I write under a pseudonym because, if my colleagues were to find out about my criticisms of this field, I would be unable to find any employment in academia. That someone who critiques the axioms of a field of study feels compelled to write under an assumed name tells you everything you need to know about the authoritarianism underpinning this ideology. I have seen this ideology up close and seen how it consumes and even destroys people, while dehumanizing anyone who dissents. Because Critical Social Justice ideology is now the dominant paradigm in American academia, it has flowed into all other major societal institutions, the media, and even corporations.
Far from being counter-cultural, Critical Social Justice ideology is now the cultural mainstream. A diverse spectrum of liberals, libertarians, conservatives, and all others who, to put it bluntly, want the American constitution to continue to serve as the basis for our society have to team up to prevent this ideology from destroying our country. I became «woke» around 2003, so I have nearly two decades of experience with Critical Social Justice ideology. As the oldest daughter in a working-class family with six kids, neither of my parents had a college degree, although my mom had taken some community college classes.
My high school teachers emphasized the importance of going to college. While I wasn’t sure what opportunities a college education would bring, I decided that it would best to attend, given the urgency with which all the teachers and guidance counselors discussed college as a necessity. I don’t think it is widely understood that first-generation college students, in general, don’t know the politics behind who becomes university professors. I naively assumed that professors are among the smartest people in the country, and I had no idea that the professoriate is heavily slanted to the ideological left.
I now understand that Critical Social Justice professors are evangelists for their faith and the university is their mission field. My first encounters with Critical Social Justice came during the feminism unit of this course, which included works by Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Angela Davis, bell hooks, and Shulamith Firestone, among others. In spite of my reservations about Firestone’s book, I became interested in learning more about feminism and began to check out more women’s studies books from the library. As a young university student, encountering Critical Social Justice ideas felt intoxicating, like stumbling onto a portal into a new world.
It felt righteous, like I was part of a counter-cultural movement, a vanguard helping to bend the arc of the moral universe toward justice. The women’s studies professor, sensing that she had an acolyte, encouraged my interest in becoming more involved in advocacy for women. Around this time, I attended a few protests for various causes, but after a couple of years with this ideology as my guiding framework, I grew exhausted by feeling constant anger. I became tired of focusing on all the injustices of the world, not on what I had to be grateful for.
It was a miserable, resentment-based life, and I felt helpless to solve the world’s problems. I focused on reading literature and my colleagues’ works, which were complex and nuanced, not ideologically motivated in the slightest degree. After finishing my master’s degree, I taught writing as a college lecturer for a couple of years, then decided to apply for Ph. One of the most galling forms of hypocrisy I’ve experienced is that leftist professors claim a commitment to «social justice,» yet the academic departments they run employ large numbers of underpaid adjunct instructors who are closed out of the high pay and job security of the tenured radicals.
When I began my Ph.D. program in 2013 at a highly ranked university, I began to see that something about my new colleagues was different from what I remembered about my colleagues just a few years earlier. At first, I chalked this up to the fact that I was a handful of years older than most of the students, many of whom had recently completed their undergraduate degrees. They seemed angry, self-righteous, and determined, lacking the intellectual humility that I had admired so much in the friends I’d made in my master’s program. I now realize that these students were «woke.» Having spent the past couple of years teaching writing to working-class students, I hadn’t been exposed to Critical Social Justice ideology in some time, and I was surprised to see the inroads it had made in the decade since I’d first encountered it.
I realized that Critical Social Justice was no longer a fringe intellectual field of study, but a real force that was reshaping the university. Early on in my program, I recall a panic about racism at the university, and many students issued social media demands of the administration to increase minority enrollment. While I fully support that goal, I feel that such efforts are best advanced through mentoring and guiding promising young students beginning in elementary school, not waiting until they reach adulthood and then attempting to force equal outcomes. Yet I don’t think I fully understand the authoritarian aspects of woke ideology until after Trump won the 2016 election.
In late 2016 and early 2017, I witnessed shocking behavior from my colleagues, who began attacking Republicans, white people, conservatives, and Christians as oppressors. It was in this context that I became disillusioned with the ideology in which I had been immersed for years. On the contrary, I discovered carefully reasoned, evidence-based arguments that had much greater explanatory abilities than anything I’d read in the Critical Social Justice literature. Buckley observed that Yale University was no longer producing graduates who had a commitment to fundamental American values.
The advancement of Critical Social Justice ideology has been well documented at this point, so it is not necessary to trace that history here. Suffice it to say that our universities are so infected with Critical Social Justice ideology that they are probably not salvageable at this point. In closing, I want to offer some thoughts on how to defeat Critical Social Justice ideology. If we want to understand why this ideology is winning over the young, we have to understand its appeal.
