Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Taking Down the Woke Agenda
No part of our culture has been immune from the disease of woke-ism. Whether one studies corporations, educational institutions, the media, federal and state governments, woke-ism has corrupted every part of our culture to one degree or another. When I contemplate how to even begin to break its hold on our country, that proposition appears overwhelming. Where to start? How to make legitimate inroads? How to get an informed audience to consider the issues and make changes?
Eventually, however, I discerned that tackling one bastion of woke-ism might be possible. It is one of the oldest institutions, as it began to show its power in the 20th century, and it continues to demonstrate its pervasive influence nearly everywhere.
I’m talking about the public university.
For those of you who are very skeptical about attacking the roots of woke-ism through the university, there are a number of arguments that I find convincing. First, it has been the mouthpiece for the woke agenda for nearly 100 years; although that fact can be daunting, that longevity also suggests that it has not only overstayed its welcome, but it has abused its power and mandate, distorted its original agenda for creating the environment that would encourage the discussion of ideas, no matter their origins. A person doesn’t have to go far to discover how the university’s totalitarian, discriminatory and restrictive aims have made it the illegitimate arbiter of free speech; that determination applies to the university administration, educators and students.
Thus, a legitimate argument can be made that the university is one of the early sources of attacking the American ethos, and as a result, miseducating students, spreading distortions, and misusing their roles and purposes.
Taking down the university as a fundamental purveyor of woke-ism would deliver severe damage to the goals of those who wish to destroy the very fabric of America.
To strike at the heart of woke-ism in the universities, four main areas should be targeted: (1) engaging citizens, particularly parents who are already fighting the dominance of woke-ism in their school systems; (2) empowering governors and legislators to hold public universities accountable; and (3) applying significant penalties for those at those universities, including the administration and teachers, who ignore or abuse state law regarding education and free speech.
Engaging Citizens
Parents and even teachers have continued to fight school boards that allow school administrations to indoctrinate their students in CRT and anti-American rhetoric. Although it reflects data from one year ago, one list suggests much animosity toward school boards:
Activists and parents have launched 50 recall efforts this year aimed at unseating 126 school board members, according to a new report from Ballotpedia, a website that tracks U.S. politics and elections. Most of those recalls — which already surpass the record for a single year — started as objections to Covid-19 restrictions, but five of the most recently launched campaigns, including a particularly contentious fight in Loudon Country, Virginia, include concerns about critical race theory.
And, in a new development this year, rather than targeting a single member, these efforts often target multiple members or entire school boards, according to Abbey Smith, a researcher at Ballotpedia.
You might ask, what can parents of younger children do to affect the universities’ teaching of a woke agenda? Those parents may one day want to send their children to the universities, and part of their research should include the universities’ commitment to traditional university values, including the curriculum. Parents can then make wiser decisions about where their children should attend university, or better yet, decide whether to send them to the university at all.
Engaging Governors and Legislatures
In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis has taken the lead in restricting the teaching of critical race theory and other subjects, such as the 1619 Project. Several other states have already taken action to enact bills that restrict teaching on racism. Texas Lt/ Governor Dan Patrick responded in February to the University of Texas pushback:
‘They don’t understand that we in the Legislature represent the people of Texas. We are those who distribute taxpayer dollars. We are the ones who pay their salaries. The parents are the ones who pay tuition. And of course, we’re going to have a say in what the curriculum is,’ said Patrick.
The Lt Governor promised Senate Higher Education Committee hearings during the next legislative session. Essentially the hearings will teach faculty members of public universities a lesson in Texas politics.
Many states, however, have limited their laws to restrict K-12 grades, and don’t address the university systems. Anticipating action by the legislatures, the universities are pushing back against the idea that governors and legislatures should be able to restrict their curriculum:
Joan Bertin, who heads the National Coalition Against Censorship, said that when state legislators use their financial clout to punish or deter universities, they undermine them as places where a wide range of ideas—including controversial and unpopular ones—can be explored and discussed.
‘When state legislatures meddle in purely academic affairs they not only undermine the quality of education but also tread on constitutionally shaky ground,’ said Bertin, whose coalition is comprised of 50 artistic, educational and other nonprofit groups. ‘Curricular decisions must be based on legitimate education grounds, not popularity, politics or personal preferences. The integrity of the education system depends on respect for First Amendment rights and academic freedom, and legislators who truly care about education understand that.’
Although some states have threatened to withdraw funding for the universities for following a woke agenda, they sometimes decide not to follow through. There are a few ways to put teeth in these threats: 1) determine in advance that action will be taken and that the universities will be held accountable (2) establish a legislative oversight committee that has the power to investigate the curriculum being taught and; and (3) commit to taking action.
I also think creating a body of governors from red states (and any blue states that have the gumption) to meet regularly to exchange ideas for restoring a traditional public university curriculum would provide political support for the states, too.
