The Woke Generation - Fighting Back

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You mean like Ukrainian refugees or Chinese migrants who bring with them the same stereotypes about race from their home country to America or Australia? it's still punching down. Yes they think they have a green light to imitate racists in their new home. Newsflash! two wrongs don't make a right.

Trying to reverse label people who have been historically underprivileged using the same language against them is like claiming women who continue to victimized by men in 2023 are actually the ones harassing men, egging them on to retaliate. Conservatives might think they are smart using coded language but they haven't won this battle, at least not yet.

Of course, there is overcorrection, I discuss this all the time in various contexts. Assuming all fear of illiberalism is a disguise for racism and not seeing things that you or I can't due to lack of actual experience especially when that author constantly attacks anti-woke illiberalism is what it is.

Since the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, there has been a growing awareness in the United States of serious problems with a far-left progressivism whose mostly young adherents rushed to condemn the Israeli military response before it happened and now blame Israel itself for the terrorists’ atrocities. This appalling reaction did not occur in a vacuum. It was a result of an ideology, particularly widespread at elite colleges and universities but also influential in a wide range of other intellectual and cultural institutions, which sees everything through the prism of identity-based oppression and hierarchies of privilege — and ignorantly equates racially diverse Israel with “white supremacy.”

The problems with this ideology — groupthink, rigid “social justice” dogma, and a knee-jerk embrace of a simplistic analysis of complex issues — are explored in a timely and relevant new book, “The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time,” by Yascha Mounk, a professor of international affairs at Johns Hopkins University.

The ideology Mounk flags has been variously labeled as “wokeness,” "social justice,” “critical race theory,” and “identity politics.” Mounk uses the term “identity synthesis,” referring to the fact that this movement purports to advocate against all forms of identity-based oppression.

Resisting oppression is, of course, a noble goal. But as the situation in Israel and Palestine shows, oppressor and oppressed are not always simple categories. Hamas, which enforces a brutal form of radical Islamism, is arguably less a champion than an oppressor of Palestinian people in Gaza — but many of the “woke” see it as fighting the Israeli oppressor. What’s more, while the situation in Israel and Gaza unquestionably involves horrific tragedy and suffering for everyone involved but day to day identity-based progressive activism often concerns itself, as Mounk documents, with the trivial pursuit of hyped-up offenses.

The policing of “cultural appropriation,” which bizarrely reframes cultural mixing as a form of oppression, is a particularly striking example. "The Identity Trap” features a mind-boggling anecdote from a Florida public school: A teacher of Nigerian background asked several students to wear the ceremonial clothing of his ancestral tribe to a multicultural show-and-tell. Two of the students were white and were promptly accused by some classmates and teachers of appropriating and mocking African culture. Despite the teacher’s intercession, the "culprits" were suspended.

One consequence of such petty bullying is that progressive organizations end up spending a lot of their time embroiled in internal squabbles over wrong words, wrong clothing, and other irrelevances.

“The Identity Trap” offers not only a convincing account of how the “identity synthesis” acquired its influence, but a blueprint for how to get out of this trap without becoming a reactionary who self-defines in opposition to whatever progressives support. Mounk’s prescription is classically liberal: freedom of speech, intellectual exchange which rejects the notion that ”oppressed” identity confers superior authority, and rejection of segregation, even the supposedly benevolent segregation of race- and ethnicity-based “affinity groups” to discuss racial issues.

Today, we can see more clearly than ever that identity politics are leading us down the wrong path. The liberalism of individual rights points the way forward.

The third floor of a historic high-rise in downtown Austin, Texas, with restricted elevator access may be an unexpected place to find a college campus, but it’s where America’s newest private university is preparing to open its doors to an inaugural undergraduate cohort this fall.

According to founding president Pano Kanelos, the University of Austin, or UATX, aims to address the perceived decline in intellectual freedom and prioritization of knowledge at established universities, with an emphasis on open inquiry, critical thinking, respectful, vigorous debate, and persuasive writing.

“Our core motivation is to renew the spirit of higher education,” explained Kanelos, a Shakespeare scholar who has become an outspoken advocate for classical education — study based on traditional liberal arts rooted in the canon of Western thought — following years of what he and other perceive as a retreat from the central purpose of higher education and academic scholarship.

