I’ve been asked to serve sometime next month on a panel discussion on the effects of wokeism on the academy. In no particular order of importance, here’s what I’m likely to say:

One element of wokeism is (what Jonathan Haidt has called) The Coddling of the American Mind. If this helicoptering started in the home, why? I managed to walk to school and back – uphill both ways, of course – without being kidnapped and sold into slavery. So why can’t kids today? Or if it started at school by a generation of school marms, which generation of academics taught them? But whoever’s responsible, it’s produced a generation of snowflakes that will melt at the slightest breeze above freezing.

To mix my metaphors, the chill is not that I have to be careful what I say. That would just be a me problem. Rather it’s that if I have to say what I say carefully, I can’t say it spontaneously. And if I can’t say it spontaneously it has to be scripted. But if it has to be scripted, why not just email the script to the class? Well, counters the woke, why not indeed?! And while we’re at it, why not let them pre-vet the script?!

This coddling dovetails with (what’s been dubbed) the ‘marketisation’ of the academy. Campuses are competing for market share. And what draws (what are now) our clients is ‘the student experience’, which better not include anything too challenging to these young sensitive minds. So standards, both for admission and for achievement, get lowered. And as one campus lowers its, its competitors have no choice but to follow suit.

A second element is identity politics rendering ad hominem argumentation no longer a fallacy. If I deny that the residential school program was genocide, “Well, as a settler colonialist, you would say that, wouldn’t you?!” In fact what we teach as the rules of inference turn out to be just settler colonialist rules. What follows from what doesn’t need to be adjudicated, because truth is just what one believes, not a property of the states of affairs to which we erstwhile thought beliefs refer.

A third is Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty’s insistence that “A word means whatever I say it means, nothing more!” Which would be fine if the speaker would say what her words mean, rather than what they don’t. I have a Dean who thinks that to “investigate” does not mean to seek information one does not already have, and that it’s an “atrocity” that there may or may not be no longer marked graves somewhere. The woke take cosmetic diversity as a reliable metonym for perspectival diversity. And by “inclusion” they mean, “except, of course, for those people.” What it is to decolonise or to indigenise the classroom is anyone’s guess, because, well, it’s whatever the speaker says it is. And that, like one’s gender, can change with the alacrity of the weather.

A fourth – and perhaps the most pernicious – is the conceit that, as one of my colleagues made clear, if he finds something hard to believe, then neither should anyone else be allowed to hear it, lest they might find it easier to believe. And another colleague opines that if a state-sanctioned commission has concluded that p, then no university professor under that state’s jurisdiction should be allowed to assert that not-p.

But let’s be fair. Most universities – including the top universities in the world – started off as centres for the induction of the would-be clergy into that particular religion’s partisan dogma. In Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, universities were for the training of political commissars. The idea of a university as a protected space for ideas to contest with each other has been a very recent idea, an unstable one, and a short-lived one. So cancel culture is nothing new. What the left is doing to the right today is precisely what the right did to the left in the 50’s and 60’s. And below the 49th, what the left is doing to the right in blue states is precisely what the right is doing to the left in red states.

Jonathan Haidt has argued that a university can seek truth, or it can seek social justice, but not both. Why not? Because truth and social justice – at least someone’s idea of social justice – are almost invariably in conflict. For example, (what Hymie Rubenstein calls) indigenous exceptionalism may be a myth, but subscription to that myth might be the sine qua non of (whatever’s meant by) reconciliation. Truth is an instrumental value. And as such it’s a contingent value. If it doesn’t pay the rent, ditch it for what does.

Haidt doesn’t reject that view. And neither do I. All he demands – and all I demand – is truth in advertising. Tell us your mission and stick to it. Or if you’re going to jump, let us know. To its credit Trinity Western University rightly makes it clear it’s a Christian institution, not a liberal one. So having suspended academic freedom at the U of L – which invertebrate then-President Mike Mahon did not on January 31, 2023, because he’d already done so on October 4, 2016 – all would be well had he just said so.

Too quick. My complaint presupposes there are universities neither Christian nor woke a student could attend if she wanted neither. But as of about a decade ago there are not. As low as the U of L has fallen – and it’s fallen pretty low! – it remains no worse than most. It’s at best a third-rung university, but first and second no longer exist.

