Author: Jonathan Barazzutti, C2C Journal
The Centre for Heterodox Social Sciences (CHSS) annual conference in Buckingham, England, this past summer brought together hundreds of academics from around the world to discuss the malign impact that woke policies and attitudes are having on their universities – what many have called the Great Awokening.
But unlike most events of this nature, the mood was upbeat and positive.
The Great Awokening has deeply damaged Western universities. The most obvious proof is the vast supply of DEI offices that oversee the exclusion of certain applicants, most often white males, from school job postings.
Other telltales include research agendas obsessed with gender and race and the acceptance that certain views should be banned from campus. This narrowing of opinions together with outright discrimination and censorship has deeply eroded the moral authority and research capabilities of higher education throughout the West.
Despite such a surfeit of bad news, however, Canadian academic and CHSS founder Eric Kaufmann used the Buckingham conference to create a “post-progressive agenda” meant to push back against wokism and reclaim merit and openness on campus. “Let’s Get Started!” he told the crowd. And while there’s a long way to go, conference attendees discussed many encouraging ways in which wokism is now being rolled back.
The most common form of pushback can be seen in new seminars and courses being created that deliberately expose students to a broad range of opinions.
For example, the University of Toronto’s Victoria College offers students a weekly lunchtime seminar that forces participants to engage in difficult or controversial topics rather than simply demanding that opposing views be cancelled.
At the University of British Columbia’s Okanagan campus, Renaud-Philippe Garner and Brad Epperly created a new course called “Dangerous Ideas” that similarly requires students to grapple with complicated issues. Interestingly, students are randomly assigned various positions, so it is impossible to pass the course without considering both sides of many hot-button topics.
At a broader level, some schools are renaming or shutting down their DEI offices. While this may be merely performative in some cases, it still points to the fact that officially sanctioned discrimination is no longer universally popular.
Universities are also rediscovering the long-lost notion of institutional neutrality. This requires school administrators to abstain from entering political debates not directly related to their own operations.
Institutional neutrality has become an important force across many U.S. universities. And while it is less prevalent in Canada, it is growing.
Another avenue for change lies in programs that bring together dissenting scholars from different schools. The Heterodox Academy, founded by well-known social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, promotes open inquiry and intellectual diversity throughout academia, allowing members to network and share ideas.
Kaufmann’s CHSS, located at the University of Buckingham and with members worldwide, is another important component in this process. In an interview, Kaufmann explained that he created the CHSS “to promote viewpoint diversity and really ask the questions and pursue the viewpoints that have been either actively discouraged or shut down in mainstream academia.”
He argues that the creation of institutions such as the CHSS capable of producing original research is crucial to bringing down the woke regime.
“I’m relatively pessimistic about the mainstream system being able to change,” he said. “I think the only way to do this is to have separate centres…that can create entire atmospheres that are non-progressive.”
The deep-seated nature of woke ideas suggests that many universities are unlikely to change on their own. Kaufmann and others at the conference agreed that some form of external or political pressure will probably be needed to complete the process.
The strongest example of this comes from Florida, where Governor Ron DeSantis has enacted a suite of legislation designed to rebalance the state’s education system. This includes shutting down DEI offices and forbidding the imposition of ideological positions on students and faculty.
In Canada, there is much less action on this front, although both Ontario and Alberta now require free speech mandates from their universities. Unfortunately, neither of these policies includes a functional enforcement mechanism to ensure students or faculty who’ve had their speech rights infringed by mobs or school administrators are properly protected. There’s certainly more work to be done.
The final option for removing the scourge of institutionalized academic Marxism is a root-and-branch rethink of the entire concept of a university. The most ambitious example of this clean-slate approach is the University of Austin at Texas (UATX), which markets itself as having “the fairest and most honest admissions in America.”
The school’s race-neutral entrance requirements are based entirely on test scores. As with any new offering, UATX has faced some growing pains. Still, it offers the most ambitious and comprehensive solution to the Great Awokening — bypassing the tired old education model to create something entirely new.
As the CHSS conference heard, there are many different ways to push back against wokism and restore credibility to the university system. This pressure can come from both internal and external sources. It may be incremental, or it can involve dramatic change. Regardless, bringing sanity back to campus will never be a quick fix. The seeds of wokism were sown over many decades, and its roots and vines are now deeply entrenched.
But however long it takes, this process is vitally necessary if universities are to reclaim their historical role as places that offer the freedom to engage in the truest and most important form of diversity — diversity of thought.
Jonathan Barazzutti is a graduate student in Economics at the University of Toronto.