“We are all on campus now.”
—Andrew Sullivan
Here we have two editorials purporting to say different things, but in the end reaching nearly identical conclusions.
The first, published at Persuasion (click on screenshot), is by a young writer, Sahil Handa, described by Harvard’s Kennedy school: “a rising Junior from London studying Social Studies and Philosophy with a secondary in English. At Harvard, Sahil writes an editorial column for the Crimson and is a tutor at the Harvard Writing Center. He is the co-founder of a Podcast Platform startup, called Project Valentine, and is on the board of the Centrist Society and the Gap Year Society.”
The title of Handa’s piece (below) is certainly provocative—I see it as a personal challenge!—and his conclusion seems to be this: most students at elite colleges (including Harvard) are not really “woke” in the sense of constantly enforcing “political correctness” and trying to expunge those who disagree with them. He admits that yes, this happens sometimes at Harvard, but he attributes wokeness to a vocal minority. The rest of the students simply don’t care, and don’t participate. In the end, he sees modern students as being similar to college students of all eras, especially the Sixties, when conformity meant going to “hippie protests.” His conclusion: modern “woke” students, and those who don’t participate in the wokeness but also don’t speak up, are evincing the same “old borgeois values” (presumably conformity). And we shouldn’t worry about them.
It’s undeniable, and Handa doesn’t deny it, that Wokeism is pervasive at Harvard. He just doesn’t see it as universal:
If you’re reading this, chances are you’ve heard of the woke mob that has taken over college campuses, and is making its way through other cultural institutions. I also suspect you aren’t particularly sympathetic to that mob. While I’m not writing as a representative of the woke, I do wish to convince you that they are not as you fear. What you’re seeing is less a dedicated mob than a self-interested blob.
I recently finished three years as a Harvard student—a “student of color,” to be precise—and I passed much of that time with the type you might have heard about in the culture wars. These were students who protested against platforming Charles Murray, the sociologist often accused of racist pseudoscience; these were students who stormed the admissions office to demand the reversal of a tenure decision; these were students who got Ronald Sullivan—civil rights lawyer who chose to represent Harvey Weinstein in court—fired as Harvard dean.
. . . . Nor are most students even involved in campus protest.
There are almost 7,000 undergraduates at Harvard, yet the tenure protest was attended by fewer than 50 students, and a few hundred signed the letters urging the administration to fire Sullivan. Fretful liberals do not pause to think of all the students who didn’t join: those who talked critically of the activists in the privacy of their dorm rooms; those who wrestled with reservations but decided not to voice them; or those who simply decided that none of it was worth their time.
But Sullivan was fired as a dean. The Harvard administration itself engages in a lot of woke decisions, like punishing students from belonging to off-campus single-sex “finals= clubs” (probably an illegal punishment), and giving them “social justice placemats” in the dining halls to prepare them to go home for the holidays. The woke students may not be predominant, but they are vocal and loud and activist. If that’s all the administration sees and hears, then that’s what they’ll cater to.
But why aren’t the non-woke students protesting the woke ones? Well, Handa says they just don’t care: they’re too busy with their studies. But it’s more than that. As he says above, the students who have “reservations” “decide not to voice them.” Why the reticence, though?
It’s because voicing them turns them into apostates, for their college and post-college success depends on going along with the loud students—that is, acquiescing to woke culture. The Silent Majority has, by their self censorship, become part of woke culture, which creates self-censorship. (My emphases in Handa’s excerpt below):
The true problem is this: Four years in college, battling for grades, for résumé enhancements and for the personal recommendations needed to enter the upper-middle-class—all of this produces incentives that favor self-censorship.
College campuses are different than in the Sixties, and students attend for different reasons. Young people today have less sex, less voting power and, for the first time, reduced expectations for the future. Back in the Sixties, campus activists were for free speech, and conservatives were skeptical; today, hardly anybody seems to consistently defend free speech. In 1960, 97% of students at Harvard were white, and almost all of them had places waiting in the upper class, regardless of whether they had even attended university. Today, fewer than 50% of Harvard students are white, tuition rates are 500% higher, and four years at an Ivy League college is one of the only ways to guarantee a place at the top of the meritocratic dog pile.