The school’s opening on August 26 — several years in the making — comes at what many see as an inflection point for higher education in the US, with college campuses protests over Israel’s war against Hamas focusing attention on wider cultural battles taking place in academia that UATX aims to address.

The university was established in the wake of a number of watershed cultural events in American public life over the past few years that have affected how Americans converse and think about race, sexuality, gender, and a variety of other hot-button issues.

In the wake of the 2020 racial unrest, there has been a resumption of debate about race in America as well as how it is taught in schools and universities. There has also been a renewed focus on Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion programs — including “diversity training” programs that were launched throughout corporate America — and how such programs affect free speech and academic freedom.

In Texas, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott signed a law last year banning DEI programs at public universities in the state, leading to the elimination of dozens of jobs as the legislation was rolled out this summer – during a contentious election year. Abbott’s move was seen as a GOP win and other Republican-led states including Florida, Utah, and Tennessee soon followed suit with similar bills banning or restricting DEI programs at public institutions.

In recent months, US academic institutions have come under heavy fire over their handling of anti-Israel sentiment on campus in the wake of the Hamas-led October 7 mass terror incursion into southern Israel and Israel’s ongoing military response in Gaza — demonstrations that Jewish students, faculty and others charge have strayed into antisemitism and turned some campuses into places where Jews no longer feel safe. The fallout has led to the resignations of three Ivy League presidents, and increased scrutiny of how university leaders are tackling the issue.

In many places, the protests have been viewed within the lens of a wider cultural battle that has been brewing in higher education for years: the clash between academia’s embrace of efforts to create safe, inclusive spaces for students and teachers representing a wide diversity of views and backgrounds and those who view those efforts as the latest iteration of PC culture gone wild, muzzling speech by “canceling” any whose ideas are deemed insufficiently in line with progressive ideals.

Those behind UATX are aiming to counter what Panelos described as the gradual but forceful introduction of “ideological protocols” at universities, which have ended up “distorting knowledge.”

“Universities have historically been places where we do our own thinking, places we dedicate to thinking, to knowledge creation, to the transmission of knowledge, to the preservation of knowledge,” he told The Times of Israel in an on-site interview this spring. At traditional institutions, “all the evidence points to a kind of retreat from that commitment” and at “many, if not most, universities and especially… elite universities… the pursuit of knowledge is maybe not always prioritized.”

While UATX was created years before the Israel-Hamas war turned antisemitism on campus into a major hot-button issue, Kanelos said one of the reasons it was founded was “because the very things that are causing that kind of antisemitic agitation at universities, the very kind of ideological positions that generate that, are the things that we’ve identified years ago as being problematic at universities.”

UATX has had a “very significant number of Jewish applicants and faculty,” Kanelos added.

The school’s first cohort will consist of about 100 students, some of them fresh out of high school, others with some university or higher education experience under their belt. The students were selected from about 2,500 applicants through what the University of Austin, or UATX, described as a rigorous admissions process — high SAT scores, various entrance exams on knowledge and ability, an essay and a personal statement.

Kanelos said the institution sought to recruit students “the way you might recruit a professional football team – pick each student very carefully because they’re going to create the foundational culture.”

That culture is of high importance to the newly accredited four-year university, whose motto urges faculty and students to commit to the “fearless pursuit of truth.”

Building a new university
The launch of the inaugural undergraduate class is three years in the making; all hundred-odd members of the cohort will receive full scholarships, thanks to a $250 million fundraising campaign targeting private donations.

The establishment of UATX was announced in the winter of 2021 with some big, controversial names attached, including former New York Times opinion editor and US journalist and commentator Bari Weiss, of the Free Press, renowned Scottish-American historian Prof. Niall Ferguson, and Somali-born Dutch-American author and scholar Aayan Hirsi Ali, whose anti-Islamism work has earned her fierce criticism from the left and accusations of Islamophobia. (She is also Ferguson’s spouse.)

