How far can “liberal” academics criticise “woke” ideas without providing intellectual cover for Donald Trump’蝉 savage attacks on US higher education?
That was the question hanging over the inaugural Heterodox Social Science Conference at the University of Buckingham earlier this month.
The “heterodox” movement has gathered steam over the past decade amid rising concerns about the dominance of left-wing ideas on university campuses. In the US, the non-profit was co-founded in 2015 by several US academics, including New York University’蝉 Jonathan Haidt, to promote “viewpoint diversity”; the organisation now has a membership of more than 6,600 faculty, staff and students from across disciplines and countries.
The Heterodox Academy’蝉 own is next week in New York (23-25 June), but a preview of the tensions members are having to negotiate amid the Trump administration’蝉 assaults on research funding and enrolment was provided earlier this month in the small English town of Buckingham.
As the UK’蝉 oldest private university and, famously, Margaret Thatcher’蝉 favourite university, the University of Buckingham has always been a home to maverick thinkers. For instance, its current vice-chancellor, James Tooley, calls himself “a ‘classical liberal’ in the English sense” – equivalent to a “libertarian” in the US – and “would be happy if the state removed itself altogether from education”.
Last year, the university set up a new , headed by politics professor Eric Kaufmann, an expert on nationalism, and political and religious demography. Kaufmann, whose 2019 book Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities was widely debated, also presided over the centre’蝉 inaugural conference, held between 5 and 7 June.
In , Kaufmann boldly declared that “we are entering a post-progressive era in which sixty years of cultural left intellectual hegemony is in question”. Even traditional leftists – who sometimes argue that a stress on gender, ethnic and other identities obscures issues of class – have, alongside “classical liberals and conservatives”, offered “pointed critiques of the cultural left episteme”.
Yet “the shift away from ‘woke’ excess” is “being steadfastly resisted in academia”. And given that “our knowledge-production system...direct[s] attention to progressive topics and viewpoints while using carrots and sticks to constrain the pursuit of truth,” Kaufmann called for nothing less than “a New Social Science”.
Conference sessions on “critical woke studies” would explore questions such as “Is there a case for limiting speech, mandating equal outcomes or deconstructing a majority tradition?”, while sessions on “neglected perspectives in the social sciences” would examine “alternative explanations for racial, sexual or gender inequality”, “distortion in the public understanding of historical events” and the “negative effects of low-skilled immigration”.
Such topics may have been largely sidelined in the academy, but they are staples of the right-leaning media. So it was unsurprising that the conference was attended by representatives of outlets and thinktanks that are strongly critical of identity politics and what they dismiss as “wokeism” – not to mention by a former leading adviser to British prime minister Boris Johnson. But also present – true to Kaufmann’蝉 assertions about the breadth of opposition to “‘woke’ excess” were two prominent liberals: Harvard University psychologist Stephen Pinker and Johns Hopkins political scientist Yascha Mounk.
As attendees waited for one session to begin, a writer handed out a paper that began with: “For more than a decade, [American] college campuses have severely restricted free speech and free inquiry in ways not seen even in the McCarthy period.” It is this sense that conservative speech is being actively suppressed on most university campuses that drives the right-wing animus against it – with much of the blame pinned on the stifling orthodoxies of equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI). Hence, since Trump came into office, he has waged war on what is referred to in the US as DEI, cancelling research grants on related topics and threatening to cut the funding of universities that don’t abandon EDI initiatives.?
Many of the mostly British attendees at the Buckingham conference expressed gripes that Trump?would surely share.?An astronomer was concerned about “EDI overreach”, “decolonisation agendas” and moves to embrace Indigenous “other ways of knowing” in countries such as New Zealand. There was also much scepticism about activist scholarship. A marketeer, for instance, deplored the way that his subject had been hijacked by staff and students more interested in saving the world than in teaching and learning the practical skills required to help businesses flourish. Others?complained that prevailing campus views on gender required them to deny basic biological reality.?