It would be strange if priorities at university had not changed. It would be even stranger if students had not changed as a result.
Elite education is increasingly a consumer product, which means that consumer demands—i.e. student demands—hold sway over administration actions. Yet most of those student demands are less a product of deeply understood theory than they are a product of imitation. Most students want to be well-liked, right-thinking, and spend their four years running on the treadmill that is a liberal education. Indeed, this drive for career success and social acquiescence are exactly the traits that the admissions process selects for. Even if only, say, 5% of students are deplatforming speakers and competing to be woker-than-thou, few among the remaining 95% would want to risk gaining a reputation as a bigot that could ruin their precious few years at college—and dog them on social media during job hunts and long after.
It seems to me that he does see a difference between the students of then and now. Yes, both are interested in conforming, but they conform to different values, and act in different ways. After all, they want to be “right thinking”, which means not ignoring the woke, but adopting the ideas of the woke. And that conformity extends into life beyond college, for Harvard students become pundits and New York Times writers. This means that intellectual culture will eventually conform to the woke mold, as it’s already been doing for some time.
In the end, Handa’s argument that we should pretty much ignore Woke culture as an aberration doesn’t hold water, for he himself makes the case that many Harvard students exercise their conformity by not fighting Woke culture, and even becoming “right-thinking”. After tacitly admitting that Wokeism is the wave of the future, which can’t be denied, he then reiterates that college Wokeism doesn’t matter. Nothing to see here folks except a war among elites, a passing fad:
The battle over wokeism is a civil war among elites, granting an easy way to signal virtue without having to do much. Meantime, the long-term issues confronting society—wage stagnation, social isolation, existential risk, demographic change, the decline of faith—are often overlooked in favor of this theater.
Wokeism does represent a few students’ true ideals. To a far greater number, it is an awkward, formulaic test. Sometimes, what might look to you like wild rebellion on campus might emanate from nothing more militant than old bourgeois values.
Perhaps Stalinism didn’t represent the ideas of every Russian, either, but by authoritarian means and suppression of dissent, all of Russia became Stalinist. The woke aren’t yet like Stalinists (though they are in statu nascendi), but even if they aren’t a majority of the young, the values of the Woke can, and will, become the dominant strain in American liberal culture. For it is the “elites” who control that culture. Even poor Joe Biden is being forced over to the woke Left because he’s being pushed by the woke people he appointed.
***********
Michael Lind has what I think is a more thoughtful piece at Tablet, which lately has had some really good writing. (They’ve been doing good reporting for a while; remember when they exposed the anti-Semitism infecting the leaders of the Women’s March?). Lind is identified by Wikipedia as “an American writer and academic. He has explained and defended the tradition of American democratic nationalism in a number of books, beginning with The Next American Nation (1995). He is currently a professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin.”
Lind’s thesis, and I’ll be brief, is that the nature of American elitism has changed, and has become more woke. It used to be parochial, with each section of the country having its own criteria for belonging to the elite (i.e. attending the best regional rather than national colleges). Now, he says, we have a “single, increasingly homogeneous national oligarchy, with the same accent manners, values, and educational backgrounds from Boston to Austin and San Francisco to New York and Atlanta. He sees this as a significant social change: a “truly epochal development.”
Click on the screenshot to read his longer piece:
In some ways, avers Lind, society is more egalitarian than ever, and what he means by that is that there is less obvious bigotry or impediments to success for minorities. And he’s right:
Compared with previous American elites, the emerging American oligarchy is open and meritocratic and free of most glaring forms of racial and ethnic bias. As recently as the 1970s, an acquaintance of mine who worked for a major Northeastern bank had to disguise the fact of his Irish ancestry from the bank’s WASP partners. No longer. Elite banks and businesses are desperate to prove their commitment to diversity. At the moment Wall Street and Silicon Valley are disproportionately white and Asian American, but this reflects the relatively low socioeconomic status of many Black and Hispanic Americans, a status shared by the Scots Irish white poor in greater Appalachia (who are left out of “diversity and inclusion” efforts because of their “white privilege”). Immigrants from Africa and South America (as opposed to Mexico and Central America) tend to be from professional class backgrounds and to be better educated and more affluent than white Americans on average—which explains why Harvard uses rich African immigrants to meet its informal Black quota, although the purpose of affirmative action was supposed to be to help the American descendants of slaves (ADOS). According to Pew, the richest groups in the United States by religion are Episcopalian, Jewish, and Hindu (wealthy “seculars” may be disproportionately East Asian American, though the data on this point is not clear).
