The Collegiate Anti-Woke Counterrevolution

From around 2010 to the present, a woke supremacy took charge on many American college campuses, upending a traditional emphasis on a lively but civil dissemination of time-honored ideas and discovery of new ones, replacing it with ideologically driven support of a leftish agenda.

Over the past seven years, I wrote a couple of books totaling close to 200,000 words about all of this, but the Wall Street Journal in an excellent recent editorial provided a nice 50 word summary of the current state of collegiate affairs: “rising tuition that prices out the middle class; an explosion in bureaucracy that steal resources from instruction; runaway grade inflation; an opaque admissions process that prizes race, gender and identity over achievement; disdain for America’s founding and its abiding principles; and a largely left-wing monoculture that discourages honest…debate…” 

Offering a perceived shoddy product has adverse consequences, even in academia. Enrollments are lower than they were in 2010, the number of school closings is starting to grow (most recently: uber wokish Hampshire College in Massachusetts), public confidence in colleges had until recently declined, some governments (including the federal one) were reducing financial support, attacking academic tenure, creating traditionally oriented civic institutes, and threatening other reforms such as redoing a flawed accreditation system. 

Meanwhile, some prominent private donors publicly announced a withdrawal of financial largesse, and some presidents of prestigious universities embarrassed themselves and their institutions in widely reported congressional testimony.

Lately, however, there has been an upsurge in campus sanity. In a thoughtful report, a faculty committee at Yale conceded that much recent criticism had merit and that some concrete reforms (such as reducing preferential admissions not based on academic merit, and moderating inflated grades) are needed. The president of Dartmouth College, Sian Beilock, wrote an excellent op-ed for the Wall Street Journal extolling the virtues of institutional neutrality and vigorous but civil discourse, suggesting that “requires a campus culture where controversial speakers are heard rather than cancelled, where disagreement is expected rather than feared…” As she put it, “American higher education has a trust problem.” She recognized what many other Americans have: “On many campuses, students are exposed to a limited range of perspectives, signaling to them what rather than how to think.”

Beilock was following the path-setting efforts of two other prominent university presidents or chancellors, Vanderbilt’s Daniel Diermeier, and Washington University in St. Louis’s Andrew Martin. Diermeier’s innovations extend beyond promoting intellectual diversity, including a raft of new initiatives, including establishing several new campuses long distances from the school’s Nashville hub.

Even Harvard has shown some retreat from maximum wokeness. According to the Harvard Crimson, university Provost (and former Law School dean) John Manning, described as a “prominent conservative legal scholar,” has suggested that there should be a campaign to endow a healthy number of professorships that would reduce the left-wing monopoly (affirmative action for conservatives?) The idea may make sense. Politically, asking leftish dominated departments to hire conservative and libertarian professors is probably an exercise in futility, so Manning appears to be proposing an end run that would circumvent that problem, but skeptics might reasonably consider it a hustle to extract a few hundred million dollars from an increasingly recalcitrant alumni fed up with campus leftish shenanigans.

In many public universities, state governmental officials have pushed some constructive change, such as increasing emphasis on America’s historical and civic heritage (notably in Ohio), creating traditionally or conservative-oriented civic institutes with considerable autonomy within existing university structures, or eliminating anti-meritorious DEI programs (in several states). In some cases, the push for reform has come from members of school governing boards. 

And it appears these efforts have stopped the precipitous decline in public confidence in higher education, if recent Gallup polling data is any indication. The big decline, in my judgment, in large part reflected a lack of clarity over who “owns” and controls universities—the faculty, the students, major donors, the official governing board, and, for state or church-controlled schools, sometimes their legally constituted “owners.” The adult overseers (governing boards, state governments, sometimes very large donors) are being jolted out of serving almost as ceremonial participants into having to make real decisions.

Muting or ending the woke policies that have contributed to falling public confidence is not enough: higher education’s future does not look overly bright. The number of college-aged American students is going to decline because of falling fertility. Foreign student enrollment may have peaked as other nations develop increasingly top-flight universities. The nation’s capacity to fund higher education is being increasingly reduced by rapidly rising federal debt obligations reflecting irresponsible fiscal behavior in Washington. Debt service may soon crowd out student or research support. Possibly AI technology will cause declining employment opportunities for bright college graduates, but not for such non-college trained occupations such as welding, plumbing and home health care.

This short assessment ignores still other problems, such as a scandalous rise in academic dishonesty, including fictitious research results and widespread student cheating on exams and elsewhere. It ignores the absurdity of requiring students in America to study four years for degrees conferred elsewhere (i.e., Oxford University) in three. It does not fully convey that administrative bloat has not only raised costs but diverted universities from job one: creating and disseminating knowledge. Channeling Winston Churchill: never have so many/ spent so much/ for so long/ learning so little. Hopefully, the anti-woke counterrevolution may ease these problems.