The initial news of the university’s launch was met with dollops of snark and skepticism – one headline dubbed the institution the “anti-woke” university – and the project has since drawn criticism, mainly directed at the founders, and accusations that the school would not be on the level.

In an editorial titled “The University of Austin Champions Grifting Over Free Speech,” The Harvard Crimson claimed that “at its core, UATX doesn’t seem to care about free speech” and “represents a twisted attempt by a select group of aggrieved people to force their orthodoxy onto others through sheer spectacle.”

An opinion columnist for MSNBC wrote that there was “no substance behind the allegedly academic effort” by a “group of conservative and contrarian academics and journalists,” and that the new university appeared to be “the latest, and largest, in a long line of cancel culture-related grifts.”

Sarah Jones, a senior writer for New York Magazine’s Intelligencer, accused Kanelos of mischaracterizing the history of universities as having been “once free of donor pressure or administrative cowardice or, more to the point, pesky student activism. But this history only exists in his imagination.”

Universities have always been fraught places, where the free exchange of ideas often results in intellectual turbulence,” which “Kanelos, Weiss, and their comrades” are seeking to escape, she wrote.

Jones compared UATX to Liberty University, a Christian institution founded in 1971 by televangelist and conservative activist Jerry Falwell, famous for his campaigns against desegregation and the US civil rights movement. Schools like Liberty “exist as laboratories for right-wing thought” that are “committed not to free expression but to indoctrination,” claimed Jones. UATX will be “no different,” she wrote, calling UATX a “Bible college for libertarians” without the Bibles.

The sharpest critiques were reserved for the core people associated with UATX: Weiss has been described as a “self-styled tribune of the people”; Ferguson as a “Stanford historian perhaps fired for blatantly trying to dig up dirt on a progressive undergraduate.”

Most of the criticism, said Kanelos, “had to do with people attached to the project, they didn’t even know what we were building as a university. They’re like, ‘we don’t like Bari Weiss, so therefore this must be some sort of fascist-like’” project. “They didn’t look at the other 50 people who were involved.”

Weiss and Ferguson both sit on UATX’s board of trustees with Kanelos, and Ali is on the board of advisors, which also includes Harvard University president emeritus Larry Summers, Shalem College dean of faculty Leon Kass, The Atlantic’s Caitlin Flanagan, and social psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt.

What unites them all is the belief that something is broken with traditional higher education. Haidt’s 2018 bestseller “The Coddling of the American Mind” warned that university students were becoming increasingly intolerant of arguments they disagreed with and that universities were caving to their demands, to the detriment of the schools.

The school also earned attention before launching due to a program it offered as part of a summer session for high school students titled the “Forbidden Courses,” taught by professors from New York University, the University of Chicago, Columbia University, and Brown University, among others. Weiss promoted the class on her podcast and her involvement drew some chatter.

Other UATX programs and fellowships have drawn speakers like tech entrepreneur Marc Andreessen and former Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper, alongside venture capitalists, scholars and intellectuals.

The school’s incoming undergraduates will study toward a BA in Liberal Studies, the only program offered.

The first two years will focus on what the school calls Intellectual Foundations, offering programs diving into the works of Homer, Plato, George Orwell, Tocqueville, Confucius, and Descartes among others; readings will also include the Book of Genesis and the Gospel of John.

UATX’s Intellectual Foundations is led by Prof. Jacob Howland, who serves as dean of the program and previously taught philosophy at the University of Tulsa. Howland was also a senior fellow at the Tikvah Fund, a conservative philanthropic foundation that invests in a range of educational initiatives in Israel and the US.

In the third and fourth years, students will pursue fellowships and internships in their areas of study and work with scholars and researchers at UATX’s Center for Economics, Politics, & History, the Center for Arts & Letters, and the Center for Science, Technology, Engineering, & Mathematics.

“Our curriculum won’t be for the faint of heart,” the university has warned. “Courses will be purpose-driven, cohesive, and intellectually rigorous. That’s exactly what an education should be.”

Birds of a feather
Kanelos says the campus was founded as a pushback to the sort of groupthink and “atrocious behavior” that shuts down the free exchange of ideas on other campuses, though some have argued that the school is creating its own sort of echo chamber.