Membership in the multiracial, post-ethnic national overclass depends chiefly on graduation with a diploma—preferably a graduate or professional degree—from an Ivy League school or a selective state university, which makes the Ivy League the new social register. But a diploma from the Ivy League or a top-ranked state university by itself is not sufficient for admission to the new national overclass. Like all ruling classes, the new American overclass uses cues like dialect, religion, and values to distinguish insiders from outsiders.
And that’s where Wokeness comes in. One has to have the right religion (not evangelical), dialect (not southern) and values (Woke ones!):
More and more Americans are figuring out that “wokeness” functions in the new, centralized American elite as a device to exclude working-class Americans of all races, along with backward remnants of the old regional elites. In effect, the new national oligarchy changes the codes and the passwords every six months or so, and notifies its members through the universities and the prestige media and Twitter. America’s working-class majority of all races pays far less attention than the elite to the media, and is highly unlikely to have a kid at Harvard or Yale to clue them in. And non-college-educated Americans spend very little time on Facebook and Twitter, the latter of which they are unlikely to be able to identify—which, among other things, proves the idiocy of the “Russiagate” theory that Vladimir Putin brainwashed white working-class Americans into voting for Trump by memes in social media which they are the least likely American voters to see.
Constantly replacing old terms with new terms known only to the oligarchs is a brilliant strategy of social exclusion. The rationale is supposed to be that this shows greater respect for particular groups. But there was no grassroots working-class movement among Black Americans demanding the use of “enslaved persons” instead of “slaves” and the overwhelming majority of Americans of Latin American descent—a wildly homogenizing category created by the U.S. Census Bureau—reject the weird term “Latinx.” Woke speech is simply a ruling-class dialect, which must be updated frequently to keep the lower orders from breaking the code and successfully imitating their betters.
I think Lind is onto something here, though I’m not sure I agree 100%. This morning I had an “animated discussion” with a white friend who insisted that there was nothing wrong with using the word “Negro”. After all, he said, there’s the “United Negro College Fund.” And I said, “Yeah, and there’s also the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, but you better not say ‘colored people’ instead of ‘people of color’!” In fact, the term “Negro” would be widely seen as racist now, though in the Sixties it wasn’t, and was used frequently by Dr. King, who almost never used the n-word in public. “Negro” was simply the going term for African-Americans then, but now it’s “people of color”, or, better yet, “BIPOCs. And that will change too”. “Gay” has now become a veritable alphabet of initials that always ends in a “+”. “Latinx” isn’t used by Hispanics, but by white people and the media. It’s an elitist thing, as Lind maintains.
But whether this terminology—and its need to constantly evolve, 1984-like—is a way of leveraging and solidifying cultural power, well, I’m not sure I agree. Weigh in below.
How about peoples who, in the U.S., were regarded in a derogatory way (by anyone) in the past, but eventually got through it – and are “white” – I think Irish and Italians might apply – and we still see stereotypes of them in entertainment, yet somehow we are fine with it – maybe even enjoy it.
Agree with your overall sentiment. Yes the extreme left is a small group not the mainstream. Yes maybe it’s elites catering to elites. But yes that’s still a social problem worth paying attention to if this small minority of elites is getting people fired, changing curriculum for whole universities and university systems, creating on the job training courses that punish people based on the color of their skin, etc.
I think a mixed metaphor is appropriate: this is the squeaky snake oil salesman getting the grease. He shouldn’t be – even if he’s not representative of most of us.
Typo : “borgeois” should be “bourgeois”.
This reminds me of the backlash in the 1970s in the UK against selective policies for schools. The 1944 education act introduced selection for academic schools that was aimed to offer equal opportunities for all bright children, regardless of class or the wealth of their parents. It was originally regarded as progressive. Much of the opposition came from middle class parents who did not want their cosseted children exposed to competion from highly intelligent “oiks”.
