Woke ideology does not emanate from the Democratic party, as such, but from America’s universities, which turn out the political activists, corporate executives, and culture makers that have spread that virus far and near.
Today, though, the academic establishment is in a bad way. Enrollments are plummeting, costs are soaring, and student learning is embarrassing. Universities send out graduates who know little, can do little, and can’t get jobs, even as their enormous student loans come due.
The good news is that universities are starting to recognize that there is a problem. They can sense that the culture is turning against them. That voters have re-elected Donald Trump, who is threatening to tax university endowments, largely out of a reaction against leftwing identity politics, is part of the awakening (as opposed to the awokening). The intersectional left is coming apart over its internal contradictions, as it descends into anti-semitism and finds itself championing anti-woman, anti-gay Muslim terrorists. In this climate, the more traditional scholars, who have seen what the reigning ideology has done to their fields but have been keeping their heads down, are starting to assert themselves.
The flagship trade publication of higher education, the Chronicle of Higher Education, has published Michael W. Clune’s We Asked for It, with the summary deck, “The politicization of research, hiring, and teaching made professors sitting ducks.” This is a rather contrite confession. He writes, “Professors began to see the traditional values and methods of their fields — such as the careful weighing of evidence and the commitment to shared standards of reasoned argument — as complicit in histories of oppression. As a result, many professors and fields began to reframe their work as a kind of political activism.” This is happening not just in the humanities and social sciences, but also in the hard sciences, even in medical schools.
Having spent decades as an English professor, I have seen this firsthand, though I found a haven in Christian colleges. Graduate students like me used to go into the field of literary studies because they enjoy reading. They might, for example, be great fans of Shakespeare, whom they have found moving and instructive and whom they want to understand more deeply. More recently, though, in English Departments committed to “critical theory,” the scholar submits the author to “interrogation”–their word, and the police state metaphor is intentional–in which authors and literary works are tortured until they confess to political crimes (sexism, colonialism, homophobia, etc.). Grad students who liked Shakespeare won’t like him any more once his oppression is revealed, or if they do, they had better keep quiet about it.
Today, though, an alternative approach to literature is emerging, the “post-critique” movement. Sparked by Ruth Felski, whose book The Limits of Critique argues that “Rather than looking behind the text—for its hidden causes, determining conditions, and noxious motives—we might place ourselves in front of the text, reflecting on what it unfurls, calls forth, makes possible.” She says that we should ask what the text is telling us, why it moves us, and how it is working. She advocates a return to aesthetics and meaning. (See this explanation of this “post-critical” scholarship. See also Walker Larson’s discussion of these and other heralds of change in academia.)
Many universities are are now refraining from issuing political statements and are dismantling their DEI programs, some of which force faculty members to formally articulate a woke confession of faith as a condition of employment.
So perhaps higher education can reform itself. And yet, there may be limits as to how much reform is possible. A whole generation of professors and administrators has been schooled in critical theory and interrogating their subjects may be all they know how to do. But intellectual fashions change, and we can expect higher education to do so as well, eventually.
And yet, changing institutions, with their entrenched personnel and long-established habits of mind, is very difficult and can take a long time.
In some ways, it is easier and quicker to start new and better institutions than to reform the old ones. This is happening as well, as we’ll post about tomorrow.
Illustration: William Shakespeare Interrogated by KGB Agents. Generated by the Cranach blog via Deep AI.
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