How Woke Universities Demoralize Their Best People
By the Anonymous Academic
I invited a friend who is an academic at a US college to write a guest piece for you about what woke universities are like from the inside. Enjoy and please share if you do!
A lot has been written about how universities are too “woke”, often focusing on the most sensational stories, like people getting suspended for saying a Chinese word in a lecture on…(gasp)...communicating in Chinese, or the students (and some faculty) chanting Hamas talking points and explaining how they are an extension of “queer feminist” epistemology (because we all know how much Hamas loves queers and women), or Halloween costumes and their discontents. These stories are risible and worth telling, and don’t get me wrong, I could share a few of my own.
But let me share an inside account of what I think is far worse, and far less appreciated, about woke academia: it is driving some of its best faculty, students, and staff to the exits. Since 2020, my department has lost roughly a third of its faculty members. I have had conversations with numerous top staffers who are leaving or actively planning to leave. Enrollment is crashing nationally, especially among young men who increasingly reject woke politics. In most cases, people aren’t leaving because of cancellation threats, or antisemitism, or sillier things like Halloween costume controversies. My university is actually pretty good on free speech, and hasn’t had too much antisemitism, aside from one incident that resolved quickly.
Instead, people are leaving because woke universities have become demoralizing to work and learn at, on a day-to-day basis. They’re demoralizing for three reasons.
First, they’re not serious. For example, a top staffer was telling me the other day about a campus-level outreach strategy meeting, where on the subject of how to recruit more students of color, one of the main talking points in the room was that there wasn’t even a point in trying to recruit more students of color until the campus works on its racism (in vague, undefined ways). In contrast, a few days later, we visited a much poorer regional school. They were situated in a conservative part of the state, and so did not talk about DEI. Instead, their outreach strategy for recruiting disadvantaged students included keeping costs down, adding degree programs in skilled trades, emphasizing shared unifying values like love, humility and courage, and sending their president to disadvantaged schools to tell students about these initiatives and values. Their enrollment from disadvantaged parts of the state has skyrocketed, they told us. It’s not actually that hard, if you’re serious.
Second, the Emperor is naked. In other words, you have to pretend to not see obvious things. Basically, universities all decided ten years ago that ending bigotry and promoting emotional well-being were their two most important strategic objectives. Then, they put some of the most bigoted and emotionally unwell people on campus in charge. For example, a faculty member and graduate student created an “anti-racism” training module after George Floyd, which the campus recommended to everyone. In one of the first videos of the module, one the trainers said he used to physically assault white people who offended him, but “white supremacy culture” made him stop. More gravely, mounting evidence suggests that the ideologies universities push--often in the name of wellness and belonging--are actually making young people unwell and isolated.
A starker example of the naked Emperor lies in the canon in some disciplines, especially education. Imagine what the public reaction would be if it came out that the most cited and assigned books in teachers’ colleges were written by Nazi sympathizers, whose most influential pedagogical ideas were directly connected to their Nazi sympathizing (as opposed to, say, James Watson, whose discovery of DNA structure is not directly connected to his recreational racism). My guess is that the public would be very upset about this, and liberals would call for much more drastic government interventions in campus governance than conservatives are calling for now. Yet, replace Nazism with communism (which was even deadlier) in that sentence, and that’s basically exactly what is currently happening in schools of education. The most widely assigned and cited works in the “critical pedagogy” canon, such as those by Paulo Freire, literally praise Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and other communist despots, encourage educators to emphasize revolutionary politics over learning reading and math, and endorse political violence.
Third, no one knows what the rules are. Made-up rules are often enforced and actual rules are often broken with impunity. For example, I was once called into a meeting with a DEI dean and asked to apologize for saying in a public talk that immigrants risk their lives to come to the U.S. Worse still, I had shown a picture of migrants from Haiti (in the news at the time) on my slide, who happened to be black, and I am white. Therefore, it was “anti-blackness”. Of course, there is no rule against what I said (and I didn’t apologize), and there is a rule against applying disciplinary standards differently on account of someone’s race (which this DEI dean was implicitly doing). There is also a rule against hiring based on race, gender, and other protected characteristics, which became widely practiced after the summer of 2020. When I pointed this out to the equity office, they admitted it was probably illegal but refused to do anything without a plaintiff, i.e. someone willing to throw their career away suing over a job they didn’t know they weren’t eligible for. How convenient that it’s hard to find such a person.
A tragic aspect of all of this is that the majority of university faculty and staff still do great work and still believe in the academic missions of truth-seeking and discovery, education, and public deliberation. These are essential public goods in an advanced society. If we didn’t have universities, we would have to build something else to serve these purposes. In my experience, it is a small but vocal minority of faculty, staff, and students who create most of the problems I describe above. But almost everyone else either enables them, keeps their head down and goes along with them, or quietly leaves out of frustration. For this collective cowardice, we share some of the blame for the current state of higher ed.
There’s a big debate going on--in the center and on the right--about whether and how governments should intervene to fix campus problems. The broad arguments are, on the one hand, that universities have become so extreme that they won’t be able to fix themselves, and on the other hand, that too much or the wrong kinds of government interventions create slippery slopes that pose long-term risks to academic freedom and other core university values. I think both of these arguments are right, and there’s a way for governments to intervene without going down a slippery slope, if done carefully.
More on that in my next piece!
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Yep. I graduated with my degree in mathematics a few years ago. I love number theory so much that sometimes I stay up all night working on a problem, and I'm a successful enough tutor to expect that I'd be an effective classroom teacher. IOW, I'd be an ideal research mathematician and professor. But at this point just the thought of grad school, much less employment on a campus, makes me feel like crying or throwing up. There are a lot of people who don't even consider academia who'd be good at it.
The idea of no public universities may seem like a solution, but that doesn’t remove the money that is corrupting higher ed. Consider the millions Qatar has poured into US universities; or the unlimited student loans that prevent market forces from impacting colleges. They can raise tuitions to ridiculous levels, not to pay for quality faculty, but instead to fund their exploding bureaucracies.