Cynthia Burack blames her own career field for the illiberal turn in American academia. “I think that universities, students, and the academic enterprise would be better off if women’s and other identity-based ‘studies’ had never been institutionalized in US higher education”, she writes in How Gender Studies Broke the University.
“I can’t think of a core gender studies belief, ideal, demand, conviction, or standard that didn’t become part of the de facto doctrine of US universities by 2022”, Burack explains. Campuses have become intolerant places by mothering their students. “In the academy, the face of left-wing populist authoritarianism is female.” First on their agenda was the purge of the western canon, with its patriarchal concern for facts and reason.
Humanities and social sciences are “some of the densest pockets of the illiberalism that plagues the academy.” Today, humanities departments are closing for lack of student interest. Even as “humanities disciplines commanded less respect in universities, the progressive worldview born in these disciplines spread throughout universities.”
One might say that the woke mind virus has killed its original host departments and the universities themselves are next. Put another way, the fervid believers in a narrow political ideology have transformed the university into a daycare. Burack notes the irony that avowed feminists loudly reject caring duties as a female concern while imposing “care” as the ruling paradigm of education.
The decolonialist, deconstructionist, postmodern queer theorist academics are carrying on “the struggle between a morally pure and virtuous left and an authoritarian right” as “a matter of faith. They speak a particular language, incant progressive ‘magic words,’ and sniff out unacceptable signs of moral, political, or intellectual ambiguity.” They are doing it to change the world by changing their student body.
As we recently analyzed, this is scrupulosity, also known as ‘religious OCD’ or ‘moral OCD’, that is, an obsessive-compulsive disorder. Academic scrupulosity is focused on being a perfectly good person rather than obeying a set of religious rules. “To be righteous, it was her duty to call out the white guys who dared to speak about feminist issues in class”, Ben Appel writes of a classmate who dismissed his “cis white gay” opinion. “It was a religious act she must perform in order to prove her faith.”
Appel’s book, Cis White Gay, is an account of his experience at Columbia having grown up in a cult. Appel suffered from scrupulosity in adolescence and discovered the university was a repeat of his childhood trauma. Rather than liberation, “everyone in this new religion was required to take responsibility for the behavior of everyone around them. They were at the same time acolytes of the ideology, and its enforcers.”
Rather than obsession with purity of food, or sexual purity, woke scrupulosity is obsessed with the purity of political expressions and the constant struggle for moral certainty. Having arrived at the correct moral conclusions, the academic suffering from woke scrupulosity becomes intolerant of immoral, incorrect arguments, which of course eliminates all contrary arguments. Loud moralizing is a form of social dominance display by the scrupulous.
“Progressives in the academy strongly contest their critics’ characterizations of what they do as indoctrination, but as pejorative as that term is, it fits”, John McWhorter writes in Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America. He is explicit about his use of the word “religion” to describe the racialization of the woke academy: “I mean that it actually is a religion.”
“If we teach young adults that what we and they believe about every contentious issue is correct and that anyone who disagrees is misguided, immoral, or phobic, we’ve already surrendered the possibility of learning.” Being our intellectual and moral betters, they think of themselves as the Elect and behave as priests, teach superstitions, punish original sin, burn heretics at the stake. “The reality is that what the Elect call problematic is what a Christian means by blasphemous.”
Race is merely one form of identity that becomes a university struggle. “The notion that real blackness means framing casual racism as close to physical abuse is a modern one. It feels right only to people who, deep down, do not feel right at all”, McWhorter notes. The concept of “harm” has been used expansively, creating sacred victim groups.
Eric Kaufmann calls them “totemic minorities”. What Burack offers is a first-hand testimony of how, and when, the word “harm” expanded on campus, so that these sacred identities could be protected, mothered. Appel noticed students wearing pajamas to class. I have witnessed this alarming trend with my own eyes. Stuffed animals, comfort blankets, and other public displays of infantilism are embraced and encouraged.
“The illiberal moment in higher ed is often dated as having begun between 2011 and 2014.” Public awareness of intersectional woke religion on campus dates to around 2014, when art student Emma Sulkowicz began carrying a 50-pound dorm mattress across campus to protest Columbia’s handling of her reported sexual assault.
But the policy story begins with the 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter issued by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. Now rescinded, this policy reinterpreted Title IX to mandate that colleges and universities handle campus sexual harassment and sexual violence as a form of sex discrimination.
The moral panic over an epidemic of campus rape, an ongoing process that is recalled in the ‘Cornell 7’ case today, had already snowballed. “But there’s a caveat: If you’re in a field that helped to produce these ideas and practices, you will have gotten in on the ground floor well before 2011.” Burack knows because she was there.
During the 1990s, “gender studies programs … benefited from the growth and political homogeneity of other identity studies disciplines. These units provided additional pools from which gender studies faculty could safely — politically speaking— be selected.” This is entryism, the political strategy in which a small group of people join a larger organization in order to change its policies, recruit, indoctrinate, and control the institution.
Hiring changed in the 21st century as many of the products of this entryism became the campus administration, and eventually, the deans. “[B]efore 2000, I never heard a group of political scientists posit that what the department needed was another faculty member who cleaved to a theory or belief system to which all faculty were expected to adhere.”
Woke is an ersatz religion that made the campus into its cathedral. Whatever definition of ‘woke’ that we land upon, the effects are the same as a religious indoctrination, Burack argues. “Whether or not we think of academic progressivism as a religion, many professors have been filling up their students’ god-shaped hole with its tenets, its rituals, and the bonds of belief they share.”
“Ideology, like nature, abhors a vacuum”, Appel explains. “No matter the secular context, dogmatism rushes in to fill a void formerly occupied by religious faith.” People fall in line because “a sense of moral purpose, purity, and belonging are universal human needs.” College students are exactly the right age to recruit for causes that bestow a sense of moral purpose, purity, and belonging.
Gender studies further transformed the academy by producing the people who would bloat the administration of the mommy campus. For “women predominate among human resources and student affairs personnel, and investigators of allegations of civil rights violations. Thus, a queer, decolonial, antiracist activist ethos with a female face normalizes many of the beliefs and practices” that Burack describes in the contemporary campus culture.
Burack studies social movements and analyzes her own field as such. It was “inevitable that the locus of the movement would shift to new forms, conceptualizations, and survivors of oppression.” In the adoption of new sacred victim classes to liberate, the prior work of liberation was abandoned. How did a philosophy that once sought liberation for women become all about inclusion for men?
