"The parents of adventurous young meritocrats paid $5,490 (plus airfare) for two weeks studying 'Public Health and Development in the Andes.'"

"On that trip, the reporter, Donald G. McNeil Jr., got into a series of heated arguments with students, none of them Black, on the charged question of race. Their complaints would ultimately end his career as a high-profile public health reporter for The Times, and again put The Times at the center of the national argument over journalism and racism and labor.... The student at the center of this story is Sophie Shepherd, who isn’t among the teenagers who have spoken anonymously to other news organizations. She and two other students said she was the person who spoke the most to Mr. McNeil and spent the most time with him on their 'student journey.' She was 17 at the time, and had just finished her senior year at Phillips Academy Andover, a boarding school sometimes rated America’s best."

 Writes Ben Smith in The New York Times — at "Postcard From Peru: Why the Morality Plays Inside The Times Won’t Stop/Other news organizations have their own personnel dramas. But none attract the spotlight the way The Times does." 

She’s the kind of teenager who is excited to talk to a New York Times correspondent about public health, and perhaps to put the adventure on a résumé. She had even done the optional reading Mr. McNeil suggested, Jared Diamond’s 1997 book, “Guns, Germs, and Steel,” a Pulitzer-winning history that argues that environmental and geographic factors produced the global domination of European civilization. 

The book has drawn criticism for a deterministic view that seems to absolve colonial powers of responsibility for their choices.... She asked him, she recalled, about the criticism of the book. “He got very defensive very quickly about it,” she recalled. “It’s just a book, it’s just making this point, it’s very simple, it’s not racist.” She said she backed down, apologized and “felt terribly guilty — like I must have come off as a crazy liberal.” 

At lunch that day, she said she sat down the table from Mr. McNeil at a cafe overlooking the town’s narrow streets, where he was talking to another student when he uttered the N-word, and used the word in the context of a discussion of racism. Some of the teenagers responded almost reflexively, she said, to object to his use of the word in any context. 

“I’m very used to people — my grandparents or people’s parents — saying things they don’t mean that are insensitive,” another student, who was then 17 and is now attending an Ivy League college, told me. “You correct them, you tell them, ‘You’re not supposed to talk like that,’ and usually people are pretty apologetic and responsive to being corrected. And he was not.” 

Ms. Shepherd said she thought the word was inappropriate but hardly the worst thing that happened on the trip, which she documented in a diary that she referred to in describing details to me. She also felt sorry for Mr. McNeil. “There was this atmosphere where people didn’t like him,” she said. “He was kind of a grumpy old guy.”...

A few nights later, after a hike up Machu Picchu, she sat with Mr. McNeil at dinner at El Albergue.... On the walk over, she said, she talked about her favorite class at Andover, a history of American education that covered racial discrimination. He responded, she recalled, that “it’s frustrating, because Black Americans keep blaming the system, but racism is over, there’s nothing against them anymore — they can get out of the ghetto if they want to.” 

Ms. Shepherd said she tried to argue, but he talked over her whenever she interjected, their voices getting louder and attracting the attention of other students, two of whom confirmed her account of the conversation. “This is the thing with these liberal institutions like Andover — they teach you the world should be like this but that’s not how reality is,” she recalled him telling her. 

(I sent Mr. McNeil a full account of Ms. Shepherd’s recollections; he said he won’t be responding publicly until he has officially left The Times on March 1. “I’m sure we’ll have different memories of conversations that took place that long ago,” he said in an email.)

She kept a diary. You never know how accurate any given observer's observations are, but contemporaneous day-by-day notes give her substantial power. Perhaps McNeil too has his notes, but his statements "I’m sure we’ll have different memories of conversations that took place that long ago" suggests that he did not write things down as they occurred. 

When Ben Smith gave McNeil a "full account of Ms. Shepherd’s recollections," did he include the fact that Shepherd kept a diary? I'm thinking no, because he said "memories of conversations that took place that long ago." She made a point of preserving her impressions and not merely relying on memory — though, of course, the impressions could have been inaccurate at the time, she could be interposing inaccuracy as she relies on her notes now to talk to Smith, and she could even be dishonest in her claim that she did keep a diary. Hearsay problems galore.

Now that Shepherd has come forward and connected her identity with McNeil's fate, it's quite possible that the critics of cancel culture will come after her. Unlike McNeil, who can retire from his reporting career and still do well by writing books, Shepherd has her entire career in front of her. She may be a privileged young woman, with parents who could afford to send her on the trip and to Phillips Academy Andover, but she did nothing wrong, reading and thinking and talking about her ideas in a setting where McNeil was holding himself out as a resource for her and owed her those conversations. She doesn't even sound as though she was impudent and self-righteous.

I'm seeing things like this at Twitter:

Wokezilla invasion. https://t.co/ABSiooWFS2

— Christina Sommers (@CHSommers) February 15, 2021

Take care not to become the thing that you deplore. 

ADDED: Let me be clear that Christina Hoff Sommers is reacting to that article in the NYT about Sophie Shepherd:

I quite specifically mean to say that there is a danger that the opponents of cancel culture are slipping into a cancel culture of their own. I am trying to be accurate and fair to everyone concerned.

You can see that Lee Fang (an investigative journalist at The Intercept) is saying something about Shepherd — that she "falsely accused famed science reporter Don McNeill of racism, effectively ending his storied career at the Times" — and that is not supported by the text of the article. Yet Fang poses as outraged at false accusations!