I Am One of Those Evil Woke Professors
Here’s how woke I am: this old hippy-era poster hangs in my living room. To me, being woke means being antiwar, because war is the meta-problem that exacerbates other problems.
Hoboken, May 19, 2024. My sister-in-law Laura [1] provoked me into writing this piece. She sent me an article headed, “The Myth of ‘Woke’ Indoctrination at American Universities.” It begins:
“According to some prominent billionaires, political pundits, and media figures, American universities have undergone a radical transformation. Institutions of higher learning in the United States, they say, are no longer focused on free academic inquiry. Rather, they are devoted to indoctrinating students on ‘woke’ topics like critical race theory, systemic racism, and transgender rights.”
The article quotes the following sages making this claim:
Podcaster Joe Rogan: "If I was gonna try to destroy the country, that’s how I would do it. I’d radicalize the kids. I’d give them the stupidest ideas and run them in their head… I think we’re sending our kids to cult camps. I think [students] get indoctrinated."
Tech bro Elon Musk: "The amount of indoctrination that’s happening in schools and universities is, I think, far beyond what parents realize.”
Investor Peter Theil: “Over the last three to four years [academia] is even more woke, it’s even less meritocratic.”
Venture capitalist David Sacks: “If you want the economic and social advancement that a college degree grants you, you have to go to one of these schools and submit to voluntary reeducation for four years."
Right-wing activist Charlie Kirk: colleges are “brainwashing away the future of America’s youth.”
NY Times columnist David Brooks: "ideological activism is replacing intellectual inquiry as the primary mission of universities."
Judd Legum, author of “Myth” article, then demolishes the claim that “universities have gone ‘woke’ and are indoctrinating students with far-left ideologies.” He cites data collected by Open Syllabus, a nonprofit that has analyzed “over 5.5 million syllabi at more than 4,000 American institutions of higher learning.” Key stats:
*Terms such as "critical race theory," "structural racism," or "transgender" appear in 0.08% of 2023 syllabi. That comes to less than one mention per 1,000 syllabi.
*“Race” appears in 2.8 percent and “gender” in 4.7 percent of 2023 syllabi. These levels, far from surging lately, have remained more or less constant over the past 15 years.
*Mentions of “climate change” in syllabi have more than doubled over the past 15 years--from 0.6% in 2008 to a whopping 1.3% in 2023.
Legum’s conclusion:
“The reality is that, depending on their major, college students in America can go through their entire college careers without encountering a single course that focuses on race or gender — much less ‘woke’ topics like critical race theory and transgender rights.”
My conclusion: Far from being too woke, universities aren’t woke enough! And just to be clear, let me spell out what I mean by “woke”: It means giving a shit about people less fortunate than you, and it means thinking that pollution and war are not healthy for children and other living things. You have an extra responsibility to be woke if you’re a lucky bastard like me--and like all those white guys quoted above.
I’ve always been, or tried to be, a woke, politically correct, virtue-signaling, green, antiwar, social-justice warrior, both as a professor and science writer. Back in the 1980s, readers unhappy with my critiques of Ronald Reagan’s hawkish policies mailed me letters addressed, “Dear Unscientific Unamerican.”
More recently, social INjustice warriors like Steve Sailor, Jordan Peterson and Charles Murray have attacked my Scientific American columns on sexism and racism. The “skeptic” Michael Shermer calls me the “PC police of the [Scientific American] web site.” Thanks, Mike! [2]
Since 2005, when I began teaching at Stevens Institute of Technology, I’ve yammered about woke stuff in classrooms as well as in my writings. I don’t lecture much in my classes, which include basic humanities courses for first-year students as well as seminars on science writing and war. I prefer to chat with students about readings by me and other authors. Here’s a sampling of topics and readings:
GENDER. Gender is a touchy topic at my school, where students and professors skew male. I prime the pump for class discussion with anthropologist Margaret Mead’s classic paper “Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies”; my column “Darwin Was Sexist, and So Are Many Modern Scientists”; and, for balance (yeah, I try to be balanced), “A Different Take on Sexism in Science,” a critique of my column by the scholars Claire Lehman and Debra Soh.
RACE AND COLONIALISM. Readings include Martin Luther King’s 1964 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech; and an excerpt from Decolonizing the Mind, in which Kenyan scholar Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o describes how British colonizers jammed their language and culture down the throats of Kenyan subjects (now that was indoctrination).
CAPITALISM. I like making students read “The Communist Manifesto” because Marx and Engels do a great job detailing the upside as well as downside of capitalism. For a bit more balance, I assign an essay in which economist Deirdre McCloskey extols the virtues of free markets. McCloskey happens to be transgender, and I happen to have written about her, so assigning her gives me an excuse to get into the whole transgender thing.
CLIMATE CHANGE. I enjoy taking my science-writing seminar down to the Hudson River to meet Phil Orton, a professor of oceanography at Stevens. He recalls how the Hudson flooded Hoboken during superstorm Sandy, just as his computer models had predicted, and how much climate change contributed to the river’s surge. I also assign newsy climate-change articles, including this one by journalist David Wallace-Wells.
WAR. In my “War and Science” seminar, we talk about my book The End of War, which argues that war is neither innate nor inevitable. For balance, anthropologist Michael Wilson, whose views of war’s roots diverge sharply from mine, talks to my class via zoom.
Few of my students agree with me that war is a solvable problem. One of my all-time favorite “War and Science” students become an officer in the Army. I brought him back to my seminar to talk about his experiences in Afghanistan.
I tell my students that I welcome pushback against my views, and they take me at my word, perhaps because I wear my self-doubt on my sleeve. Some students are more conservative, hawkish, libertarian, religious than I am. Others are more woke than I am, and more versed in, say, transgender politics. My students often tell me things I didn’t know, and they make me second-guess my views.
My point is that students are not sheep. They have their own views and values, and they are quite capable of resisting authority figures like me. So describing higher education as “indoctrination” is idiotic--and insulting to students.
Do I ever worry that I’m too woke as a professor? Hell no. I see it as my job, my responsibility, to be woke as a professor, writer, human being. If anything, I worry that I’m not woke enough.
1: Laura, a voting-rights activist, says right-wingers harp on the myth of woke indoctrination “because they literally have nothing to run on that would be popular to most voters. They can’t exactly run on cutting taxes for the wealthy, making it easier for corporations to be predatory, raising the cost of healthcare, destroying the environment and turning our country into an undemocratic white nationalist Christian state where women are suffering and dying because of abortion bans.” Right on, sister!
2: Scientific American fired Michael Shermer as a columnist in 2019, and since then he’s been whining that the magazine is too woke.
Further Reading:
Want more woke columns? Here you go:
Dear Student Protesters, Please Oppose All War
Advice to Aspiring Science Writers: Remember Marx
What’s the Point of the Humanities?
You’re Not Free If You’re Dead: The Case Against Giving Ukraine F-16s
Dear Feminists, Please Help End War!