Although the United States is Not Woke Enough, Its Universities are Now Too Woke

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In “The Right Amount of Wokeness,” I write:

Anyone who has been paying attention lately and tried to get a historical perspective should realize that the horrors from too little wokeness are still truly awful. The horrors from too much wokeness are still not at the same level. So from where we are now, increasing the average level of wokeness (while retaining the same standard deviation of the normal distribution) would be a good thing. It will cause some horrible things to happen from the highest extremes of wokeness, but it will prevent many other horrible things from happening from the lowest extremes of wokeness.

I stand by that assessment. Of course, we should do more than just steer the mean of wokeness to its optimum. We should also try to reduce the variance of wokeness to avoid the horrors from both extremes, as I discuss in “Getting the Best from Wokeness by Having the Right Mean, Reducing the Variance and Mitigating the Losses from Extreme Values.”

One part of reducing the variance of wokeness is to restrain the excesses of wokeness that I now see happening on university campuses. Fortunately, the University of Colorado Boulder where I now am is quite far from being the worst offender, and I am proud that at the Univeristy of Colorado Boulder, political views define protected classes along with race, gender, disability, religion etc. At the University of Colorado Boulder I do worry about the enforced ideological orthodoxy danger from asking for statements from potential hires and in annual reporting from current professors about how they contribute to diversity, equity and inclusion. There are certainly some definitions of “diversity, equity and inclusion” for which this would be innocent; but “diversity, equity and inclusion” is often being interpreted from a particular ideological perspective. What would it look like to interpret it from a non-ideological perspective? At a minimum, it would require respect (along with respect for other views) for the view that the best way to advance racial harmony is by trying to act as race-blind as possible—and respect for the idea that the idea that the main fight against structural racism is in institutions that are part of people’s life course before they get to college and that remedies should be sought there, with universities contributing to figuring that out.

As an emeritus University of Michigan professor, I still get many emails about what is going on there, and have many friends there. It seems to me that the University of Michigan is beginning to go mad-woke. For example, I consider trying to reduce the use of standardized tests not only for undergraduate admission but even for admission to graduate programs to be a big mistake. I also have a strong sense that everyone is supposed to be talking in a particular way about certain issues.

Members of the College of Science and Mathematics at the University of Massachusetts Boston have nicely articulated some of the issues with wokeness in universities in an open letter directed to their administration and a key committee. My favorite paragraph from this open letters is this:

Under no circumstances can political or ideological activism be the primary purpose of a public university. This is not to say students, faculty, and staff cannot be activists. Quite the contrary: individual people are the agents of social change, and as such they should be encouraged to organize and fight for a better society. Moreover, the public university can play an active role in educating students on pressing issues of social injustice as well as effective methods of activism. However, in this regard the role of the university is to empower people to take action themselves - not to coerce students, faculty, or institutional units to do so.

If you look at the proposed mission statements and vision statements themselves, these would be fine under some possible interpretations of the words on the page. The problem is that many of these words and phrases have gained technical meanings in woke discourse, and it is very often these technical meanings that are operative for university policy. So the details matter. But even my limited understanding of the technical meanings of these words suggests trouble, not just for UMass Boston but for many other universities with similar statements in their bylaws. As just one example, I have very gradually come to the realization that “equity,” which has many lovely meanings in its dictionary definition is often these days being used as a technical term for “equality of outcome.” One of the most basic measures to try to restrain excesses of wokeness is to try to clarify for each other and for the general public the technical meanings of terms used in woke discourse, so we can see clearly if we agree or disagree with what is being said or proposed.