Mick Hartley

After their Philosophical Malpractice piece in The Philosophers' Magazine, Daniel Kodsi and John Maier have a longish "weekend essay" in the Times today whose title really says it all – Academics are to blame for the woke wreckage at universities:

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….

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.

If you want one simple root cause for where we are – and this is me rather than Kodsi and Maier – you could well cite the baleful influence of postmodern scholarship.

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.

Their conclusion:

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.