Arguably the new, centralized American elite is a consequence of there being too many ‘qualified elites’ for the elite vacancies. So in the battle to establish yourself as the most qualified of many contenders for the one job you have to signal your woke virtue more and more aggressively. That includes sabotaging and cancelling your competitors. And there probably is a large silent majority that doesn’t want to get sucked into the destructive vortex.
See http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/ and search for elite overproduction.
Agreed! Turchin’s theory is one of the most convincing explanations for the viciousness at work today.
Yes; it’s possibly an example of the broader problem of: when you have many more well-qualified candidates than spots, you have to go to less and less relevant qualification criteria to make your decision.
Though I’m not sure how much that has to do with wokeism. Sabotage of co-workers is more a fight within the elite, not a fight to get to the elite. College admissions is more apt to be a fight to get into the elite.
Chomsky was on Coleman Hughes podcast recently – they discussed wokeness as being used by corporations to increase their power and wealth, because the people buy it.
You can see how this overproduction happens in academia very clearly: because the survival of programs depends on enrollments, it’s essential to keep attracting greater numbers of students to your department, and if you don’t have a robust graduate program, central admin is likely to shut it down . And if that happens, many of us will wind up teaching undergraduate course exclusively, which is the last thing a heavily research-oriented faculty want to do (to say nothing of the shame that would be involved, the catastrophic loss of ranking status, etc).
So we keep trying to pump up our graduate FTEs—but there certainly aren’t enough jobs for all the people who earn Ph.Ds in any given year, even in formerly hot fields like physics (it’s become something of cliché, but not without foundation, that almost all Ph.D.s in high energy physics will wind up become grotesquely well-paid quants in the finance industry). Overproduction is the key to survival for those who are already established, in many fields.
Unfortunately, the economics of the modern university have come to resemble a network of Ponzi schemes in some respects…
This is part of why I think tax-funded college for all students is a bad idea. Much as I love me some Bernie Sanders, I don’t see much benefit to increasing the availability of (what is in large part) a status competition.
Mr. Handa argues that the great majority of (Harvard) students are not themselves woke, but simply go along with the theatrics of the woke minority in order to avoid trouble. This is probably true, and I submit that it also applies to the bulk of conventionally liberal faculty and administrators.
The consequences are obvious.
Lind writes “non-college-educated Americans spend very little time on Facebook and Twitter…which, among other things, proves the idiocy of the ‘Russiagate’ theory that Vladimir Putin brainwashed white working-class Americans into voting for Trump by memes in social media.”
This itself depends on the canard that Trump supporters are overwhelmingly working class, salt-of-the-earth types, and that’s not really true. Take at look at the backgrounds of some of the people who rioted at the Capitol. Trump won in 2016 because very few Republicans defected from the party when he was nominated, and very few defected in 2020. Furthermore, if Trump supporters are immune to social media, how does Lind explain the rise of QAnon? Or the right-wing outcry over Twitter and Facebook clamping down hard on rabid Trump supporters after the Capitol riot? I personally know several middle-class, educated people who once voted for Democrats and have become conspiracy-theory driven Trump supporters. Russian involvement in Trump’s campaign was one of several factors that swayed the 2016 election.
To the question of what made the difference in a razor-thin margin of victory, as 2016 was in some key states, the obvious answer is: a whole lot of things. People, especially media people, want to boil causality down to one factor; two if they’re feeling super generous. The world doesn’t work that way. The Russian intervention probably made a crucial difference, Comey probably did, Hillary’s failure to visit Michigan probably did, and more. Sometimes every butterfly gets to flap its wings and mess with the planet.
This can’t be true, can it? I’m highly skeptical.
That’s what’s called a WTF(?) claim. I’ve no doubt it’s false. I’ve seen countless people on Facebook that I know to be non-college-educated Americans. And I’ve never actively participated in it myself. I get it 2nd hand from my wife. She has a sort of sick fascination with the crazy comments, rants and conspiracy theories. It’s particularly disheartening to see people you’ve known for years and decades passing the crazy around.
