Academics are to blame for the woke wreckage at universities
As young teachers at Oxford we know how deep-rooted woke thinking is. And it’s older colleagues who stood by nodding it all through
Gaslighting is an abused word these days. But gaslit is how we feel whenever we are told that the problem of woke ideology at universities has been exaggerated. We, after all, have been inside the belly of the beast for ten years. Coming up to Oxford as undergraduates in 2015, the period referred to by some as “the great awokening”, the public mood was by turns puritanical and doctrinaire, obsessed with an oddly narrow range of social justice issues.
From Rhodes Must Fall, a student campaign to press the university into removing a smaller-than-life-size statue of the Victorian imperialist from the façade of Oriel College, to the mass sit-ins of Black Lives Matter and the pro-Palestinian encampments of recent summers, each season has brought a new style of ideological fast fashion. At least such political posturing will have provided ripe material for student satire magazines, you may think. Well, not exactly: our own college’s satirical publication was forcibly shot down by a student vote (on account, of course, of its politically wrong-thinking transgressions).
When a satire of the modern-day woke university finally appears, it is
likely to make its villain the kind of intolerant, blue-haired,
placard-wielding undergraduate who has so shamelessly cast themselves as
the protagonist of the past decade’s culture war. The more we have seen
of university life, however — as undergrads, then PhD students and
finally teaching — the clearer it has become that the damage being done
by woke ideology is not confined to student skirmishes, but has infected
academia at every level: taught content, research, disciplinary norms
and even institutional design.
In
fact, the conventional emphasis on the menace of woke student activism
risks getting things backwards. There is indeed an important
generational component to the malaise gripping universities. But the
culpable figures are not students. They are those academics in positions
of authority and secure employment who have negligently allowed the
culture to be trashed, leaving a mess for the next generation to clear
up.
Above all, the adults in the seminar room have aided and abetted the spread of destructive errors under the guise of behaving with political neutrality. Incredibly, some even flatter themselves that standing idly by as bad ideas flourish is a way of exercising mature restraint in the marketplace of ideas.
No cause illustrates this dysfunction better than trans ideology. Within our own discipline, philosophy, it has warped the intellectual environment. Most famously, Kathleen Stock was hounded from her position at Sussex for defending women’s rights against encroachment by adult males who claim to be women. When her work was presented in scholarly forums, other academics objected to being “non-consensually co-platformed” with her: an impressively obtuse complaint from the folks who insist that women have no business worrying about the presence of men in their spaces.
Holly Lawford-Smith, a sex-realist feminist, was treated in a notably underhand way by Oxford University Press, who attempted to rescind her publication contract on spurious grounds. Jimmy Doyle, a philosophy lecturer, recently left Harvard, where the highly policed atmosphere made it feel, as he told The Times in a recent interview, as though “the nation’s intellectual elite [are] enforcing moral auto-lobotomy as a condition of entry to polite society”. Worse treatment met Alex Byrne at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) who, alone among senior analytic philosophers, has published sane, rigorous papers arguing for the view that “male woman” is an empty category. A few months ago, Byrne was the target of an open letter organised by his colleagues, accusing him, in a characteristically McCarthyite idiom, of “collaborating” with the Trump administration for helping to author a report about the treatment of paediatric gender dysphoria.
For years, trans ideology has presented academics with what economists call a “collective action problem”. Intervene alone, and the costs can be huge; bite your tongue and at least you might have a quiet life. Recently, opting for the high personal cost strategy, we published a public essay, Philosophical Malpractice, on a brief submitted to the US Supreme Court by 21 Yale philosophers, some of the most distinguished figures in the discipline. Styling themselves as impartial experts, they argued that a state-level ban by Tennessee on medical interventions such as puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones was presumptively unconstitutional. In effect, these academics were intervening on the side of inducing symptoms such as lifelong sterility in psychologically distressed children. That such a position can sail under the flag of political neutrality, and do so largely unquestioned, is a sign of how far academia is from a healthy intellectual equilibrium.
