Applicants for faculty positions are often required to submit “diversity” statements, which screen out otherwise highly qualified candidates who do not fully endorse wokeness or do not understand its subtleties. In some disciplines, wokeness has corrupted faculty research and teaching.
Academic journal editors often suppress rigorous studies whose results contradict the tenants of wokeness while promoting shoddy research whose results happen to support wokeness. These poorly conducted studies are easy to publish and even enshrined as conventional wisdom in textbooks.
Thankfully, red states are starting to fight back against wokeness. Bills are being proposed to defund discriminatory and divisive “diversity, equity, and inclusion” bureaucracies, where woke initiatives typically originate. Other bills seek to prevent administrators from subjecting students and faculty to tests of fealty to wokeness and to prohibit race preferences in admissions and hiring. Still others would create new academic units controlled by faculty dissenters from wokeness, which could become havens for non-ideological scholarship.
Such reforms could be a boon to red-state public universities. If implemented well, they would help red-state universities attract top scholars who find the “woke” academic culture stifling.
Unfortunately, some red states are pairing anti-woke legislation with bills that weaken or abolish tenure protection, which, if passed, would undermine all reform efforts.
Without tenure, no rational conservative or centrist professor who dissents from wokeness would accept a job at these states’ public universities. Those already there will leave, or woke administrators will purge them in short order.
As I have pointed out elsewhere, administrators, not faculty members, caused the woke takeover of our