Some of the students who spoke to The Times of Israel expressed a desire to be part of a select group of kindred spirits, while also being critical of the sort of peer pressure and ideological and political homogeneity they say exists on US campuses today.

“I am excited to be with like-minded people who are passionate, convincing, and set in their beliefs,” Sam Indyk, 18, told The Times of Israel in a video interview over Zoom this spring. “We need intellectual pluralism, not mob dynamics, and more discussions.”

The decision carried some amount of risk. The school has no proven track record, and while it is recognized by Texas as a degree-granting university, UATX is still in the process of accreditation, a five-to-seven-year process, according to the school.

None of the students who spoke to The Times of Israel identified the protests or campus antisemitism as a motivating factor in sending them to UATX, but many predicted that the school would be free of such tumult, noting it as a plus.

Cost-cutting in Guatemala
UATX costs $32,500 a year for full-time students, not including housing or over $2,000 for fees, books and activities. The school says the price is competitive for a high-level liberal arts college, and UATX says it plans to keep tuition prices within reason by discarding what administration costs it can, or finding ways to turn a profit.

“At places like Yale now, you have more administrators than undergrad. Literally. We don’t need to get into the reasons for this other than bureaucracy,” Kanelos said.

Beyond “administrative bloat,” Kanelos also blamed what he called “luxury amenities” offered by many universities.

college president, he said, has to manage “an entertainment district, workout facilities, lifestyle stuff, a sushi bar, this and that. What does this have to do with learning?”

UATX strips all that down with a business plan designed to channel the majority of its spending into academics. In tax filings from 2022, the latest publicly available, the school said it spent nearly three times as much on program services as it did on management.

Instead, the school outsources many non-academic tasks overseas to save on labor costs, building a “virtual administrative hub in Guatemala,” said Kanelos.

“These are degreed bilingual administrators who can do all sorts of things, the back office stuff for the university at a radically lower salary rate,” he said.

“The salaries we pay them are better than practically anything you can find in Guatemala. But by American standards, they’re significantly less so that lowers the cost [of education],” he added.

Coercion’ on campus
Ferguson, Kanelos and others see academic groupthink and a move away from truth and toward ideology as culprits behind the unprecedented crisis on university campuses, where administrators have had to appear before Congress and explain the surge in antisemitism. Some universities are facing lawsuits and investigations over their handling of the unrest over the past several months.

Universities have also had to grapple with vandalism, graduation disruptions, occupation of buildings, encampments, and others threats by anti-Israel students, faculty, and supporters intent on forcing divestment from Israel.

To Kanelos, the issue isn’t their message, but rather how they deliver it, which he described as “coercion.”

“Students have the right to try and persuade the university that a particular course of action is warranted, but they have no right to use coercive means to achieve their ends,” he said. “I think that there are clear lines that divide free speech from actions that inhibit the operations of a university.”

In an op-ed for Newsweek in May, Howland, director of UATX’s Intellectual Foundations Program, argued that “students who chant genocidal slogans, tear down posters of Israeli hostages, deface Jewish spaces and displays, heckle and film Jewish students, and disrupt programs that feature defenders of Israel are engaged in expression that aims to shut down speech.”

Ferguson said that he was not surprised by the antisemitism that has surged on campus since October 7: “Radical left groups have been at it for a while. I have seen the antics of progressives, and the ‘woke’ and Islamist connection.”

“What happened on October 7th is something that none of us could foresee but the response of university communities to what happened on October 7th was foreseeable,” Kanelos said.

Administrators themselves are to blame, said Ferguson. “University governance is a problem. It is aggressively politicized and in pursuit of political goals. Trustees go along; there is no judicial branch where you can say ‘this is wrong.’”

There’s also no tenure track at UATX, which Ferguson said is a “core tenet” as “academic freedom is protected more than tenure” and “tenure enforces conformism.”

The events since October 7 have “created a cultural moment, where people started realizing something is very wrong,” he added. “We now no longer have to explain why the University of Austin is needed.”

I do have my suspicions that the school will become the close-minded bubble it rightly criticizes wokes for. But since this school is first opening, it is too soon to judge.