I can only speak anecdotally that my friends and acquaintances of that sort are extremely active on one or both, and from them I regularly see meltdowns about the election, with lotsa ‘likes’ from their salt-of-the-earth friends. Rather than claim that this or that demographic are less active on these platforms, lets just say they all can be pretty active, but if you search through Cancel Culture facebook groups for MAGA hat wearers, you won’t find many spending time there.
Yeah, I’m not buying the bit about Facebook. It’s got around 190 million regular users in the US alone. Some elitism.
I don’t do Facebook myself, but a woman I was involved with about a decade and a half ago opened an account for me, and I had friend requests pouring in from people back in the working-class neighborhood where I grew up. And my best buddies — guys I’ve known since junior high and went off to college with — tell me they hear from people from the old neighborhood all the time, too, when they venture onto Facebook. Same with my sister.
As far as I can tell, Facebook seems to be a working- and middle-class online community as much as anything — although perhaps not in the circles in which Mr. Lind runs.
I agree 100% counsellor. I feel that FB (may it burn in hell for a thousand reasons) is a lower class (but extremely popular) hobby than twitter (burn for 500 reasons – only because cool academics post stuff on twitter – the rest is garbage).
My sister in Australia started me a fb page which I use only to check on family photos, the rest is toilet wall graffiti. But I’ve noticed how a lot of the people I “left behind” in the working class there turn up on that FB feed. How they tracked me down with such a common name on the other side of the planet I don’t know.
D.A.
NYC
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2020/06/10/photos-of-readers-93/
Academics do not avoid FB. Many use it, our host included. There is a tendency for people who do not use it to misunderstand the system.
“Constantly replacing old terms with new terms known only to the oligarchs is a brilliant strategy of social exclusion.”
I don’t see it as a strategy, rather as an outcome. The big worry about wokeness might be that it is less a strategy and more of a societal algorithm gone amok. You really need a viral and exponential counter to fight this virus properly, as waiting for herd immunity through the use of rationality may not work out in this instance.
The case of Professor Lorgia García Peña is one we have no information about from Harvard’s side, and almost certainly never will. But it should be seen in the context of a long-standing policy at Harvard and Yale that you don’t promote your Assistant Professors to tenure; you hire tenured faculty in. The theory of faculty recruitment at Harvard and Yale I’ve gotten from people who are in a position to know is that you accept a job at either place fully expecting to wind up somewhere else, probably a very good place; a friend of mine who was denied tenure at Yale wound up at UC Santa Cruz, in a department in her field which has consistently ranked *for decades* as better than Yale’s in e.g. the QS ratings. But that’s how they do it: the figure I’ve heard is that fewer than six out of every hundred Assistant Profs are promoted to Associate with tenure at Yale, and I’m sure Harvard is no better. You apparently take the job because of the glittering address at which you’re a temporary resident, you make the most of your six years there, get your publications out, develop and maintain strong personal connections with the seniorati in your department, and count on being a strong competitor on the short lists of any number of excellent departments that, in contrast, don’t feel that they have something to prove…
Again, we don’t know what really happened to García Peña. But her experience there seems to have been that of the overwhelming number of junior faculty who start off there.
Bummer, man.
The guy is just wrong about voting power. Voting age is three years below what it was in the 60’s. College students now can have much more impact now if they bother to use their votes.
“Indeed, this drive for career success and social acquiescence are exactly the traits that the admissions process selects for. Even if only, say, 5% of students are deplatforming speakers and competing to be woker-than-thou, few among the remaining 95% would want to risk gaining a reputation as a bigot that could ruin their precious few years at college.”
I don’t buy this for a second. Maybe a few don’t want to rock the boat, but I’m sure most just don’t care, are too busy to care, and don’t see woke culture as affecting them one way or another. And the idea that “social acquiescence” is a selected trait in Harvard undergrads – LOL!
Compare with the original SJW definition on the UrbanDictionary…
When I was first confronted by it, in New Atheism at Freethtoughtblogs, they presented themselves as über-aggressive, but strangely mixed with academese. They sounded like a copy-pasta stereotype from the “Tumblr SJW” generator, a satire site similar to the pomo generator.
