This is really the key: "If you think that the reason that we've not been able to root out disparities everywhere is because there are people who argue that some disparities are okay who thereby perpetuate this by the very articulation of this view, then you spend all your time language-policing people who take that view. You make sure that this is your litmus test for jobs and promotions and art, too. And other people, who are sympathetic to the goal of removing disparities, are sensitive to this and they are okay with changing the register in which they speak of these things. So artists try to make art this way and critics evaluate art in this way; they are all being good citizens of the moment."
Liberal institutions were unable to firmly stand by the idea that some disparities, in some situations, are unsolvable. That this university can really do nothing to change the composition of its class. They could've said that to Janine and been firm. But instead they said a lot of stuff about how they'd try to change and be better. And they really did not have any intention to change. They did not have any intention to do better, because doing better was impossible. And Janine saw this contradiction and was angered by it.
Well and now they're capitulating to Trump because they still don't have any real principles other than the perpetuation of their institution and its status.
I have somewhat less generosity toward Janine than maybe you do because I think she doesn't see the problem clearly. She feels something is amiss and then deals with it dysfunctionally and in a way that doesn't really imperil her own standing (or didn't when the winds were blowing in the other direction).
I'll be honest: could the university have said outright to Janine that it's not really possible to completely change the class composition? Wouldn't that be tantamount to declaring yourself a racist or a sexist? I can't see this happening in any liberal-leaning institution. I guess the big question is how one says this in a clear-cut way.
It would also mean acknowledging that quite a bit of progress has been made on many issues but this cuts against progressive rhetoric where we always have to emphasize how much we have left to achieve but which often leads many people (e.g. my students) to think that nothing has been achieved whatsoever.
Why could they not have said that, if that's the truth as they understand it? What would Janine do? Quit her job?
That's the whole point. The university conceives of itself as being not-racist, so they feel threatened by being called racist. They don't have the spine to stand up to that threat, because they don't have a strong sense of their true mission, and of what's lost by giving in to things that aren't true. That's the problem, not that Janine has strong opinions. Universities are full of people with strong opinions about all kinds of things, and often express them in highly tedious and unconvincing ways. The number one thing that a university ought to be good at is resisting people like Janine. But in this case it wasn't. Why was that?
Janine's ideas were wrong, yes, but they were not unconvincing. In fact they had power precisely because they seemed to flow logically from the rhetoric that universities had been peddling for so many years now, about how they would do good in the world. And when she insisted that they make good on the rhetoric in clear and concrete ways, in their functioning, they stumbled, because everyone had understood, they thought, that they couldn't actually solve these problems, that they could just gesture towards them. Except a lot of people weren't on board with the hypocrisy. They genuinely believed in the hype. That's why the university found itself stuck and unable to push back, because it would mean admitting that they'd been making promises for years (e.g. to increase diversity in various cohorts and professoriates) that they couldn't really keep.
Many people were told for many years that the university was somehow against racism, but...in the end what does that actually mean? How is that actionable? Is it even a meaningful for an institution to be against racism in a society that's underwritten by these lingering racial disparities that were themselves created by racist policies that occurred within living memory.
And if the university functions to credential society's winners and reify their victory over the dispossessed, then is it really against racism at all? Or is the answer just that...it's no more racist than anything else, and it does more good than most things.
In the end, it was that psychic struggle that was at play. That guilt and shame that both the university (and Janine) felt over benefiting from other people's oppression. And that shame is why wokeness ran amok. I don't really know how to fix that shame, but I don't think the answer is merely to blame Janine.
So how can they commit to their core mission? Preserving knowledge, preserving culture. They failed with Janine, and then they failed with Trump. What can be done to give colleges a backbone?
I think that they would have to first agree on what that mission actually is. I thought that Shreeharsh made a lot of good points, but all these problems are downstream of what I see as the essential problem, which is that Janine wants to do good in a place that is not devoted, primarily, to doing good. Universities exist, as Naomi said, to preserve knowledge, and provide an ideal environment where truth can be debated and pursued. Even if Janine manages to remove everyone she sees as 'racist', and make every department reflective of her idealized racial vision of the world, this still would not do much (if any) real good. (Of the washing-the-feet-of-the-poor and healing-lepers variety.) The test for this is pretty easy—do the unwashed poor have a place at Janine's university? No, and they never have and never will. Janine, and the university, have gotten high on their own supply—they believe that the university exists primarily to do good, that pursuing an education in itself is doing the good. (Itself a rather modern idea.) I think that those universities that stand up to Trump will be those that can admit that universities exist to educate and to pursue truth, and are not a remedy for society's ills. Paradoxically, if they can admit that universities do not exist to do good, they might, finally...do some good.
