(SUMMARY) The diversification of groups of professors, students and technicians in universities has also led to an increase in reports of harassment in academia. In response, professionals accused of misconduct often resort to the same strategy to disqualify investigations: they are victims of Cancel Culture, a neoliberal persecutory conspiracy against Marxism. The following text argues that good outcomes and alignment with progressive causes should not eliminate individual responsibility and lead to silence in the cases in question.
In recent years, Brazilian public universities have experienced a process of democratization of access through positive actions. These measures have significantly transformed the academic environment, allowing for a greater presence of black, indigenous, quilombolas, refugees, disabled people, LGBTQIA+ and other groups previously excluded from these spaces. However, this process cannot take place without reactions.
Thanks to the diversification of the teaching, administrative and student body, as well as the intense action of social movements in the public sphere, an increasing number of reports of various types of violence have been made public, including harassment in universities.
The naturalization of the culture of moral and sexual harassment in academic relationships, always marked by hierarchies, is not new. The change is now that historically silenced groups and people affected by this violence have managed, despite the difficulties, to express their positions more forcefully in public debate, in specialized mediation offices and in the judicial system.
Faced with this, it is not uncommon to emerge, both on the left and on the right of the political spectrum, the criticism according to which we are confronted with a culture of cancellation, conceived as a sort of strategy of neoliberal capitalism stemming from social networks, fueled by identity and moralist sectors.
There is an attempt to devalue necessary investigations into harassing behavior – whether it comes from left-wing, center-right or right-wing professors – by lumping them all into so-called cancel culture.
Because the university is an environment of scientific excellence, functioning formally through vertical (teachers, students, technicians and outsourced workers) and horizontal inequalities (full professor and assistant professor; postgraduate student and undergraduate student; civil servants and outsourced workers), the grammar of harassment and violence has long been naturalized as something everyday in the academic universe. The victims have been discredited and silenced.
When the behavior of left-wing professors is investigated, the defense argument is always the same. Instead of opposing the evidence, Cancel Culture is being criticized as part of an international conspiracy against Marxism.
The counterattack is attractive: it makes self-defense elegant and shifts attention from the repudiated behavior, left aside as of lesser importance, to the (super)structure. This produces unity between disparate sectors of the academic left.
If all frictions are a “stratagem of capitalism”, every problem no longer has a subject or a circumstance; It’s just another chapter in the conspiracy.
From there a functional character is constructed: the professor, surrounded by an empire of censorship, mobilizes academic grammar to convert criticism into persecution. In the name of socialism and anti-capitalism, the game is reversed. He who holds power becomes a victim of power; the one who occupies the center of the room presents himself as a forbidden voice; Those who rely on the authority of knowledge begin to claim pariah status.
However, it is important to stay within the realm of facts. Although the college environment appears safe, a study by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine indicates that it is the workplace with the second highest rate of sexual harassment, behind military bases.
In Brazil, according to a 2025 report by the Federal Court of Auditors, around 60% of federal universities have no measures to prevent or combat harassment. Only 10% of cases are recorded, either due to lack of confidence in the institution, or fear of being denounced, or fear of reprisals.
After all, how can you report your own advisor/professor/department head for harassment without facing retaliation? How do you prove behavior that occurs underground? How can we trust an administrative process in which the colleagues under investigation will themselves be responsible for the decision?
On the other hand, defendants use their economic power to hire lawyers from famous firms for their defense, while the majority of victims have no resources; they take advantage of the slowness, corporatism and lack of preparation of the institution in terms of administrative investigation; they disqualify confidential reports in the media and in universities for the protection of victims; they retaliate against whistleblowers with criminal and civil proceedings; they continue to give lessons during the investigation, punishing victims in class who fall ill or drop out of classes, without any type of welcome.
The culture of silencing harassment is one of the leading causes of dropouts in course completion, according to the TCU 2025 report.
Investigating harassment on campus, with protocols from an intersectional gender perspective, following due process for both parties, is the antithesis of cancel culture. And that’s the goal of every victim and every wrongly accused teacher, despite research from the University of Massachusetts (US) which reveals that only 2-10% of reports of sexual harassment are false.
Cancel culture can be a platform for neoliberal capitalism to hollow out social struggles. However, it must be differentiated from criticism of the silencing of harassment in universities, even if the accused have carried out important work against racism, LGBTQIA+phobia, against socio-economic and gender inequalities, against ableism or coloniality.
The collective fight for a fairer society requires above all the fight against the hierarchies and inequalities which structure the culture of harassment. Diversity and respect for contradictions do not coexist with complicity and violence. The facts must not be dissolved in the foam of the “great enemy” and the responsibility of concrete agents must not be suspended in the name of progressive ideological affiliations.
Alexandre Melo Franco Bahia is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Law of the UFMG (Federal University of Minas Gerais)
Flavia Maximo is an assistant professor at the Department of Law of Ufop (Federal University of Ouro Preto)
Joyce Alves da Silva is an associate professor at the Department of Education and Society at UFRRJ (Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro)
Maria Ribeiro is a collaborating professor at the Faculty of Philosophy, Letters and Human Sciences of USP (University of São Paulo)
Patricia Valim is an associate professor at the Department of History at UFBA (Federal University of Bahia)
Renan Quinalha is an assistant professor at the Department of Law at Unifesp (Federal University of São Paulo)
Valéria Machado Rufino associate professor at the Department of Psychology of the UFPB (Federal University of Paraíba)
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