Elite academia in America now faces a reckoning. Advocacy groups have used lawsuits to expose its illegal hiring practices. In 2023, the Supreme Court ruled that methods of positive discrimination used by elite universities in admissions were, as many had long suspected, racist and unconstitutional. More recently – maliciously, indiscriminately and in many cases, to the detriment of good science – the Trump administration has forced universities such as Harvard and Columbia to the negotiating table by withholding their vast federal research budgets. Much of the insurgent right, on both sides of the Atlantic, has revelled in seeing its philistine agenda put into practice. But elite universities are responsible for putting themselves in a position in which their own culpable failures can be so credibly exposed.
For years, these institutions have systematically silenced or ignored the few internal truth-tellers who have tried to sound the alarm about indulgence of cancel culture, anti-meritocratic appointment processes, the flourishing of antisemitism on campus, the metastasising spread of equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) infrastructure, and the collapse in intellectual standards all the foregoing are liable to trigger. Now — in Columbia’s case, to the tune of $200 million — they are paying the price. America, often regarded as the progenitor of academia’s woke obsession, is also the first to try to rein in its excesses.
What has gone wrong? Simple: academia is biased. And though the indulgence of the disturbing demands of trans activism may provide the most vivid expression of this bias, the problem is far more general. Outside economics, many academics indulge poorly evidenced, anti-capitalist posturing to an incredible degree. Identify yourself as a socialist, or openly sympathise with the objectives of murderously oppressive left-wing regimes, and no one will blink. The academic publisher Routledge has a 114-book series on Fascism and the Far Right, whose “scope includes anti-fascism, radical-right populism, extreme-right violence and terrorism”. It has no comparable series on communism and the far left.
Volunteer woke-coded examples in humanities seminar rooms or at conferences and you should expect to receive solemn nods of approval. By contrast, try asking otherwise opinionated academics point-blank whether, for instance, any male sex offenders should be housed in women’s prisons and the result is usually a bout of spluttering incredulity, as if you have just made a brazenly impermissible move in a game everyone is playing. Persist, and you’ll meet with irrelevant prevarication, and a sudden bout of reticence as to whether it’s the kind of issue about which academics should even venture an opinion. Many academics are so resistant to the idea their profession might be biased that they refuse to agree to the terms in which a discussion of the problem can be conducted. Use words like woke or cancel culture and one’s left-wing interlocutors will often pull a sophisticated grimace. Sometimes they will insist that they don’t even know what those words mean. Such opportunistic confessions of ignorance are exactly symptomatic of bias. Woke is a nice, simple word for the phenomenon it names. By denying its use to their opponents, academics are, ironically, engaging in a practice which in other contexts they call “hermeneutical injustice”: depriving marginalised people of the words they need to describe the injustices they face.
Even as moderate academics nitpick over its meaningfulness, academia’s radicals embrace the term woke to name what they take to be their own moral-cum-intellectual virtue. The philosopher Rima Basu, for instance, commends a woke attitude as the “virtue” of “[exercising] a kind of indirect long-term control over how we engage in inquiry”. In the same paper, Basu argues that even if you have strong evidence for statistical generalisations such as “African-Americans commit murder at disproportionate rates”, it is not just wrong to assert them but impossible even to know them, in effect because of their potential to be used in racist reasoning. Though other philosophers provide rigorous responses to such arguments, they typically maintain, or feign, obliviousness about how weird and wrongheaded the ideas are in the first place. They collude in the self-image of their woke-identified colleagues as being on the side of moral virtue and intellectual progress.
But woke scholarship is highly regressive. Not only does it retard the pursuit of fairness and truth it claims to promote, it takes intellectual steps backwards. Many woke theories are messy and ugly, useless for acquiring real insight or theoretical understanding, and encode errors so glaring even non-experts can see them a mile off.
Few academics are sufficiently sensitive to the damage woke bias has done to universities. When one inhabits an ideologically stifling atmosphere, it can be tricky to put one’s finger exactly on what is so malign about it. Any specific worrying detail can be dismissed by opponents as trivial; any impressionistic worry accused of lack of specificity. Still, as woke academics have often noted, the accretion of many subtle wrongs can have a cumulatively disastrous effect.