Agree completely! I've long wanted to write a post with the title: if research is politics, then you need to act like a politician. (The short argument would that politicians have to get elected which keeps them sensitive to what their voters care for but researchers or teachers who want to do politics through their work have no such mass audience to worry about and so this just skews their work in a certain direction and rarely does any good the way politics is supposed to.
The problem here is that universities have multiple core missions, which are fundamentally intertwined but also can pull in opposing directions. Universities have always (by which I mean since c. 1100-1200) been places for educating and shaping young people, including instilling values; they've always been places for job training, even when that job was exclusively the church; they've always been places for preserving knowledge and culture; they've always, albeit in very limited ways, allowed for social mobility (with important consequences for the history of literature and philosophy), and they've also, from the seventeenth century on, allowed a literate elite to preserve its position and status.
Almost everyone who works in a university believes in multiple aspects of their core mission. In an era of expansion, like the postwar era, the tensions seemed far less important than the complementarity; in a moment of contraction, obviously things are quite different. Predictably, different people are seeing different aspects of the core mission as the essential one. I recommend Stefan Collini on the university.
We're now in a moment not just of contraction but probably of transformation where former core functions and guiding ideals are all but disappearing. We are staging protests and I do think this is important. But even if we can get universities to commit to our (extremely modest yet almost certainly impossible) demands, the underlying problems are as stark as ever.
Daniel's probably gonna kick me off of here soon since I'm commenting too much (sorry!), but man am I passionate about this topic and enjoy seeing the different views.
I like Adler-Bell's definition of wokeness, actually. But as it stands it seems like it could apply to the left or the right--or really any belief system, including a religion. I am I right about that?
Yet all the examples used by Shreeharsh and Adler-Bell in his article are from the academic left. Adler-Bell talks a lot about campus radicalism, for example. And I think people generally do associate wokeness with the left, which is why I'd argue the definition needs to target that. So here's my suggestion for a modified definition:
"Wokeness refers to the invocation of unintuitive and morally burdensome political norms and ideas PRIMARILY DRAWN CONCEPTUALLY FROM CRITICAL THEORIES in a manner which suggests they are self-evident."
I really like this definition. And I think, but correct me if I'm wrong, that the best way to understand "critical theory" is as a response to liberalism. So many critical theories--from Marx to critical race theory to certain kinds of feminist theories--suggest that the liberal notion of equal rights and equal treatment is unable to really fix disparities--to the point where liberalism itself becomes the *cause* of these disparities. But it's hard to speak against liberalism outright, so then those who raise liberal objections often get painted as the problem and the reason for those disparities.
(I do think critical theories are really good to teach, especially in contrast to liberalism, and I like to teach them in my "Social Theory" class but it's really hard to see them as the basis of any kind of policy.)
The critical theory part of the wokeness definition seems important to me because it helps to fully explain particular cases--like when Coleman Hughes was nearly deplatformed for giving a seemingly innocuous TED presentation on colorblindness, or the Obama/Biden Title 9 changes that restricted the individual rights of the accused due to considerations of gender discrimination.
I agree it's important to teach critical theories, and I also teach them when I talk about contemporary political philosophy. Not only is it important to teach them but I think critical theories offer some valuable insights. But yes, the problem is that they shouldn't be the basis of policy nor should they be seen as unquestionable moral truths.
I think the argument should be turned around. Wokeness is a slippery concept to be sure, but anti-wokeness seems to me to be clearly and intentionally racist...and at times misogynist. Don't make me rethink anything, djt is saying; only whites are deserving. I think we all are victimized by thinking our thinking is how it must be, and almost no one can think that our/their thinking is wrong. My ideas are mostly equally good, one thinks, and satisfying, and not shaped by any unconscious source. So we don't know when our thinking goes off the rails. Keep in mind Oliver Cromwell's appeal to his constituents: Gentlemen, I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, to consider that you may be mistaken. TCB
We may be stuck somewhat in a terminological muddle. I mean something different from "anti-woke" than you do. Not saying yours is wrong and mine is right, just saying that I think we're very much talking about different things. There is a long, rich tradition among both socialists and liberals that is very critical of wokeness/identity politics/radical chic. There's also a long, not so admirable tradition among racists and misogynists of attacking civil rights/gay rights/women's rights/etc.
If your argument is that the the "anti-woke" brand has been so contaminated by the latter that the former should dissociate themselves from the term, I'm open to considering the argument. But if so, what should the now separate, non-anti-woke critics of the woke left call themselves?