Cutting Funding
When state law is violated regarding curriculum, cut funds as promised. Funds won’t be restored until proof of corrective action is provided to the oversight committee of the legislature.
Re-Establishing Free Speech
Although half-hearted efforts have been made by some university administrators to protect free speech, the Left’s agenda to punish conservative speech made by teachers and students continues. We need to resurrect the understanding of the tenets of free speech in the public university:
During the 1980s, however, some scholars and activists on the left started to propose restrictions on racist hate speech as well as violent and degrading pornography, on the ground that these forms of expression undermine the equality of women and minorities. In response, some conservatives began to develop a more libertarian position, which appealed to the First Amendment as a bulwark against what they regarded as the dangers of political correctness. In recent years, this conservative-libertarian approach has become one of the most important currents in First Amendment law. The federal courts have increasingly used this approach to strike down regulations that seek to promote liberal or progressive values.
It’s time to take even further decisive action.
* * * *
Legislatures and governors in particular need to waste no time in moving against the public universities. Given that even blue state legislatures may turn red in the November mid-terms, there’s no excuse for letting the woke agenda continue to destroy the lives of our conservative university professors and their students, and in the process, extinguishing the freedoms that we believe in.
[Photo from Leon Wu at Unsplash.com]
Published in Culture
There is Hugh Hewitt’s old “Was Alger Hiss a spy?” question too.
It is both sad and fascinating how the left capture academia. It started with the entirely noble idea of faculty control and tenure. How else would you ensure that the ideas of mankind would be considered, debated, researched and catalogued without political or religious influence? And on this basis certain individuals of outstanding intellectual gifts but uncommon beliefs were added to the faculty and became part of the decision process for selecting future faculty. A few more were added based on the efforts of the last hire who was looking to expand congenial intellectual approaches. Then the number grew to where it was justified that there was a new “school” of thought that should be represented in any self-respecting academic community. Then when the “school” grew large it started to dominate and once in a dominant position it did not have either the grace or outlook to invite different thinkers into the institution in the way that the earlier faculty had done with the initial academic “oddball”. And so intellectual darkness descended.
Now the way out is to blast apart the very controls that had insulated academia from political and religious control. If it is done it will have adverse consequences on the process of true intellectual inquiry for a time. But failure to undo it will consign a society to tyranny.
A great discussion. If we have the time we have to radically transform all our schools. We act as if the teachers unions were legally in charge. They do not play a positive role anywhere and in well run states the schools can be taken from them. Boom, just like that.
Public universities, in contrast, are not run by unions from whom they can be taken, and I don’t understand how so many got so bad, and fixing them will take longer, but in well run Republican States we can begin. We can’t replace the Ivy League universities they are too rich for us to abolish but they feed this monstrous apparatus that will destroy the country.
If we can win the next two elections we might have the time to fix a lot of these matters and have to be prepared to do so, but winning is not obvious. How many votes were created for silly old Biden? How many will be needed for some new candidate who looks better and isn’t obviously senile? What must be understood is that the Chinese are in charge of Biden but may not be in charge of the next democrat, even an idiot. Governors like De Santis need to charge ahead and show the way but in Washington our priority should be to get rid of Biden. That she is an idiot doesn’t matter, she probably isn’t owned by the Chinese. And if she has to be replaced put the corrupt old lady in charge. What’s crucial is to understand that with Biden the Chinese are in charge and their purpose should be obvious.
A very fine description of how we arrived at this time and place, Rodin. It shows how a virtuous idea eventually yields to greed and power, and now we must fight back. Thanks.
Are you saying there is no fun in running a guillotine?
There might be, at least up to the last second . . .
Public universities, public endowments. Why not? The state has lots of power to deal with funds of charities that have outlived their purposes.
I have no problem with private universities using private money to do private things. (The idea that such institutions provide the ‘leaders of tomorrow’, of course, would need to be comprehensively exploded.) The fact that someone has benefited from an erroneous and possibly immoral policy in the past doesn’t make them wrong or hypocritical for wanting to correct that policy in the present.
Perhaps the light at the end of the tunnel is an apparently growing perception that not every kid needs a university education. Many of our wealthiest entrepreneurs lack a degree. T when universities are hungering for students rather than the other way around, there may be an opportunity for sanity to prevail. I am not holding my breath, though.
This is a deep problem, deeper than just what academics believe.
The basic problem is in the very nature of our educational system. Universities are dominated by people who have never had to to function in the real world, and that means that they are free to embrace irrational world views that will never be tested by reality. Their incentives, by and large, have nothing to do with any need to produce practical results. As long as this continues to be true, the deck is stacked against change.
Of course this is a problem for employers, because it means that they have to deal with new employees who haven’t learned anything useful. A far better system would be one based on internships and apprenticeships: job skills are best learned on the job, and I suspect a one-year unpaid internship would be a better education in almost any field than an academic degree. There would still be a need for theoretical classroom work, but it would have to be results-oriented.