American culture is becoming increasingly secular, which means that more young people don’t have a faith tradition, and social justice ideology is, as many have discussed, filling a religious void. The woke have a messianic complex, a goal to remake society, and view anyone who is opposed to their project not as simply having a different worldview, but as evil. There is so little viewpoint diversity in academia that students don’t even realize that what they are being taught is an ideology, not factual analysis. As Niall Ferguson accurately put it, «North American academia is in the grip of a hideous mania, a cross between the early-modern witch craze and Mao’s Cultural Revolution, in which implacable zealots conduct grotesque show trials, innocent individuals have their reputations, careers and sanity destroyed, and everyone else cowers, terrified that they will be next to be ‘canceled. »
This is not to say that there shouldn’t be academic critiques of the country. On the contrary, critiques help to improve society. But we have reached a point where there are hardly any academics left to transmit the basic principles of the country. Heterodox Academy is doing great work to highlight the lack of viewpoint diversity in the academy.
Their research has shown that professors who lean left outnumber conservative professors by a ratio of nine to one. Unless non-woke people structure their application materials and writing samples to appear to follow the Critical Social Justice ideology, I don’t see any inroads for non-leftist scholars to find academic positions. One of the most urgent needs is the development of a grassroots movement for intellectual diversity on campus, spearheaded by students, alumni, parents, and concerned citizens. I hope that existing conservative, centrist, or libertarian organizations can help to facilitate this movement by providing organizational and logistical support at campuses throughout the country.
Everyone should take a close look at their state’s public universities’ Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity initiatives to see if intellectual diversity is included. If it is not, then the obvious first step is to advocate for the inclusion of intellectual diversity. Concerned taxpayers, students, parents, and alumni, working with the elected officials in those university districts, if necessary, need to ensure that universities have intellectual diversity in humanities and social sciences course offerings. If intellectual diversity is included in the Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity initiative , then work can be done to survey students to see if they feel that intellectual diversity is represented, particularly in their humanities and social sciences courses.
Heterodox Academy has published relevant survey data on the dearth of intellectual diversity in these fields. Teachers should take a stand for fighting racism within liberalism, not by adopting critical race theory. In 1964, 15 of the 50 premier universities in America required students to take a survey of Western civilization. An excellent example of a Western civ curriculum can be found in the James Madison program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University, which is dedicated to «exploring enduring questions of American constitutional law and Western political thought.» Another avenue is to look into funding institutes for education in Western civilization as a new department at extant colleges and universities.
I would love to see crowd-sourced funds used to construct a beautiful classical building adjacent to one of the ugliest college campuses in the country, preferably one composed entirely of postwar Brutalist buildings. I imagine that students whose spirits are continually depressed by attending classes in the midst of such hideous architecture would feel intrigued to enter such a beautiful building. In this way, we might plant and nurture the seed of resistance to the increasing totalitarianism of Critical Social Justice. In the long term, it is going to be necessary to create more universities devoted to classical education, not indoctrination into Critical Social Justice ideology, as well as more K-12 private and charter schools in the classical tradition because university schools of education have been training «social justice» educators for decades now, so Critical Social Justice ideology is now in the K-12 public schools.
At a policy level on this problem, we need avenues for teacher certification outside of the existing teacher colleges, which are wholly committed to critical pedagogy and other failed approaches. At the personal level, my advice to everyone with kids who can afford to do so is to pull your kids out of the public schools immediately and enroll them in private schools, or home school. I realize that not everyone can afford to home school or send their kids to private schools . Far from being a bastion of white supremacy, America’s liberal values are what have attracted people from all countries to undergo great hardship to come here, precisely because this is one of the few places in which ordinary people can exercise their talents to achieve a standard of living that is impossible in most of the world.
Lastly, I have focused mostly on academia and education because this is the sector I know best, but I strongly urge everyone, from all walks of life, to embrace your sense of humor . If you witness attacks on freedom of speech and advocacy of censorship, or if you meet people who are in favor of «hate speech» laws, or laws to combat «misinformation» , articulate why freedom of speech is an absolutely essential and non-negotiable value. If you hear people calling for retributive justice and political violence, push against it and discuss why violence is never acceptable. I think a lot of liberals, like me, generally, if not naively, assumed that the liberal values underpinning America would simply continue throughout our lives, but these values are under attack and they need to be vigorously and unapologetically defended.
Our civilization is at stake and the hour is late.
Source: Samantha Jones | New Discourses
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