Meanwhile, one US-based delegate, Jukka Savolainen, a professor in the department of criminology and criminal justice at Michigan’蝉 Wayne State University, spoke about “the ideological capture of the social sciences”. The American Sociological Association had “a tendency to deny its ideological agenda in public and double down on it in practice”, he suggested, citing statements that described the discipline as a “liberatory practice” and the title of the association’蝉 “Intersectional Solidarities: Building Communities of Hope, Justice, and Joy”. In “the big debate about government intervention versus institutional autonomy”, Savolainen took the view that public bodies that provide funding “had a right to intervene – and indeed a duty”, since it was “futile to wait for internal reform” by universities.
Psychiatrist Sally Satel, a lecturer at the Yale University School of Medicine, was similarly dismayed by the way that psychotherapists and their training institutions are now “driven by the precepts of social justice and anti-racism rather than the needs of their patients”. This represented a sharp move away from the old ideal of the “therapeutic alliance”, where the therapist is required to be “supportive and non-judgemental, which doesn’t work if the patient is being berated” or “encouraged to become an activist”.
Wilfred Reilly, assistant professor of political sciences at Kentucky State University, explored what he saw as taboos among many working in universities, most of which were based on the conviction that “all groups and most people would perform equally well in a fair world”.
“I don’t like taboos established by the winners in a culture war,” he went on. “Attacking recent taboos such as opposition to defunding the police may require a generation of heterodox academics. But how do you shift the knowledge-making population which is currently blocking the solution?”
There was, of course, a saviour on offer. Chris Rufo, a conservative activist and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, worked on the president’蝉 executive order and lobbied hard for the ousting of several female Ivy League university presidents last year, including Harvard’蝉 Claudine Gay, over their alleged mishandling of antisemitism. Just before the conference began, he was also influential in blocking the appointment of Santa Ono as University of Florida president, describing him as a “captured left-wing ideologue”.
Rufo offered a robust “defence of Trump” via video link, particularly in regard to the president’蝉 attacks on Harvard, which include legally contested attempts to and ban it from enrolling international students.
“The Constitution of Massachusetts, Rufo pointed out, “makes clear that Harvard would receive benefits but was expected to honour God and carry out its duty to the nation. The church and state were represented on its governing body. That underlying compact still remains, which creates obligations which have been violated. The president is on very strong constitutional foundations. Harvard doesn’t have a right to unlimited public funds while violating its compacts.”
Regarding critical race theory, with whose elevation into a political issue Rufo is , “the critiques have been endless”, Rufo reflected, “but Trump has been turning it into…political [action]. Solving the problem requires blood on the ground, not waiting for liberals to come to their senses. Politics is a blunt-force solution – you have to find elegance elsewhere. The question is if one cares about the outcomes.”
This obviously raises a challenge for academics who want to reform the academy but still identify as liberals and don’t approve of many of Trump’蝉 other policies.
Kaufmann, “liberal national conservative”, feels a genuine need for government intervention to move universities away from pursuing a “woke” agenda. The credit for “get[ting] universities trumpeting viewpoint diversity, abandoning diversity statements [and] trying to recruit conservatives” belongs, he believes, to Trump, as well as Florida governor Ron DeSantis’ crackdown on “woke” policies at the University of Florida and the congressional hearings on universities’ handling of pro-Palestinian protests that led to the resignation of Gay, as well as the University of Pennsylvania’蝉 Elizabeth Magill and Columbia University’蝉 Minouche Shafik. But, in Canada, Kaufmann added, “woke domination is total because there is no external pressure”.
Nevertheless, he stressed that “government must seek to reform, not destroy, and must cherish the many excellent things happening in legacy institutions like universities. A civil and cooperative approach that is principled and rules-based, preserving structures where possible, is better than a punitive, unprincipled and inconsistent approach, as we see with Trump. You cannot call for an end to DEI for race and sex, then ask for it for conservatives; or free speech for all, but not for anti-Zionists.”
Pinker was also troubled by Trump’蝉 wider agenda – including his targeting of Pinker’蝉 own institution. In a recent , Pinker wrote that in his “22 years as a Harvard professor, I have not been afraid to bite the hand that feeds me”. So he was “hardly an apologist for my employer when I say that the invective now being aimed at Harvard has become unhinged”.
