Wokeness Claims Another Victim

By Aaron Kliegman One of the great tragedies of our time is that universities have become places to close minds, not to open them. Indeed, activism — specifically left-wing activism, in service of social justice — has replaced teaching and learning on most American campuses. Students still learn, to be sure, but what they learn is information imparted by professors and administrators to pursue a particular agenda, not information to understand the world around them as it is. Interestingly, the administration — more so than the faculty — is largely responsible for this shift, seeing its fundamental job as enforcing and sustaining progressive causes to improve society, not educating kids. Traditionally, the idea was to prepare students for life in a troubled world by teaching them some knowledge and how to think critically. Today, that mission has been replaced by the push to train woke warriors to spot perceived oppression and reverse it. The American university has, in short, become a center of indoctrination, because its leaders have a fundamentally different understanding of the institution’s purpose than their predecessors. This transformation explains in part why, as the years pass, conservatives have shrunk from comprising a small slice of academia to maybe a few crumbs. People who understand the mission of the academy to be advancing social justice are not going to hire academics who view their job differently. Yuval Levin, the American public intellectual, describes this trend well in his recent book, A Time to Build. Levin notes that, while in 1969 a quarter of American professors described themselves as right of center, that figure dwindled to 12 percent by 1999. More recent surveys put the percentage of Republican academics in the single digits — and well below five percent in the social sciences and the humanities. We shouldn’t be surprised, then, to see universities today silence conservative voices and students (often encouraged by professors) shout down guest speakers who don’t completely adhere to progressive doctrine. And yet, despite being a millennial, I enjoyed freedom of speech and avoided leftist indoctrination in college. I was one of the lucky few of my generation. That’s because I went to Washington and Lee University, a small, private liberal arts school in Lexington, Virginia. W&L has long prioritized instilling good character and an open mind in its students, emphasizing the importance of honor and a well-rounded education. Professors know their job is to teach and conduct research, not indoctrinate — regardless of their personal beliefs. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that W&L is also one of the more conservative and traditional institutions of higher education in the country. The school’s culture values history, tradition, and a genuine education in the liberal arts. Pick a student at random, and he or she is far more likely to be conservative and a Republican than liberal and a Democrat. Indeed, when I was there, College Democrats was the group that hid in the catacombs, while College Republicans had no shortage of members. I’m glad I graduated when I did, however. It seems now even the most traditional schools are susceptible to wokeness, and I fear some, if not all, of the good qualities I just described are changing for the worse at W&L. For example, at least one professor said publicly that the school should remove George Washington’s name after faculty voted to remove Robert E. Lee’s name in July. (The school is not named after Lee because he was a Confederate general, but rather because he did so much for the institution as its president after the Civil War — primarily in the name of reconciliation between North and South.) Most recently, several publications reported on W&L offering a new course titled, “How to Overthrow the State.” The class is a writing seminar for first-year students. According to the course description on W&L’s website, each student will be put “at the head of a popular revolutionary movement aiming to overthrow a sitting government and forge a better society.” “How will you attain power?” the description continues. “How will you communicate with the masses? How do you plan on improving the lives of the people? How will you deal with the past?” Students will explore “examples of revolutionary thought and action from across the Global South,” studying Marxists and revolutionaries such as Frantz Fanon, Che Guevara, and Mohandas Gandhi. To engage the assigned texts, students will participate “in a variety of writing exercises, such as producing a manifesto, drafting a white paper that critically analyzes a particular issue, and writing a persuasive essay on rewriting history and confronting memory.” As a graduate of W&L, I was dismayed to see such a course being offered. That W&L of all places flirted with teaching how to overthrow the state is sad, I thought — and telling of how far our universities have fallen. But then, as a member of W&L’s community, I received a mass email from University President Will Dudley addressing the controversy. Dudley explained that the course is meant to teach students how to write. “What better way to teach the power of writing — the idea that the pen is mightier than the sword — than to ask students to read and evaluate historical texts that aspired to move their original audiences to revolution?” he explained. “The course does not advocate revolution or train students for it. It studies how revolutionaries have written in order to help students become more powerful and persuasive writers." Dudley’s argument is compelling and makes me feel a bit better about the course being offered, though I am still certainly uncomfortable with it. But after thinking about the matter, I actually think it raises a much larger issue, one that the late British philosopher Roger Scruton noted. In history (and in this case writing) courses, universities always teach about revolutionary struggle but rarely about ordinary life. They especially ignore what is worth conserving at various periods of history, what has been engrained in the spirit of the people to last. This almost universal truth of higher education pushes progressivism on students and rejects conservatism on a much deeper, philosophical, and even subconscious level than most people seem to realize. Universities — even my esteemed W&L — too often present history as one momentous, revolutionary moment after another to push history forward to a better future. What’s lost is the vast majority of actual history in between these moments, what most humans have actually experienced — including beautiful things that give everyday life meaning without being a revolutionary soldier. The implication from this way of teaching is that there is nothing worth conserving from the past and present, thus giving conservatism no real place in society as history marches onward. The real tragedy is that students indoctrinated into this thinking will find it much more difficult ever to feel content, let alone happy. I suppose that’s in part how we get rioters in the streets today who supposedly want to fight racism toppling statues of Ulysses S. Grant, who destroyed the Confederacy, and Hans Christian Heg, an abolitionist who died fighting slavery. We produce young adults who neither know history nor appreciate what they have. But that’s the whole point, isn’t it: to produce woke warriors always seeking to destroy what was and looking toward what will be, never taking time to appreciate and be grateful for what is. Order Newt's Latest Book: https://www.gingrich360.com/trump-and-the-american-future