered on after the 2022 brutal surprise attack on a stage in western New York that nearly killed him and took out one of his eyes. In his memoir Knife,  Rushdie recounted the assault, his ordeal in a hospital, and his deep sadness over and difficulty adjusting to the loss of an eye, a particularly cruel fate, he laments, for one who lives for reading and the written word. 

Unlike many who genuflect to free expression from the distance and safety of their keyboards, Rushdie has gone out there to put his life on the line. For the sake of an ideal, a principle, a human right, he has suffered beyond the ability of many people to imagine. Clearly, the right thing is to honor and celebrate his words and ideals and to foster more engagement with them, not to “deplatform” Rushdie. 

But cancellation is the dominant trend, as conservative pundit Michael Smerconish learned last year when Dickinson College disinvited him as commencement speaker and as Mike Pence found when the student newspaper at the University of Virginia ran a staff editorial calling for his disinvitation to speak at an event that Republicans on campus organized. The editorial’s title? “Dangerous Rhetoric Is Not Entitled to a Platform.” The editorial defined such “dangerous rhetoric” as, in essence, anything that went against a certain narrative on controversial social and political subjects of the day. 

The academic world has not been kind to Rushdie since the incident one might have expected to bolster support for him and for freedom of expression everywhere. It would not be surprising if Rushdie feels all the more acutely the deep appreciation he expressed for a departed friend in the essay “Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011).” In Rushdie’s telling, Hitchens, already a passionate defender of free speech, grew all the more committed to the principle as a consequence of the fatwa against Rushdie. 

“The spectacle of a despotic cleric with antiquated ideas issuing a death sentence for a writer living in another country, and then sending death squads to carry out the edict, changed something in Christopher,” Rushdie writes. “It made him understand that a new danger had been unleashed upon the earth, that a new totalizing ideology had stepped into the down-at-the-heel shoes of Soviet Communism.” 

Rushdie goes on to criticize prominent figures on the left for their assumption that those vaguely identified as “oppressed people” automatically have the upper hand morally and are justified in pushing the most outlandish demands, including for the suppression of speech they dislike. We will soon see whether other administrations and student bodies act with moral courage or conform to cancel culture.