Speaking to 51吃瓜, the Johnstone family professor of psychology described himself as “a moderate centrist liberal” and said “it would be an understatement to say that I am not sympathetic to Trump”. However, “that doesn’t mean taking the opposite stance to everything he says – just as being alarmed by critical social justice ideology doesn’t mean taking the opposite stance to everything in it”.
Moreover, if heterodox academics were to self-censor for fear of providing intellectual cover for Trump, “that would mean that important developments in education and scholarship may never be discussed, which is a recipe for disaster,” Pinker said. “I think that thoughtful people should not choose between extreme and indefensible poles but articulate defensible principles and argue for their merits.”
Mounk, associate professor of the practice of international affairs at Johns Hopkins, spoke in the same conference session as Pinker on “classical liberal approaches”, and he is equally disquieted by Trump’蝉 general approach to government. His administration “had an opportunity to use [its] power and influence to remedy some genuine problems in American universities: to stand against certain forms of ideological coercion that have become routinised”, Mounk told THE ahead of his conference session. “But [it] decided to turn universities into enemy institutions which must be beaten by any means possible. I fundamentally disagree with that choice and oppose many of the things they have done: the attacks on Harvard, the indiscriminate cuts to various forms of federal funding, the attempts to deport students who have expressed views disliked by the White House.”
Nevertheless, Mounk – who has written two books about the dangers of right-wing populism, as well as, more recently, a critique of identity politics – insisted that “as academics and intellectuals, we should say whatever we believe to be true, rather than worry about how it might be perceived or who might use it (and in what ways)”. As “philosophical liberals”, he and Pinker oppose what Mounk called “the identity synthesis” because it violates “our most fundamental moral principles”.
Equally, however, he is dismayed by those who “perhaps don’t have similarly firm coordinates about what [their] political vision is” and “have allowed their understandable dislike of ‘woke ideas’ to drive them towards either being unwilling to criticise Trump or to outright embrace him”.
Apart from Rufo’蝉, unconditional endorsements of Trump’蝉 presidency in the round were largely conspicuous by their absence from the Buckingham conference. But there were some striking endorsements of the president’蝉 effect on campus culture. For instance, while Savolainen did not vote for Trump – “because I care about democracy and world peace” – he observed that “nothing” has been happening to reform universities before the “jolt” provided by Trump.
“The Harvard thing is completely excessive and punitive,” Savolainen conceded. “But he’蝉 been facilitating the takedown of DEI. [So] is Trump a force for good or evil when it comes to higher education? In my mind, he is a force for good.”
Savolainen believes there should be much more cooperation between university boards and perhaps state legislatures with “the more heterodox types of scholars who have been identifying these overreaches and ideological biases”, in order to facilitate further crackdowns.
But another conference attendee, Musa al-Gharbi, suggested that the threats posed to free speech on campus by “wokeism” are overstated. Last November, the assistant professor of communications, journalism and sociology at Stony Brook University and research fellow at Heterodox Academy published a book, We Have Never Been Woke: Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, arguing that over history there have been a series of “awokenings” but that they never last long and that the current one is already in decline.
As a result, al-Gharbi told 51吃瓜 that he regarded “a lot of the narratives about wokeism – that it is a threat to civilisation, that Western society is on the cusp – as very hyperbolic. There is actually a lot less at stake than meets the eye.”
So while “DEI policies are not just very effective” at realising their stated goals of increasing equality and tolerance and may even have been counter-productive, there are “no big crises requiring us to burn down and restructure universities from the ground up”, in al-Gharbi’蝉 opinion. “We have problems, but you should prescribe antibiotics before you start chopping things off and, even when you do surgery, you should stick with the scalpel before you pull out a chainsaw.”
The current political climate has certainly created an elevated platform for academics who are openly critical of “‘woke’ excess”, but there evidently remain deep divisions between libertarian, conservative, liberal and left-wing critics about what needs to be done to restore ideological balance on campus. As Trump’蝉 profoundly divisive second presidency embraces Rufo’蝉 “blood on the ground” strategy in this and so many other policy areas, the position of scholars who support the president’蝉 attacks on DEI but deplore his interventions in other areas only seems likely to get more uncomfortable.
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