I think the only real solution is for employers, parents, and young people to recognize that the universities offer little of practical value. Employers should focus on actual skills, irrespective of credentials, and should offer internships and apprenticeships where this makes sense. Lenders should stop lending money to buy degrees that offer no hope of earning a paycheck. Let the universities wither away and become irrelevant. (Fortunately, I think this process is already starting.)
It has started, but it takes a while to turn the ship around. There are multiple constituencies–the parents, students, trade schools and employers. We need to find ways not only to educate them, but to provide incentives that they value. The parents will have trained kids who will be prepared for a job in the real world; the students will have practical training (and maybe we could offer a small income); the trade schools could work with the employers (if they aren’t already) to help students transition; and the employers will have many new resources to fill those jobs they haven’t been able to fill. Very good points, BXO.
For the few working the blade, maybe. For the majority trying to keep their head out of the basket, not so much.
When my kids were in high school, which would have been the mid-2000s, our school district abruptly eliminated any classes below college-prep level. “All our kids go to college” was the message, which I’m sure felt good to board members but not great to students who really weren’t or didn’t want to be college material. At the same time, they closed down the auto shop classes. Our county does have a technical high school with training in non-college professions, but attendance is limited and it’s not practical for everybody.
Kids would be so much better served by a dialing back of the everybody goes to college mentality. But “More low-level classes for our underachievers!” doesn’t sound good in a Board of Ed campaign speech, I guess.
The auto aftermarket developed standards for mechanic certifications as did the OE companies. Software cert exams and other technical paths evolved apart for school systems. Maybe broader career prep schools that teach esoteric things like reading, writing and basic math skills. Maybe museums and other non-profits offer courses in culture and history attractive and common enough that this becomes a popular way to be educated about such things.
Newt Gingrinch created an American economic history program in the 1990s with taped interviews with CEOs and inventors, lectures by distinguished profs and complete with materials such that colleges could resell the course, offer credit and only supply grad students to run discussion sessions and grade papers. Lots of big universities did that until it was considered evil and toxic to be associated with Gingrich.
But the model works–encapsulate presentations of the very best lecturers and then offer the content online remotely or in other class settings. There is no longer any reason to let the wokerati strangle access to quality education if the degrees they issue are worthless and no longer provide career access or the satisfaction of learning.
I’m afraid you’ll be waiting a lot longer than you expect for that to happen. Inez Stepman talks about this pretty convincingly. The woke left has had a captive audience for their cultural revolution for at least 2 generations now. The employers and business entities you are hoping will save you are staffed, expecially in HR departments, by the kids coming out of 16 years + of lefty indocitrination. They aren’t quitting or reversing course any time soon. The idea that millenials and zoomers are going to lurch right on social issues in their mid 30’s is probably a fantasy.
Sure, eventually it will collapse on itself. But, as the qoute (and I don’t know who said it, but would attribute if I did) says, “there’s a lot of ruin in a nation.” There’s always reasons for optimism, and we should always stay in the fight, but it would be a lie if I didn’t say that my gut tells me it gets a lot worse before we have any hope of it getting better.
Do you see any inconsistency between the first two ideas here, and the third?
If you’re going to allow free speech, then faculty will be free to indoctrinate their students in CRT and anti-Americanism. If state law is going to impose a curriculum, then faculty will not be free to teach contrary to that curriculum.
Someone needs to set the curriculum, to determine what students will be taught. This can be the legislature, or the faculty. The legislature is, at least, subject to control by the voters. We know what happens when the faculty is put in charge.
Welcome to Ricochet!
Without control (i.e. funding) of schools coming from a lot more local level, there is no good solution.
The great thing about market realities is the inherent indifference to ideologically preferred outcomes.
Deep thinkers with strong character don’t tend to be woke. The wokesters are herd-like creatures. If the winds shift, the tides turn and incomes require it, the whole PC shtick could be gone like a fart in a hurricane. The intense indoctrination of the Hitler Youth and the effect of near-hypnotic public displays wore off pretty fast when the allies overran the country.
If the country gets wise to the true value of a college degree and ceases to go into ruinous debt, it will not be long before Diversity, Equity and Inclusion empires start to lose funding and colleges redefine themselves. Keeping in mind that the single most important qualification to be a college president or dean is sheer gutlessness, the “commitment” to DEI will vanish if preserving that crap causes a loss in income or job security at the top of the university.
The lack of character, moral substance, and intellectual depth that makes wokedom possible also means its foundation is tenuous. Once it is no longer about pissing away the national wealth accumulated by past American generations, people will be forced to come back to the reality-based side.
Call it the cynical optimist position.
Free speech does not mean that anything goes.