This is really the key: "If you think that the reason that we've not been able to root out disparities everywhere is because there are people who argue that some disparities are okay who thereby perpetuate this by the very articulation of this view, then you spend all your time language-policing people who take that view. You make sure that this is your litmus test for jobs and promotions and art, too. And other people, who are sympathetic to the goal of removing disparities, are sensitive to this and they are okay with changing the register in which they speak of these things. So artists try to make art this way and critics evaluate art in this way; they are all being good citizens of the moment."
Liberal institutions were unable to firmly stand by the idea that some disparities, in some situations, are unsolvable. That this university can really do nothing to change the composition of its class. They could've said that to Janine and been firm. But instead they said a lot of stuff about how they'd try to change and be better. And they really did not have any intention to change. They did not have any intention to do better, because doing better was impossible. And Janine saw this contradiction and was angered by it.
Well and now they're capitulating to Trump because they still don't have any real principles other than the perpetuation of their institution and its status.
I have somewhat less generosity toward Janine than maybe you do because I think she doesn't see the problem clearly. She feels something is amiss and then deals with it dysfunctionally and in a way that doesn't really imperil her own standing (or didn't when the winds were blowing in the other direction).
Thank you both for a stimulating conversation!
I'll be honest: could the university have said outright to Janine that it's not really possible to completely change the class composition? Wouldn't that be tantamount to declaring yourself a racist or a sexist? I can't see this happening in any liberal-leaning institution. I guess the big question is how one says this in a clear-cut way.
It would also mean acknowledging that quite a bit of progress has been made on many issues but this cuts against progressive rhetoric where we always have to emphasize how much we have left to achieve but which often leads many people (e.g. my students) to think that nothing has been achieved whatsoever.
Why could they not have said that, if that's the truth as they understand it? What would Janine do? Quit her job?
That's the whole point. The university conceives of itself as being not-racist, so they feel threatened by being called racist. They don't have the spine to stand up to that threat, because they don't have a strong sense of their true mission, and of what's lost by giving in to things that aren't true. That's the problem, not that Janine has strong opinions. Universities are full of people with strong opinions about all kinds of things, and often express them in highly tedious and unconvincing ways. The number one thing that a university ought to be good at is resisting people like Janine. But in this case it wasn't. Why was that?
Janine's ideas were wrong, yes, but they were not unconvincing. In fact they had power precisely because they seemed to flow logically from the rhetoric that universities had been peddling for so many years now, about how they would do good in the world. And when she insisted that they make good on the rhetoric in clear and concrete ways, in their functioning, they stumbled, because everyone had understood, they thought, that they couldn't actually solve these problems, that they could just gesture towards them. Except a lot of people weren't on board with the hypocrisy. They genuinely believed in the hype. That's why the university found itself stuck and unable to push back, because it would mean admitting that they'd been making promises for years (e.g. to increase diversity in various cohorts and professoriates) that they couldn't really keep.
Many people were told for many years that the university was somehow against racism, but...in the end what does that actually mean? How is that actionable? Is it even a meaningful for an institution to be against racism in a society that's underwritten by these lingering racial disparities that were themselves created by racist policies that occurred within living memory.
And if the university functions to credential society's winners and reify their victory over the dispossessed, then is it really against racism at all? Or is the answer just that...it's no more racist than anything else, and it does more good than most things.
In the end, it was that psychic struggle that was at play. That guilt and shame that both the university (and Janine) felt over benefiting from other people's oppression. And that shame is why wokeness ran amok. I don't really know how to fix that shame, but I don't think the answer is merely to blame Janine.
So how can they commit to their core mission? Preserving knowledge, preserving culture. They failed with Janine, and then they failed with Trump. What can be done to give colleges a backbone?
I think that they would have to first agree on what that mission actually is. I thought that Shreeharsh made a lot of good points, but all these problems are downstream of what I see as the essential problem, which is that Janine wants to do good in a place that is not devoted, primarily, to doing good. Universities exist, as Naomi said, to preserve knowledge, and provide an ideal environment where truth can be debated and pursued. Even if Janine manages to remove everyone she sees as 'racist', and make every department reflective of her idealized racial vision of the world, this still would not do much (if any) real good. (Of the washing-the-feet-of-the-poor and healing-lepers variety.) The test for this is pretty easy—do the unwashed poor have a place at Janine's university? No, and they never have and never will. Janine, and the university, have gotten high on their own supply—they believe that the university exists primarily to do good, that pursuing an education in itself is doing the good. (Itself a rather modern idea.) I think that those universities that stand up to Trump will be those that can admit that universities exist to educate and to pursue truth, and are not a remedy for society's ills. Paradoxically, if they can admit that universities do not exist to do good, they might, finally...do some good.
Agree completely! I've long wanted to write a post with the title: if research is politics, then you need to act like a politician. (The short argument would that politicians have to get elected which keeps them sensitive to what their voters care for but researchers or teachers who want to do politics through their work have no such mass audience to worry about and so this just skews their work in a certain direction and rarely does any good the way politics is supposed to.
