Another moral panic debunked: The "woke" university

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.

The decline of the public university

I'm going to point you to an article by Lisa Corrigan who writes about the recent "restructuring" of West Virginia University, and what it means for the rest of us who work in public colleges and universities, whether flagship institutions, or regional colleges and universities (like me). WVU's administrators hired a consulting firm to determine programs to put on the chopping block, and it is doing away with quite a number of majors, including all of its majors in the languages. About 16% of its faculty will be laid off in the process. I write this as my university is doing a program viability study, and I worry about what the outcome of its recommendations will be. 

If you want a more tl:dr version, Dr. Corrigan posted a thread on the platform formerly known as Twitter:

https://twitter.com/DrLisaCorrigan/status/1693252473152999436

The enrollment cliff has been used as a cudgel for much of my professional career - at least since the Great Recession came and went. What I suspect will happen is what Dr. Corrigan says quite bluntly: we will end up with a two-tiered higher education situation where the privileged will have more opportunities to enrich themselves intellectually, and the rest of our students, especially in rural public universities will just have to get used to fewer options. After all, workforce development is the big buzzword these days. We'll also see a future in which institutions operate with fewer full-time faculty, with the ensuing decline in quality that comes with understaffed programs. This was not the future I wanted for our next cohorts of students. Unless there is a huge fuss made regarding adequate funding for our institutions and a move back to ensuring academic freedom that is untouched by legislators, this is the future that awaits. It is bleak.

Political intereference in the classroom is increasing, and that should disturb all of us

Reading this story about how a simple guest lecture almost led to this Texas professor's firing was unsettling, to say the least. Although I don't know Dr. Joy Alonzo's work, it appears that she's a respected expert on the opioid crisis in the US. The content of her lecture, at least from the PowerPoint slides available, suggest she had a matter-of-fact presentation of the opioid crisis, as well as policies that could mitigate or exacerbate the problem. She just happens to work in Texas, which has arguably managed to make that particular situation worse. Any expert who understands the impact of public policy is inevitably going to end up saying something when state or national policies are doing more harm than good. Politicians may not like that fact, nor may partisans of any stripe, but that is how professionals work. Her reward for offering her expertise to a class at another university was to end up on paid leave and investigated - and nearly fired. Why? Some of the content of the lecture might have offended the Lt. Governor of Texas. She managed to dodge a bullet, as no evidence of wrong-doing could be found, but I can only imagine that she regrets the day she joined the Texas A&M faculty. 

Let me step back for just a moment. I am in the behavioral and social sciences. When I started my first position at Oklahoma Panhandle State University, I quickly became friends with a then-junior faculty member in my department who was and probably is considerably more conservative than I am. We are still good friends although we each work in completely different locations now. One thing we shared in common was a belief that we both expressed often: social scientists are equal opportunity offenders. If we are doing our job right as educators and researchers, we're going to present evidence that will end up upsetting someone. That's not because we enjoy upsetting our intended audiences, but because facts can be inconvenient, depending on one's worldview. I also believe that since our research output can inform policymakers, we have an obligation to call them out when they are misunderstanding our work, misusing our work, or ignoring our findings at the expense of the greater social good. If these decision-makers are unhappy with our informed opinions, that's their problem. At least that's how it should be. I take the same view with students. Some course content will inevitably challenge beliefs and maybe that leads to some cognitive dissonance, or whatever. I can't just change the facts to please others. My job is to make the evidence available. What students choose to do with that information is up to them, and quite frankly, I have little interest in what they do with that information once the course is finished for the term. As a result, some semesters my course evaluations can look a bit bleak. Imagine a simple introductory course in Psychology that includes materials about research on gender that go against what a subset of students may have learned in Sunday School. I'll get flak for the simple fact that the information is in the textbook, and that I may have tested on that information. So it goes.

In mentioning all of this I do know that I am working during a difficult moment in higher education. The tendency for legislators, primarily in Republican-run states in my country, to micromanage our instruction and research is only intensifying. Texas and Florida are probably the most obvious examples, but any of us in the so-called "red states" are at risk of being cancelled. I expect things to get worse before they get better. I can hope that the tide turns back in favor of rational thought, defended with empirical evidence, and that this era of filtering all data and ideas through tribal grievances will end with minimal collateral damage to careers and to students' ability to function after college. Then again, I am well aware that hope and $1.50 might buy you a candy bar, and little else.

America's Confidence in Higher Education is Dropping

You can read the article here. The article and the poll don't give much in the way of context for why Americans' confidence in higher education has dropped so precipitously. Apparently some measure of political party affiliation was used, so that helps a bit. Apparently, if you analyze the cross-tabs, you'll find that generally, those who identify as Democratic have had relatively higher amounts of confidence in higher education relative to those who identify as Republican or Independent, and that seems to be a consistent pattern across time. However, since 2015, confidence has dropped among all polled regardless of party affiliations. I suppose university and college administrators in blue states can take some consolation in the finding that as of 2022, more the half of Democrats were confident in higher education as an institution, but even that is a noticeable decline from 2015. 

I'll speak only anecdotally for the time being, as I don't have the time or energy to really do a deep dive into other data on the matter. I've noticed a tendency, usually political and deeply partisan, to attack colleges and universities. There was and still is a moral panic about not enough ideological conservatives being hired at institutions of higher education. I've seen that tired attack for as long as I've been an educator. I guess I don't see it at the sort of regional colleges and universities that would typically hire or at least interview me, and I've looked. There's definitely a moral panic over the content we teach in our courses, and I've seen so much fuss made about CRT and "wokeness"at colleges and universities that I'm pretty much numb to such attacks. There isn't much "woke" about means and standard deviations, folks. So it goes. I think I can understand how those who regularly rely on Fox News for their information my have changed their attitudes toward colleges and universities. I wonder if our colleges and universities are increasingly seen as not doing enough by at least some subsection of those who identify as Democratic. I'm pretty jaded about most DEI statements and offices at universities like mine. I wonder if that jadedness is shared. Then there is the ongoing problem about the increasing student loan burden that students and parents alike deal with in order to obtain degrees that, while leading to nominally middle-income careers, are not lucrative enough to pay back those loans. 

There's so much to unpack, and I think that particular article gives us only a minimal amount of information to go on. At least we know what the topline numbers are. We just don't entirely know what they mean. And we need to understand better what is going on behind those numbers in order to make sure we can as institutions defend ourselves in an increasingly difficult political and social environment.