adult males who claim to be women. When her work was presented in scholarly forums, other academics objected to being “non-consensually co-platformed” with her: an impressively obtuse complaint from the folks who insist that women have no business worrying about the presence of men in their spaces.
If you want one simple root cause for where we are – and this is me rather than Kodsi and Maier – you could well cite the baleful influence of postmodern scholarship.
Any teenager off to university to start a humanities degree next month will encounter the result of a scholarly environment that treats inadequate, moralistic theorising with an unearned respect. An analysis of cross-disciplinary US college syllabuses, shared by the psychologist Steven Pinker on X, revealed a pervasive bias towards woke scholarship. With the US figures probably propped up by its “great books” tradition, the UK’s figures were even direr: the gender studies specialist Judith Butler listed thousands of times more often than Plato; the cultural critic Edward Said more often than Shakespeare and the radical French philosopher Michel Foucault more than virtually anyone.
Their conclusion:
There are many lessons to draw from academia’s sustained indulgence of woke ideology. Any serious government should curb the funding of EDI bureaucracies. Subsidies that have been used to inflate the demand for college degrees, depressing standards, should be wound down. Tenure, a form of job security often justified on the grounds that it liberates academics to speak their minds, has proven doubtfully effective in that respect. Its unfortunate effect now may be to allow some of the worst proponents of a bankrupt ideology to continue to haunt their institutions long after the excesses of woke are banished from the rest of public life. The past decade has shown that wokeness disables academia from promoting knowledge and furthering the good in myriad ways. Perversely, but unsurprisingly, one of the things that bias precludes, for those in the grip of it, is its own discovery and correction. Steering universities towards this realisation should be the aim of academia’s real progressives.
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