Are universities too woke to exist?

No, we should not defund all universities because of "ideological capture"

In one of the grossest and funniest scenes in this season’s Slow Horses, the shambling alcoholic MI5 agent Jackson Lamb, played by Gary Oldman, stages a bout of explosive flatulence in order to get out of a surveillance lockdown. “You might want to keep hold of that,” he says, pointing to the can of air freshener a disgusted agent is spraying around the room. “I think I just hit a seam.”

I managed to hit a similar seam here on Substack last week. In a Note I posted about the sudden firings of 162 hard-working staff members at my university, I got expressions of sympathy and concern, but I also seemingly uncorked a wellspring of bile. I don’t know what got unleashed within the Substack algorithm, but dozens of people came out of the woodwork to express kind-hearted sentiments (“Hope they starve”) and yell at me about how universities are evil and ought to be defunded and destroyed. If I had posted about mass layoffs at tobacco companies, banks, private equity firms, or companies that mock and club baby seals, I don’t think I would’ve received as much of an outpouring of vitriol, most from anonymous accounts, echoing the same themes.

This tells me two things. First, there is a faction in this country that has done a very effective job of painting universities as the epitome of public enemy. Second, universities themselves are at fault for failing to broadcast their values and defend their worth, both to students and to society. The result is that universities find themselves with few allies, even as they weather unprecedented partisan attacks from our executive branch.

kyla scanlon had a great piece in The Argument about the demise of college towns that included sobering statistics on higher education: “According to a Gallup poll, in 2015, 56% of Republicans said they had a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in colleges; today, only 20% do.” Academia is facing a serious trust problem. According to much popular consensus, we deserve it: institutions like mine are hotbeds of intolerant leftism, so devoted to wokeness that we’ve tossed out all standards. Instead of teaching about beauty and truth, we’re busy policing each other’s pronouns, dying our mohawks blue, and silencing free speech and open debate. Instead of hiring based on merit, we focus on identity politics and paying the big bucks to our DEI fat cat administrators. We shout down speakers whose views we dislike and bar anyone with even the slightest whiff of center-right ideology from entering our hallowed halls.

So is this narrative true? Have universities been subject to complete ideological capture from the left? How did we get here, whose fault is it, and can we fix it?

There’s a lot to say here. First, I’ll talk about two of the most frequently invoked signs of ideological capture at universities: the use of diversity statements in graduate admissions and hiring and the creation of DEI offices. Finally, I’ll tell you why I think universities got into such an unpopular spot in the first place.

Why should you listen to me? As a senior, tenured faculty member at a research university who is bad at saying ‘no’ to departmental service requests, I’ve served on ten faculty search committees over the past 15 years or so, and chaired five of those committees. I’ve also been running our PhD program’s admissions for the last three years, and have admitted multiple candidates to my own lab. I’ve written way too many research grant proposals, most unfunded, but a few lucky ones funded by NIH and NSF. I’ve served as an ad-hoc grant reviewer for both agencies and have been on an NIH study section (standing grant review panel) for years, so I’ve also sat in the room when grants get discussed. In terms of my political leanings, I would call myself a center-left normie with a fondness for institutional tradition, like wearing fun medieval robes at graduation. There are definitely elements of university culture that I do not like. Specifically, I am not a fan of ‘trigger warnings,’ ‘safe spaces,’ or any discourse that seems to start with an assumption of student fragility (and that includes actions like shouting down speakers or attempting to cancel and deplatform people with unpopular opinions). That’s my bias as a clinical psychologist trained in therapies that work through approach-oriented behaviors, like exposure therapy for anxiety. I find it counterproductive to adopt a default position of weakness or to equate ideas with violence. (I have been quite consistent on this stance; here’s me arguing against trigger warnings in a Slate piece from 2016, which got picked up by none other than Jesse Singal at New York Magazine). Trigger warnings and safe spaces are often considered leftist, but I think of them more as a legacy of helicopter parenting, mixed with online echo chamber culture; you can definitely be right-wing and still get triggered and seek to cancel dissenters. Many such cases in this past year. I am also, to be honest, not a fan of land acknowledgements before talks. Unless a speaker is fundraising to give the land back, I find them mostly performative.

