It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at Villanova professor Vincent Lloyd’s tale of being canceled by his summer seminar students. There would have been an element of tragedy if he had suffered real loss, but as he endured nothing worse than a few unpleasant weeks of teaching, the story is a comedic masterpiece.
The seminar was an intense and selective program for high school students; the curriculum was largely devoted to studying anti-black racism. The course ended with a majority of Lloyd’s students declaring, among other accusations, that “the seminar perpetuated anti-black violence” and that Lloyd, who is a black academic with a CV filled with anti-racist bona fides, “was guilty of countless microaggressions.”
A left-wing black professor teaching an anti-racism seminar being denounced by his own radicalized students is an invitation to schadenfreude, especially because, as he put it, “Like others on the left, I had been dismissive of criticisms of the current discourse on race in the United States.” Mugged by reality indeed — though by the standards of social justice mobs, he got off easy, with his job and reputation still intact. Now he describes the sort of anti-racism that took over his class as a “cult” and argues that “Pushing anti-racism to its limits, what we reach isn’t just hollow doctrine, but abuse.”
Lloyd blames the radicalization of his students primarily on one of his teaching assistants, a young black woman who is a “recent graduate of an Ivy League university, mentored by