Externally, the proliferation of woke error has done severe reputational damage. As one physicist, based at Rutgers in the US, put it on social media: universities’ claims to be capable of self-reform will be credible “when they can correctly count the number of sexes present in the human species”. Academics who don’t register that connection — readily perceived by virtually everyone else — are kidding themselves.
Internally, it was a mistake of academia’s moderates to assume that woke theories could be successfully quarantined within certain fields without ramifying to the broader profession’s detriment. Once certain patterns of argument and inference gained unquestioned acceptance among whole cohorts of tenured professors in less rigorous departments, it was certain they would infect the rest of the system.
The rapid growth of EDI exacerbates the problem. (Salaries for EDI officials have doubled over three years at British universities: with Oxford the largest employer of all.) As a matter of simple sociology, it is unrealistic to expect faulty arguments for woke conclusions to be properly exposed in the classroom while the administrative infrastructure is mandating compliance with them outside o f it.
Thought and action are not so easily divided. Any teenager off to university to start a humanities degree next month will encounter the result of a scholarly environment that treats inadequate, moralistic theorising with an unearned respect. An analysis of cross-disciplinary US college syllabuses, shared by the psychologist Steven Pinker on X, revealed a pervasive bias towards woke scholarship. With the US figures probably propped up by its “great books” tradition, the UK’s figures were even direr: the gender studies specialist Judith Butler listed thousands of times more often than Plato; the cultural critic Edward Said more often than Shakespeare and the radical French philosopher Michel Foucault more than virtually anyone.
What comes next? The position of academia today resembles, in certain respects, that of financial institutions on the eve of the 2008 crash. Universities have been peddling the intellectual equivalent of collateral debt obligations, the bomb that set off the 2008 financial crisis, which mixed together valuable products and toxic ones. Insulated from accountability to the market by the bubble of student loan debt, universities have had the latitude to behave in ways that have not only helped shred their credibility but now justify, indeed, necessitate, external intervention.
America’s lawsuit disclosures have made it clear that many universities there were simply not alive to the fact that their hiring policies were racist and illegal in the most ordinary sense of those terms. In the UK, academic job listings sometimes require candidates to demonstrate their commitment to EDI in a manner doubtfully consistent with their legal duties to promote academic freedom. Academics often think of their institutions as the honest, hard-working underdog, compared with “big, bad corporations”. That self-conception obscures to them how they could be guilty of exactly the same legal and moral failings of which they accuse private-sector institutions. Universities are large publicly subsidised institutions, as vulnerable to self-perpetuating cycles of dysfunction as any other. It is reckless to think they will course-correct under their own momentum: an expectation which, if proposed as a non-interventionist remedy to the troubles in any other public body , would be rightly viewed as mad.
But listen to prominent spokespeople for the academy and it becomes radically unclear what external constraint they deem appropriate. They spurn accountability to the market or to public opinion. They certainly don’t think they’re directly accountable to the government; in fact their track record suggests they don’t even think they should be accountable to anti-discrimination law. Unless and until academics identify a specific, realistic mechanism for their own regulation, any complaints about externally imposed reforms have little credibility. Much academic research, to be clear, is good. The best academics are smart people, by any reasonable standard, their vulnerability to woke notwithstanding. Indeed, a complicating factor in getting honest and serious academics to recognise the problems in their profession is that many of them tend to underestimate the severity of the errors of their less able colleagues, especially in “studies” departments, where it is not uncommon for scholars to lack basic statistical literacy.
There are many lessons to draw from academia’s sustained indulgence of woke ideology. Any serious government should curb the funding of EDI bureaucracies. Subsidies that have been used to inflate the demand for college degrees, depressing standards, should be wound down. Tenure, a form of job security often justified on the grounds that it liberates academics to speak their minds, has proven doubtfully effective in that respect. Its unfortunate effect now may be to allow some of the worst proponents of a bankrupt ideology to continue to haunt their institutions long after the excesses of woke are banished from the rest of public life. The past decade has shown that wokeness disables academia from promoting knowledge and furthering the good in myriad ways. Perversely, but unsurprisingly, one of the things that bias precludes, for those in the grip of it, is its own discovery and correction. Steering universities towards this realisation should be the aim of academia’s real progressives.