I’ve already written a few pieces about academia, including Trump’s latest salvo in the war on higher ed; the abrupt cancellation of my student’s funding this spring; and the banned word list adopted by the Trump admin to vet research grants, so I’ll avoid re-visiting those topics. Also, I should acknowledge that my department is in the Life Sciences division of my university and I do biomedical and mental health research. I’m sure folks from other types of departments and universities have different takes.

My earlier article talks about how diversity considerations might be weighed in research grants. Here, I’ll describe the use of diversity statements in hiring and graduate admissions.

When we evaluate faculty job candidates, we typically request a CV, a statement of their research (describing the major themes of their work and how they are reflected in their publications or grants); a teaching statement in which they write about their approach in the classroom; and a service statement in which they talk about their service to the field (serving as an ad-hoc reviewer, helping to organize conferences, editorial roles at scientific journals, outreach to the community) and to their university (like mentoring activities and roles on committees). In recent years, there has been a push to include diversity statements along with these other documents. Sometimes these get combined with the service statement, sometimes a separate statement is requested. When our hiring committee reads applications, we try to evaluate each of these pieces as fairly as we can, and weigh them according to our institutional priorities. For us as a research-focused department, the CV and research statement carry the most weight by far, and the teaching, service, and diversity statements are bonuses; we care about them, but they will not drive us to consider a candidate who is weak on the fundamentals. We’re usually vetting >100 candidates for each open position we have, so the odds are long for anyone who applies (and our numbers are similar for graduate admissions: we get about 500-700 applications a year and can admit around 10 students).

Here’s how political commentators imagine diversity statements and DEI sections of grants are used:

Candidate 1: I’m a Marxist neurodivergent enby who has been oppressed by my left-handedness. My research, funded by George Soros, is about how to radicalize my students into joining antifa.

Candidate 2: I’m a boring old white guy who studies the classics and I voted for Trump.

Search committee: You’re hired, Candidate 1! Candidate 2, we’ve reported you to Title IV!

But that’s not how it goes at all! In reading through hundreds of diversity statements, I have seen a huge diversity in how people tackle them. Moreover, contrary to popular belief, these statements serve an actual goal, and that goal is not “find people who will contribute to our left-wing groupthink.” Rather, we care about these statements because we want to hire candidates that will be able to a) bring new perspectives to our department and b) work well with students from a variety of backgrounds.

One of the best diversity statements I’ve read was written by my former postdoc Anthony, now on the faculty at UNC Chapel Hill. He’s a white guy, and he wrote about being from a working-class family that ran a trucking company and did not emphasize higher education. When he first got to college, he wasn’t sure how to ask for help, and didn’t know that you are supposed to go to professors’ office hours. He now tries to be a hands-on mentor for students like him who might fall through the cracks, and has volunteered with programs that help make academia more accessible to others. Another memorable diversity statement came from a first-generation community college graduate who wrote about arriving at a four-year university as a transfer student and struggling to get her bearings. Since USC admits many transfer students from community colleges, we on the hiring committee were excited to bring a faculty member to the department with first-hand experience of that transition. Of course, you don’t need direct experience of personal challenge to write a good statement. My awesome husband is, on paper, not what you’d consider ‘diverse’; no joke, he went to the same fancy D.C. prep school as Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. But when he applied for a job teaching music recording at Occidental College, he wrote about having spent decades in the music industry collaborating with bands and artists from very different backgrounds, and about his commitment to helping non-traditional students learn sound engineering. All three of these statements give a signal to university departments that the candidate can work with a variety of students. None of them include a statement of partisan ideology or left-wing voting history.