The problem here is that universities have multiple core missions, which are fundamentally intertwined but also can pull in opposing directions. Universities have always (by which I mean since c. 1100-1200) been places for educating and shaping young people, including instilling values; they've always been places for job training, even when that job was exclusively the church; they've always been places for preserving knowledge and culture; they've always, albeit in very limited ways, allowed for social mobility (with important consequences for the history of literature and philosophy), and they've also, from the seventeenth century on, allowed a literate elite to preserve its position and status.
Almost everyone who works in a university believes in multiple aspects of their core mission. In an era of expansion, like the postwar era, the tensions seemed far less important than the complementarity; in a moment of contraction, obviously things are quite different. Predictably, different people are seeing different aspects of the core mission as the essential one. I recommend Stefan Collini on the university.
We're now in a moment not just of contraction but probably of transformation where former core functions and guiding ideals are all but disappearing. We are staging protests and I do think this is important. But even if we can get universities to commit to our (extremely modest yet almost certainly impossible) demands, the underlying problems are as stark as ever.
Daniel's probably gonna kick me off of here soon since I'm commenting too much (sorry!), but man am I passionate about this topic and enjoy seeing the different views.
I like Adler-Bell's definition of wokeness, actually. But as it stands it seems like it could apply to the left or the right--or really any belief system, including a religion. I am I right about that?
Yet all the examples used by Shreeharsh and Adler-Bell in his article are from the academic left. Adler-Bell talks a lot about campus radicalism, for example. And I think people generally do associate wokeness with the left, which is why I'd argue the definition needs to target that. So here's my suggestion for a modified definition:
"Wokeness refers to the invocation of unintuitive and morally burdensome political norms and ideas PRIMARILY DRAWN CONCEPTUALLY FROM CRITICAL THEORIES in a manner which suggests they are self-evident."
I really like this definition. And I think, but correct me if I'm wrong, that the best way to understand "critical theory" is as a response to liberalism. So many critical theories--from Marx to critical race theory to certain kinds of feminist theories--suggest that the liberal notion of equal rights and equal treatment is unable to really fix disparities--to the point where liberalism itself becomes the *cause* of these disparities. But it's hard to speak against liberalism outright, so then those who raise liberal objections often get painted as the problem and the reason for those disparities.
(I do think critical theories are really good to teach, especially in contrast to liberalism, and I like to teach them in my "Social Theory" class but it's really hard to see them as the basis of any kind of policy.)
Yup, it's a direct response to (and in some cases outright rejection of) liberalism and the idea of universal rights and is typically stated that way in foundational texts like the CRT one by Delgado and Stefancic: https://www.amazon.com/Critical-Race-Theory-Third-Introduction/dp/147980276X.
The critical theory part of the wokeness definition seems important to me because it helps to fully explain particular cases--like when Coleman Hughes was nearly deplatformed for giving a seemingly innocuous TED presentation on colorblindness, or the Obama/Biden Title 9 changes that restricted the individual rights of the accused due to considerations of gender discrimination.
I agree it's important to teach critical theories, and I also teach them when I talk about contemporary political philosophy. Not only is it important to teach them but I think critical theories offer some valuable insights. But yes, the problem is that they shouldn't be the basis of policy nor should they be seen as unquestionable moral truths.
No apologies necessary!
Comments always welcome!
I think the argument should be turned around. Wokeness is a slippery concept to be sure, but anti-wokeness seems to me to be clearly and intentionally racist...and at times misogynist. Don't make me rethink anything, djt is saying; only whites are deserving. I think we all are victimized by thinking our thinking is how it must be, and almost no one can think that our/their thinking is wrong. My ideas are mostly equally good, one thinks, and satisfying, and not shaped by any unconscious source. So we don't know when our thinking goes off the rails. Keep in mind Oliver Cromwell's appeal to his constituents: Gentlemen, I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, to consider that you may be mistaken. TCB
We may be stuck somewhat in a terminological muddle. I mean something different from "anti-woke" than you do. Not saying yours is wrong and mine is right, just saying that I think we're very much talking about different things. There is a long, rich tradition among both socialists and liberals that is very critical of wokeness/identity politics/radical chic. There's also a long, not so admirable tradition among racists and misogynists of attacking civil rights/gay rights/women's rights/etc.
If your argument is that the the "anti-woke" brand has been so contaminated by the latter that the former should dissociate themselves from the term, I'm open to considering the argument. But if so, what should the now separate, non-anti-woke critics of the woke left call themselves?
On behalf of women named Karen everywhere, I'm grateful that the opprobrium is being shifted to women named Janine.