Judd Legum has a reasonably good explainer of the current moral panic that is targeting colleges and universities: the myth that these institutions function primarily for indoctrinating students into some sort of "woke" ideology. In a sense, this is simply a rehash of earlier moral panics targeting colleges and universities. In my day as an undergraduate student, there were still plenty of pundits who persisted to claim that universities were hotbeds of communist indoctrination - a notion I found quite amusing at the time. Later, I'd read that there was a noticeable downward trend in course offerings on Marxism and a downward trend in Marxist scholarship by the 1980s. My guess is that what really drove the moral panic of my day was student-led efforts to urge universities to divest from South Africa's Apartheid regime. Today's moral panic appears to have its origins primarily in DEI initiatives by universities and university systems starting late last decade, and more recently in student protests over the war in Gaza which is somewhat reminiscent of the anti-Apartheid protests from the 1980s and early 1990s.
As Legum notes, many of the individuals who seem to be responsible for our current moral panic over "woke" ideology in universities happen to be billionaires (often in the tech sector) and political pundits on streaming services or in our legacy media. There are the usual anecdotes to make the reader's or viewer's blood boil. Anecdotes intended to provoke outrage aside, is there any data to back up the claims that our universities are indoctrinating our students? The answer turns out to be no.
Legum mentions an organization called Open Syllabus. The data collected by Open Syllabus can be quite helpful. Obviously the data in this case come from publicly available syllabi, which could be a limitation, but it at least gives us numbers to test the claim that our universities are too "woke" to effectively educate adult learners. It turns out that there are very few course syllabi that include terms like Critical Race Theory (or race more broadly), transgender (or gender more broadly) and so on. In other words, as Legum notes, it appears possible and even probable that students, even at elite universities, can go through a four year degree program without ever encountering any of the concepts that apparently cause our far-right billionaire class and punditry class to quake in their comfy slippers. We could certainly have a conversation as to whether a lack of exposure to structural racism, the concept of gender as a social construct, etc., is beneficial or detrimental to students who are preparing for careers in which they will likely work with and supervise a diverse set of individuals. There is certainly room for debate about the necessity and effectiveness of DEI initiatives in terms of fulfilling a university's primary mission and objectives. Clamping down on DEI programs, courses of study, and student speech with scant to near-non-existent evidence is far from conducive to an environment in which ideas are freely exchanged and challenged.
The moral of the story is simple: if a claim is too outrageous to be true, it probably is. At that point, it is a really good idea to question the source or sources of the claim or claims, and do some digging to see if there is any trustworthy data to support their claim. If not, it is best to discount the claim as not valid and move on.
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