Here’s another example. My university is in a part of Los Angeles that is about 60% Latino, and my department operates a sliding-scale mental health training clinic that serves mostly members of the local community. We have about 40 tenure-line faculty. For almost the entire time I have been part of the department, there was only one Latino professor on the faculty, who recently retired. His research focused on untreated psychosis. The longer you go without treatment after your first psychotic break, the greater your risk of developing schizophrenia. There are well-known ethnic/racial disparities in psychosis treatment, with Latinos less likely to receive prompt treatment, in part because of a lack of community knowledge about the signs of early psychosis. Untreated schizophrenia is incredibly costly not just to individuals, but societies! (Take the horrendous stabbing of Iryna Zarutska as a very extreme example of what happens when an actively psychotic person does not get treatment). In any case, my colleague developed and tested a culturally tailored Spanish-language intervention to help family members better recognize psychosis in a loved one, and get them into treatment. Was this woke DEI nonsense? No - it brought our department a lot of recognition and made a real positive impact on families.

But is it true that departments only care about hiring non-white faculty these days? If that’s true, they’re doing a terrible job. As my colleagues Manuel Pastor and Jody Agius Vallejo wrote, in a Los Angeles Times op-ed about the Compact, “The share of tenure or tenure-track faculty at USC that is Black creeped to 5% from 3% between 2010 and 2025, while the Latino share edged to 6% from 5%, and the Asian American share rose to 19% from 17%. According to the National Science Foundation, that’s pretty much in line with the growth in recent PhDs by ethnicity — although we do seem to be lagging in hiring from the newly minted Latino professoriate. As empirical social scientists, we fail to see much evidence of a heavy affirmative action thumb on the scale.”

What about DEI offices and initiatives - are they driving up costs across higher education? First, I want to acknowledge that yes, universities have fumbled the ball on costs in many ways. They are way too unaffordable (as a parent of teens, I’m aghast at tuition numbers), and are prone to mission creep, administrative bloat, and a “bells and whistles” rat race. When I toured schools with my daughter last summer, not only did every college gym have a fancy climbing wall, they boasted perks like a pet therapy room and a smoothie bar. However, high tuition is not a particularly partisan issue. When people ask, ‘Why has college tuition gone up while prices in many other sectors have dropped?’, there’s a pretty simple answer: labor-intensive industries (healthcare, childcare, higher education) have seen rising costs while industries that don’t depend on people (consumer goods, tech) have dropped. See this chart from the American Enterprise Institute, shared by Noah Smith . Moreover, with higher-ed specifically, some price increases are driven by competition and consumer demand. After your 10^th college tour visit to the climbing wall, you start having doubts about the SLAC with the janky gym where your kid’s climbing aspirations may never be realized. You also want your kid to have access to mental health care, student counseling and advising, security staff roving the campus, and fun rah-rah sports games to attend – all of which costs money. At my university at least, spending on DEI-related services is about 1/100000^th of the spending on the football team. Indeed, many DEI efforts are quite weak, performative, and under-funded. Once Trump started issuing Executive Orders opposing them, many universities dropped or buried their existing offerings, which shows that they weren’t considered central to their academic missions in the first place. (I think they should be stronger and better-funded, personally).

What about the claim that universities are too full of culture warriors to impart actual knowledge? The right-wing has been pushing versions of this narrative since way before I started college. William F. Buckley’s 1951 book, God and Man at Yale, painted my alma mater as a haven for heathens, home to anti-religious and anti-capitalist sentiment. Several generations later, a 1990 Newsweek cover story on “political correctness” on campus was titled “Watch What You Say: Thought Police.” The early ‘90s pushback on campus liberals, part of a long reaction to the campus liberalism of the 1960s and 1970s, was extremely well-funded. Billionaires like the Koch brothers and the Olin and Scaife families offered high pay to right-wing academics like Allan Bloom and Dinesh D’Souza to disseminate the idea that campuses had been overtaken by intolerant lefties. (Jane Mayer’s book Dark Money: the Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, documents the network of conservative donors who invested billions in an attempted cultural takeover of the academy). In 2006, the book The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America offered a curated hitlist of faculty with “un-American” beliefs.

Ironically, an unspoken secret in academia is that the quickest route to fame and fortune is to swing to the right. Much to my disappointment, there are vanishingly few billionaires looking to fund the axe-grinding personal projects of left-leaning academics, but plenty of richly endowed institutes for conservative-think. Here are a few of the most prominent, but there are plenty of others.

