That was part of Rebecca Tuvel’s answer to a question from journalist Evan Goldstein about “the benefits of almost getting canceled.” Professor Tuvel (Rhodes College) was interviewed recently by Goldstein for the Chronicle of Higher Education. It was nine years ago, readers may recall, that the publication of Tuvel’s “In Defense of Transracialism” in the journal Hypatia ignited a firestorm of online outrage. You can read all about that episode here. (As Goldstein notes, the affair was recently mentioned in the “Vanderbilt Report” on the humanities.) Dr. Tuvel says she learned of the controversy via an email she read while in a Target parking lot. She says: I had a really intense reaction. I learned after the fact that I effectively went into a hypomanic state for about four days. I was obsessively reading every single thing on the internet. I was totally beside myself, wondering if I was a horrible person. I had always been a people pleaser. This experience forced me to become less so, which is for the better. As a philosopher, it’s damaging to be too sensitive to how other people receive your arguments. We should follow arguments where they lead. A short while later, she says, I had decided in my head that I was leaving academia. This was not what I signed up for. I was persona non grata in the feminist-philosophy world I knew. I recall wanting to get as far away as I possibly could, while also realizing that the internet follows you everywhere. Had academic philosophy as a field—including three brave feminist philosophers—not come to my defense, I would almost certainly have left academia. Ultimately, she says, a few people ended up apologizing for signing an open letter at the time calling for the article’s retraction. As for other lessons the experience held for her, she says: One of the reasons the Hypatia affair was such a watershed moment is that it raised the question of whether feminist philosophers are primarily academic philosophers pursuing arguments wherever they lead or social-justice advocates whose scholarship is principally directed toward certain anti-oppressive conclusions… [I]t’s fair to say I wrote my article from an anti-oppressive lens. It’s just that the conclusion I reached was not regarded as..

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