Cancel Culture in Academia

Public controversies over employee speech where individuals face backlash for expressing views deemed controversial, unpopular, or misaligned with prevailing norms - often labelled as “cancel culture” - are increasingly common, yet systematic evidence of their professional repercussions remains limited. Two empirical challenges have impeded research on this phenomenon. First, data that reliably pinpoints who is ‘cancelled’ in a systematic and comparable manner is scarce because these are often acts internal to an organisation. Second, the lack of comparable, reliable quantitative metrics on performance outcomes across different professional settings is difficult to obtain. We address these challenges by examining this phenomenon within the context of academia, where the freedom of speech plays a crucial role in the pursuit of knowledge. We are able to measure scholarly productivity (publications) and peer dynamics (citations), which provide quantifiable and comparable outcomes. Leveraging a novel dataset of U.S.-based academics’ ‘cancelled’ for their speech, we employ a series of difference-in-differences designs to estimate the effects on individuals’ career outcomes. We find that, following a controversy, affected scholars experience a decline in their productivity, publishing 20% fewer new papers than the counterfactual. Furthermore, affected scholars experience a 4% decline in citations to their prior body of work, reflecting a form of peer-to-peer sanctioning. This decline is disproportionately driven by scholars who are closely connected to the affected individual, consistent with a mechanism of professional distancing. These findings highlight the professional costs of speech-related incidents and contribute to the literature on workplace and employee activism as well as the career consequences of speech-related scandals.