This made it seem as if there was some “theory” behind it. But there was none. What happened was, at places like Pharyngula, the regulars and the host demanded from all commenters to use the jargon and the posture, but never explained anything. “Educate yourself ”; useful also when nobody had any clue, and didn’t want to risk writing something “problematic” and be ousted themselves.
The people “in” on that game soon sounded alike, but could not possibly have learned anything, and those who didn’t fit in, noticably non-Americans were called “trolls” and banned (the USA/non-USA divide was largely overlooked). The buzzwords and posture of zealous rightousness was instantly weaponised as a form of in-outgroup control.
I tried to find out what this elusive ideology was about, which is also still somewhat nameless. Recall “wokeness” is just the more recent term. Many others were tried through the years “regressive left”, “callout culture”, “intersectionality”, “postmodern neo marxism”, “social justice warrorism”, “successor ideology”, “critical social justice” and so on.
I was acquainted with postmodernism, and recognised some elements, I turned to Sokal and Bricmont’s “Fashionable Nonsense”, but also read what I guessed was probably seeding this ideology, from “intersectionality” to Crenshaw, and from there to Critical Race Theory. There was also a helpful pdf by the author Will Shetterly (“Social Justice Warriors. Do not engage”) who either dubbed the term “SJW” or popularized it. I found he captured it well already in 2013.
I remember how I was amazed one day that I was reading on the arcanum of US discrimmination law as discussed by the critical race theory scholar and lawyer Kimberlé Crenshaw. I realized then that the odds are nil that the common Tumblr, or FreethoughtBlogs regulars, or “the woke” in general had ever looked at it. They had taken fashionable buzzwords and weaponised them, and it works because their pioneer role gave them the hegemony of interpretation.
I still find it bizarre that an activism rooted in lawyering, easily realised by mega corporations (e.g. “diversity” iniatives are commonplace, as is “diverse” corporation PR and advertisement) in all seriousness is considered “left” in the USA without even pausing for a moment how that could be.
“Wokeness” strikes me as a perfect storm of about a dozen things, it may be even different things simply looking similar. A reaction against the ascension of the stereotypical (male) nerd, together with the internet, the information age and stereotypes associated with such people, gatekeeping, as well as the late-adoption of information/computer technology by in particular women, but also the right wing. Rival nerd gangs, especially pioneering social media lit crit fandoms who were allied more to the “studies” subjects and then came in conflict with the “science” nerds, and the skirmishes of “science wars” they brought along. Breakdown of academic silos, so that the blank slate clique collided directly with the realist side. The shift from an internet of anarchy and anonymity to the internet of clear names, and attention economy. This leads to such things as virtue signaling (nobody wants to be seen as complicit in the bigotry of our time), as well as character assassination that explain the typical woke attitude of maximal no-prisoner escalation; also a way to push their particular ideologies by bullying, since many “studies” fields have little but auto-ethnography. Attention is resource, nobody matters, with yet more effects.
I’ve reached the maximum alotted by the roolz. The workings of social media wokeness might be just the model to also get ahead elsewhere (e.g. as an elite circle as one author suggests), since social media and offline lives fuse together.
The wave of woke postures and jargon among actual and aspiring academic faculty and administrators has two other components, not yet mentioned: status and money. In the status category, the various vice-presidencies, deanships, associate deanships, and other offices of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion enjoy a status that is marvelously unquestioned, somewhat akin to the Church sinecures of Medieval times.
And the money flows more copiously than many realize. We are aware of the 5-figure fees that Robin DiAngelo commands for consultations, but it is not so widely known that educrats can draw on grants of a D/E/I sort from a diversity (could this be what they mean by Diversity?) of Federal, State, and local agencies and foundations. For example, one professor at the IUPUI School of Ed notes in his website that he had funding in the early 2000s that averages around a million $ a year. Thus, with a PhD in “Educational Policy and Leadership”, he was bringing his institution of that time more moola than most biomedical researchers. It is unclear from the professor’s website how much of these funds went to the grantee’s own salary, but some bequests of this kind undoubtedly include a little something for the administrator/PI.