The good news is that research and data show that the fall of woke academia and everything it entails are dwindling. The bad information is that true issues will still exist at colleges and universities unless the illiberal school culture is changed along with it.
According to Musa al-Gharbi, a professor of communications and sociology at Stony Brook University and author of the recently released book” We Have Never Been Woke,” periods of” Awakenings” like the DEI-craze America just experienced have passed through generations, and the current” Great Awokening” is coming to an end.
In a chat at the meeting” Censorship in the Sciences: Integrative Ideas”, held at the University of Southern California over the weekend, al-Gharbi said some measures support his idea.
” After 2010, we saw a lot of things that shifted at after, we saw the number of learners… who censor on various matters went away, peaked around 2021, and started to get over”, he said.
” Research on prejudice and discrimination went up after 2010, peaked around 2021, and is on the manner down”, he said. “]C] ancel culture incidents, you see the spike, it peaked around 2021 ,]and is ] on the way down”.
Coupled with that, the latest roll up of DEI initiatives, the close of discourse rules, and a festival of pro-First Amendment successes in court displays “academics, on report, are as free as you can get”.
” Then why are universities such censored areas? Well, the problem is, it’s not about rules and policies, it’s about culture”, he told the audience.
” If scholars are not taking advantage of the existing rules, laws and protections that they have, then multiplying the rules, laws and protections probably won’t do much to change the censorious nature of institutions”, he said. ” If you want to change the censorious nature of the institutions, then you have to work on culture”.
Blaming cancel culture in general misses the mark, he added.
” When you focus too much on the ‘ kids these days’ and Fox News, we actually miss who has the power, how that power is exercised, who the decision makers are, how they are making their decisions”, al-Gharbi said. ” When we look at who is actually driving the majority of the censorious dynamics within campuses, the call is almost always coming from inside the house,” says one student.
He claimed that academics are “much more likely to be conformist, are much more likely to be intolerant of views that deviate from their own, are much more likely to be dogmatic and extreme ideologically compared to the general public, and are much more concerned with status” ( p.
” One of the things that drives these cultural dynamics in our institutions is the fact that the people who end up in these institutions aren’t just regular people,” he said, chuckling the audience.
” We’re kind of weird, and the process of being enculturated in these institutions tends to only make the weird tendencies we already have.”
In his recently released book,” We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite”, he said he delves further into this paradox.
” To understand these dynamics and … why they are playing out, you need to look at culture”, he told conference attendees.
In an interview with The Fix prior to the conference, al-Gharbi said what he has termed” Awokenings” are not unique to the internet-age or Gen-Z,” but a phenomenon that has occurred multiple times over the past hundred years when the conditions were right”.
An overproduction of an elite population who find themselves “either unemployed or underemployed or find that they’re not able to live the kinds of lives they expected” is a major factor that seems to predict these times. In other words, according to al-Gharbi, they ultimately discover that the life they had hoped or lived for as children eventually becomes unattainable for them as adults.
What they do is they tend to criticize the social order they believe has failed them and attempt to rebuild some of the existing elites to make room for themselves, al-Gharbi told The Fix.
” I argue this is fundamentally what ‘ Awokenings’ are”, al-Gharbi said. They are these inter-elite power conflicts between “realistic” elites and more well-established elites who are trying to defend their positions.
But the struggles and concerns of would-be elites are not enough to spur an Awokening, al-Gharbi noted.
” Often when times are bad for elites, they’re fine for everyone else”, he said. ” So it’s hard to get anyone to care about elite problems. However, there are times when these trajectories” come together” in some cases.
” ]If ] things have been bad and growing worse for ordinary people for a while”, said al-Gharbi,” and all of a sudden they’re bad for a non-trivial subset of elites too …]that’s ] when Awokenings tend to happen”.
Frustrated elites and ordinary people form coalitions, though these coalitions “often prove unstable”, he noted. He claimed that part of this is because” the elite faction tends to have weird ideas that are not really what the non-elites are concerned about.”
As an example, al-Gharbi said, a lot of lower-income African Americans have concerns about the way policing and incarceration work in the United States. However, he said, they don’t want to abolish prisons or defund the police the way some relatively affluent, highly-educated people do.
According to al-Gharbi, as an Awokening fades, there is typically little left to show for it “in terms of like actually helping people who are genuinely marginalized and disadvantaged.”
But, said al-Gharbi, “each Awokening usually leads to the proliferation of more…social justice sinecures. That’s new jobs where the main focus is on helping institutions consistently adhere to, you know, the appropriate social justice whatevers.
” Those”, he added, “tend to be one of the more lasting legacies of Awokenings. They don’t much for the marginalized and the underprivileged, but they do offer reasonably well-paid social justice sinecures to otherwise irritable elites.
Some of those get cut, according to al-Gharbi, but you usually end up with much more than you started with, and they do tend to stick around for a while.
MORE: Censorship in the Sciences conference speakers call on peers to organize, defend free speech
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