Part of the problem is the nigh-universal misunderstanding that your freedom of expression is about you. It’s not. It’s about me. Were it about you, it could be far too trivially satisfied. All we’d have to do is drive you out to a field just outside of town and come back an hour later to pick you up. So it’s not about your right to say what’s on your mind. It’s about my right to hear it, conditional, of course, on your willingness to share it with me. That’s why it wasn’t Frances Widdowson who’s rights were abrogated last February. It was mine. And Jonah‘s.

But because that right isn’t just formal, because it’s (what jurisprudes call) a substantive right, where an institution is involved – as it is with academic freedom – my right to hear what’s on your mind, conditional on your willingness to share it with me, entails the institution’s duty to see to it I can hear you. Which means it has to take measures – however draconian if need be – to veto the hecklers’ veto. Last February, in addition to campus security, there were twelve city cops on hand, not to protect us from the hecklers’ veto but to protect Frances from the hecklers themselves. How many more cops would be required to protect us from the hecklers’ veto? And who would foot the bill for that protection?

This goes to the core of the Administration’s case. Academic freedom, were it treated as an absolute, would be too expensive. Well, we counter, not if the hecklers were the ones who had to pay. That would put the kibosh on it!

Ah, but the optics would be terrible. Headline: “Hundreds of students at the U of L fined and expelled for exercising their right to protest.” And there we have it. The paradox of free speech. Free speech is only possible if we agree to take turns remaining silent. But following through on that agreement, like any Prisoners’ Dilemma, is notoriously unstable. So the choice is not, as Haidt would have it, between truth and social justice. It’s between academic freedom – with the billy clubs that might require – and the rule of the mob.

Ah, but you say, there are mobs and there are mobs. Those who shut Frances down were the righteous mob. Why? Because what Frances has to say is wrong. And if Jonah and I say, as would John Stuart Mill, “Let us be the judge of that!”, you’ll counter that we’re not qualified to make that judgment. But, of course, you are. Or if you’re not, someone else is. Someone in your chain of doxastic trust. It’s a res judicata that the residential school program was genocide. Even the pope has said so. To raise doubts about this in (what are clearly) weaker minds, is to gaslight them. And there’s no moral defence for gaslighting.

Well, actually there is. Raising doubts about our beliefs forces us to ask how came we to have those beliefs. And the answer to that question can be woefully deflating. How much epistemic toil did you put into your heartfelt convictions about global warming? Precisely what epistemic toil my Christian friends – yes, some of my best friends are Christian, and one is even Indigenous, though come to think of it, none are Black, so I must be a racist! Precisely what epistemic toil my Christian friends put into the Empty Tomb.

For most of us, and for most of the things we believe, we believe on faith, if not in God then in those we trust, who in turn trust in those they trust, and so on. This is nothing to be ashamed of. There’s no other way we can come to believe what we do. And believe what we do in some cases – can those walls hold up this roof? – we must. But that the Holy Spirit proceedeth from the Father and the Son, as distinct from the Father alone, we only need to believe if it’s the Catholic rather than Orthodox militia doing doctrine rounds in the village. Likewise, then, what hangs on whether the residential school program was or was not genocide? Well, in a growing number of cases, your job!

Is this the way we want it to be? Probably, if you’re Catholic. But though there’s no such thing as a non-theocracy, any given theocracy has a limited shelf-life. Don’t get too comfortable, because the Orthodox are already in the next village. So what’s the only non-circular non-question-begging argument for academic freedom? Self-preservation.

Is wokeism killing the university? No. It’s already killed it. It’s possible that some phoenix will some day rise from the ashes, in much the way Jesus probably did not rise from the dead. But what should the would-be faithful do in the meantime? Hold on. Fight back. And like the alternative title to Sometimes a Great Notion, Never Give A Inch.

Categories: Everything You Wanted to Know About What's Going On in the World But Were Afraid to Ask, Social and Political Philosophy, Why My Colleagues Are Idiots

Tags: academic freedom, ad hominem, decolonisation, diversity, Frances Widdowson, freedom of speech, gaslighting, hecklers' veto, Humpty Dumpty, Hymie Rubenstein, inclusion, indigenisation, indigenous exceptionalism, Jonathan Haidt, Matthew Letts, Mike Mahon, Prisoner's Dilemma, rights, social justice, Trinity Western University, University of Lethbridge, wokeism