Another unspoken secret: Many corners of academia are performatively left-wing but practically conservative. (Both Paul Bloom and Josh May have written about this). Academic institutions are fundamentally businesses run by business managers, and the incentives of academia reward hierarchy, respect for authority, and resistance to change. Training and hiring rituals in academia are almost medieval, using an apprenticeship model with long periods of fealty to senior authorities. (I already mentioned the long 12th century robes we wear at graduation).

The “adjunctification” of academia over the past 50 years – that is, the replacement of tenured faculty with non-tenured instructors – is fundamentally a conservative business move. (Ironically, when right-wingers cherry-pick extreme-woke examples from academia, they are almost always views expressed by adjuncts, because adjuncts tend to be a generation or two younger and several notches more liberal than tenured faculty. Junior tenure-track faculty are also often younger and more liberal, but tend to be more cautious about speaking out. Seriously, monitor the academia ragebait discourse in right-wing spaces and take note of which faculty get singled out, and in most cases it will be the most tenuously employed ones). Medical schools are often particularly conservative and hierarchical, have workaholic cultures, and have a well-documented predominance of white males, especially within senior ranks. It’s a huge irony that the cancellation of NIH and NSF research grants hit medical schools hardest (because they hold the most research funding), since they are frequently the least woke corners of academia.

Students might go to protests and get mad during their time in college, as is age-appropriate, but relatively few of them are actually looking to burn everything down. (In fact, the ones who really want to burn it all down are the MAGA nihilists).

Here’s another dirty secret: Standards across all levels of academia have risen dramatically, not dropped. It’s much, much harder to get into college, graduate school, and to become a faculty member than ever before. At the time that conservatives imagine that academia was supposedly more rigorous and more devoted to the pursuit of knowledge and truth, it was almost laughably easy to get a job as a professor. Here’s how my stepdad got his faculty position at Oberlin College in the early 1960s: the chair of Oberlin’s English department called the chair of Yale’s English department and said, we need a new assistant professor. Got anyone good? My stepdad happened to be sitting in the graduate student lounge when his chair wrapped up the call, so he got the job. He hadn’t even finished his dissertation!** In contrast, by the time he retired as an emeritus professor in the early 2000s, Oberlin was routinely getting upwards of 300 applications for a single Assistant Professor position.

White male academics of previous generations benefited enormously from having almost no competition from anyone else, because women and minorities were explicitly shut out of academic institutions. We had decades upon decades of affirmative action policies benefiting the senior white male scholar. We also had a biomedical science that was totally dominated by research on males (both animal and human).

I once heard the quip that academics are much more like cats than dogs, which I think is one of the most apt things I’ve ever heard. We’re not loyal pack animals; we’re prickly and want to hide in our offices and avoid committee meetings like the plague. Frankly, I don’t think we’re well-organized enough to ever be fully ideologically captured.

*Note to any bad-faith commentators who discover this post: You are welcome to slag (or, preferably, debate me) as much as you want, but if you go after any of my students or colleagues, I will bust through my computer screen like the Kool-Aid man and go full goblin mode on you, Lyman-style.

**He became a truly wonderful teacher, poet, and translator, so as friend and colleague David Walker points out, “Surely he had something more going for his candidacy than that he happened to be sitting in the grad student lounge. The system was very much an old-boys club at the time, but that doesn’t mean excellence and promise didn’t very much enter into the outcome.”

MUSIC RECOMMENDATION OF THE WEEK

Past recs: Broncho // Alvvays // Capitol Years // The Cairo Gang and Hard Quartet // The Beths // Ballerina Black // James Mercer // Playboy Carti & Car Seat Headrest // Weyes Blood // Matthew Sweet

FONTAINES D.C.

I’m a sucker for a post-punk band fronted by Irish guys in track suits, and Fontaines D.C. is one of my favorites in a long time. That’s also the chorus of my favorite Fontaines D.C. song, Favourite, which has the sweetest video I’ve ever seen a grungy, tattooed band put together - featuring adorable home movie footage.

We caught these guys live at Pomona’s Fox Theater last fall, and they were loud and punky and awesome. Here’s them on KEXP a couple of years ago.