You may be right. (I like Inez, too.) But I agree with @oldbathos in a later comment that the woke are loud, but they are not as strong as they think. Their foundation is tenuous, and I don’t know how long they will stay in the fight if circumstances become more challenging. Regardless, we need to prepare for a fight!
What does it mean, then? What are the limits?
I’m not opposed to the idea that there are limits. Many other people seem to be opposed to the idea that there are any limits.
My questions above may be a bit unfair, at least for the comments to a post. It would probably take an entire post to set forth an outline of the answers to my questions. The problem, though, is making a blanket assertion about free speech rights, such as that made at the end of the OP, without providing such details — and while simultaneously making proposals to deny the supposed “free speech” rights of teachers and professors.
I do think that the answer to the free speech question is fairly easy. When you’re an employee, doing your job, you don’t have free speech rights. You’re speaking on behalf of your employer, and you have to say what the employer tells you to say. If you don’t like it, quit.
Deep thinkers with strong character don’t tend to be woke. The wokesters are herd-like creatures. If the winds shift, the tides turn and incomes require it, the whole PC shtick could be gone like a fart in a hurricane. The intense indoctrination of the Hitler Youth and the effect of near-hypnotic public displays wore off pretty fast when the allies overran the country.
I don’t see the deep thinkers with strong moral character doing much to stem any of this tide. They don’t appear to be particularly courageous, at least not those who inhabit the hieghts of academia, finance, or corporate America. I think if we’re waiting for them to decide enough, and swoop in to save America, we’ll be waiting indefinitely.
If the country gets wise to the true value of a college degree and ceases to go into ruinous debt, it will not be long before Diversity, Equity and Inclusion empires start to lose funding and colleges redefine themselves. Keeping in mind that the single most important qualification to be a college president or dean is sheer gutlessness, the “commitment” to DEI will vanish if preserving that crap causes a loss in income or job security at the top of the university.
“If” does a lot of work here. And even when the country gets wise, I don’t see a lot of people out there making this an issue. Sure, if you read right wing media you know CRT and “woke”, but that’s not enough. At least half the states in this country have majority GOP legislatures. How many bills have passed or are onthe table that defund, severely limit the scope of, and/or bring the state universities to heal? 1 or 2. Florida maybe?
The lack of character, moral substance, and intellectual depth that makes wokedom possible also means its foundation is tenuous. Once it is no longer about pissing away the national wealth accumulated by past American generations, people will be forced to come back to the reality-based side.
Every American under 35 has for the most part grown up in a system that taught them from day one that the “woke” position is the position of moral substance. I think we on the right discount how much a not insubstantial minority come out of college believing firmly, religiously even, in wokism. They then go into education, into HR departments, into corporate America, media, etc. Again, I get the hope. But if you’re hoping for some mass awakening, road to damascus moment from this country… well I hope you get to see it in your lifetime. I doubt it though.
I absolutley agree, we need to be prepared to fight. More so, because I do not believe there is a knight in shining armor called “common sense” or “necessity” waiting in the wings to come save us. I am also not optimistic that we are anywhere near prepared for that fight. I also don’t see it as an issue of strenght vs. weekness. Yes eventually it will crumble in upon itself, but that doesn’t mean a rebirth of conservative American virtue, and Reagonite politics and economics. It just as likely means we get to find out what it’s like to be Sri Lankan, or the Danes. Worse case scenerio, North Korea has managed to exist for quite a while despite its lunacy.
I have no idea why you would think that local funding would solve the problem. If the local school boards are in charge, then those boards could impose terrible ideas, too. In fact, this is what has been happening in many places, hasn’t it?
The problem is bad ideas. Wicked, evil, anti-American ideas, like Wokeism and philosodomite teaching and the trans obscenity and rabid anti-white racism masquerading as CRT and “social justice,” and on and on. These ideas were allowed into the universities and the schools because of the principles of freedom of speech and freedom of inquiry.
The barbarians were allowed into the citadel and — surprise, surprise — they took over.
It is easy. The legislature has set the curriculum in FL. Going beyond those limits is not acceptable
Yes, they can impose terrible ideas. And those terrible jurisdictions can be more easily escaped and evaded if they are local, which will tend to temper the terrible ideas.
There is no way of getting away from bad ideas.
I should also note that I was careful not to say that local funding would solve the problems. I said there is no good solution without local funding. Local funding is necessary, but not sufficient.
Actually, I don’t believe in solutions at all, but I guess the term can be used as a shorthand for “making things better.”
Tenure is largely a thing of the past and that is a good start – particularly at public universities.
Government employees should always be on the hook for bad behavior, particularly college and university presidents who should be replaced each time a school loses a court case to FIRE.
Do away with tenure and you’ll reduce the portion of conservative professors from 0.01 percent of the total to 0.001 percent.
I think you’re right, Ret. Why stick around for the potential abuse if there aren’t any perks?