The Anti-Woke Counterrevolution Begins

Two of America’s prestigious private universities, Vanderbilt and Washington University in St. Louis, recently did something extraordinary: they jointly bought a full paid ad in the Wall Street Journal entitled “Higher Education is at a Crossroads” that asserted:

Ideological forces in and outside of campuses have pulled too many universities away from the core purpose, principles and values that made them America’s great engines of learning, innovation and discovery, and the envy of the world.

They further call for “excellence in all aspects of our …work, free of political litmus tests, grounded in a commitment to institutional neutrality” and “academic freedom and freedom of expression, to ensure unfettered inquiry… and debate … free from censorship and disruption.” These universities are pledging themselves to refrain from taking political positions while encouraging lively but peaceful debate and not tolerating violent, disruptive protests that endanger lives and stifle thoughts. Noteworthy, not only did both chancellors of the two universities, Daniel Diermeier and Andrew Martin, sign the statement, but so did the chairs of both of their governing boards.

Full page ad in today’s WSJ taken out by leaders at @VanderbiltU and @WashU:

Higher Education is at a Crossroads

To university leadership, Board members and alumni:

American higher education is at a crossroads. Ideological forces in and outside of campuses have pulled too many… pic.twitter.com/SGdlxx7NOS

— Steve McGuire (@sfmcguire79) February 25, 2025

Implicitly, these institutions are saying, “Higher ed has gone too far with its woke supremacy that tries to enforce ideological conformity and tolerates violence against innocent students, such as shown by protests at Columbia and other elite schools.” Enough is enough. Higher education’s job is disseminating knowledge and discovery through, among other things, reasoned civilized discourse. As someone who has visite d both schools—one for a year as a faculty member—I am proud of them.

There are broader indicators that society is increasingly fed up with the antics of the woke left but searching for life’s true meaning and understanding. The decisive Trump victory is cited by many, but there are other indicators within higher education itself. Intriguing to me is the upsurge in religious interest on many campuses, consistent with recent Gallup polls showing that the decline in church affiliation among the general public has greatly slowed and maybe ended. College kids in my town go to church in bigger numbers than five years ago and, remarkably, are endorsing more traditional forms of religious expression; Catholic girls often wear veils to church, for example. Schools with a strong conservative or libertarian Christian orientation are often booming, while more uber woke liberal arts colleges are often struggling.

Politicians are seeing the trends, too, and reacting.

Several states have created new semi-autonomous learning centers promoting traditionalist thinking and conservative views to offset leftist domination of the academy. I am proud that Ohio is starting five such intellectual oases at state universities. Bans to varying degrees on “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) campus activity are seemingly happening in roughly one-third of the states, with the number still growing. Like many faculty, I have historically opposed political attempts to control curricular matters, outlaw tenure, or do much more than appropriate ever larger sums of money to keep the good times rolling. Even today, I am wary of much involvement, yet I favored a hugely controversial bill in Ohio stifling DEI and imposing some review of the performance of tenured faculty. We should put some limits at state-funded schools on faculty wishing to overturn long-held conventions on the running of academic villages called “universities.”

Markets are playing a role in ending the academic Reign of Terror. Ultra-woke expressions at schools like Evergreen State College in Washington and the University of Missouri had powerful adverse enrollment consequences, and even mighty Ivy League schools are facing some reputational damage and significant declines in alumni contributions. Some lucrative practices are being scrutinized and probably ending, such as very generous overhead provisions on federal research grants, forcing some retrenchment, particularly for overpaid administrators involved in distributing what economists call economic rents—overpayment for services.

No university is an island unto itself, to steal from a seventeenth century Englishman, John Donne, that probably few high school or college students read much these days, to their unwitting chagrin. All schools are dependent not only on academic markets but also on public goodwill to prosper. These outside forces are starting to seek ending the excesses of the woke supremacy, in a slightly less dramatic and bloody way than used to end the French Revolution, but strong enough to likely bring some sanity to an academy soon facing a generation that the birth dearth and federal fiscal irresponsibility has assured will have some mighty new challenges of its own.