The New York Times Finally Wakes Up to the Dangers and Dysfunctions of Wokeness
After a long deep sleep, the NYT is finally starting to acknowledge the dysfunctions and dangers of Critical Race Theory. Or maybe I'm being too charitable. This has been a newspaper in deep denial, paralyzed by the fear of being called names by hostile people who mislabel themselves as "liberal" and who falsely claim to have solutions to "racism." I've been reading and writing about these dangers for the past year, yet this is only the second article I've seen by the NYT that acknowledges obvious dysfunction in many of our colleges (the other was last week's article about Smith College). Here's an excerpt from Brett Stephens Op-Ed, "Smith College and the Failing Liberal Bargain: Absolution is off the table. And liberal ideals themselves are up for renegotiation":
Why is it that racial tensions keep boiling over at some of the nation’s most emphatically progressive-minded institutions, whether it’s at Smith, Yale, Northwestern, Bryn Mawr or the Dalton School? Why does the embrace of social justice pedagogies seem to have gone hand in hand with deteriorating race relations on campus?
One answer is that if many students are enjoying a diet of courses on critical race theory, and employees are trained on the fine points of microaggressions, they might take to heart what they are taught and notice what they have been trained to see. Another answer is that if those who report being offended gain sympathy, attention and even celebrity, more accusations may be reported. . . .
In place of former notions of fairness toward individuals regardless of race, the Woke left has new ideas of “restorative justice” for racial groups. In place of traditional commitments to free speech, it has new proscriptions on hate speech. In place of the liberal left’s past devotion to facts, it demands new respect for feelings.
All of this has left many of the traditional gatekeepers of liberal institutions uncertain, timid and, in many cases, quietly outraged. This is not the deal they thought they struck. But it’s the deal they’re going to get until they recover the courage of their liberal convictions."
No Thanks, [Formerly Prestigious American University]. I Need to Go To School Elsewhere to Get a Real Education
John McWhorter has received many hundreds of emails from people who are dismayed with the Woke dismantling of American Education. Here is a recent communication he received, redacted to protect this person and published at It Bears Mentioning, McWhorter's Substack Website, part of an article titled, "If I like it, it's data; if I don't like it, it's "anecdata." No - whether you like it or not, it is neither dim nor racist to generalize on the basis of widespread and frequent events (i.e. both cop killings and Elect abuses)." McWhorter introduces this communicating by noting that this person had been "accepted into a graduate program at a prestigious institution."
It hurts so much that I have to decline your offer and several other great offers that I have received from elite universities and programs that used to be the dream schools for young people like me. I am simply very frustrated by ideology masquerading as objective science in today's higher ed. particularly humanity fields. Universities these days are trying to make young people like me feel guilty because we are white and because the whole system is filled with white racists, and me included. There is such strong moralization in the academy that is so certain that it has Science on its side in all of its proclamations. Frankly, today's academy’s ideological dogmatism is one of my major fear and hesitancies for entering it. I fear any work I do, especially in developmental or evolutionary psychology, would be evaluated not on its merit but instead on what is perceived as my politics based on how politically convenient my findings are. I have decided to move to [foreign country] to join a group of very creative and young [subject area redacted by me] on a [ibid.] research project. I want to spend the last 5 years in my 20s on something scientific, not political. But it seems that it is simply impossible to accomplish that goal in my own country.
ADHD and its Functional Twin: VAST (Variable Attention Stimulus Trait)
For many years, I thought of “ADHD” and “ADD” as dysfunctional conditions with which other people struggled, not me. Discussion of these conditions brought back vivid grade school memories of several bright and energetic boys struggling to sit still in their desks for seven hours, while nuns scolded and belittled them. I was fully aware of the social stigma that came with a diagnosis of ADHD. At the same time, I have long been aware that many successful people have been diagnosed with ADHD. I’ve long been convinced that, to some degree, their ADHD traits fueled their success.
Before my divorce in 2014, my wife Anne (in our 18th year of marriage) accused me needing treatment “because of ADHD,” explaining that I was “ruining the marriage.” She had been reading a website called ADHD and Marriage. She insisted that I should see a doctor to get medication for my “problem.” She told me that I was a bad listener. She told me these things repeatedly. It didn’t help that these concerns were hurled at me, not gently broached, but I now understand her frustration better.
An ADHD diagnosis also seemed ridiculous because I had never before been told I exhibited ADHD symptoms. No other human being ever raised a concern about ADHD until Anne proclaimed her diagnosis in black and white. Nor did any instances of ADHD seem apparent in any of my close relatives.
I resented these sole-cause accusations because I saw our marriage to be much more complex than that and far more nuanced. Also, I liked who I was and saw myself as high functioning. I have always been upbeat. I enjoy many activities and I’m fairly good various things, including my legal career, writing and composing music. Also (as I reminded my wife), I was capable of sitting in front of a computer screen for twelve hours per day writing complex appellate briefs. I have received awards for my brief writing. Fellow lawyers (and opposing lawyers) have often expressed that they like working with me. On a regular basis, more than a few of my friends tell me that I am an extremely attentive listener.
After the divorce in 2014, I became increasingly intrigued about ADHD. I started reading various articles and books about ADHD. From this informal research, I became convinced that many of the qualities associated with the ADHD mind are things that describe me well. In December, 2020, Anne died suddenly causing me to do a lot of thinking about a lot of things, including our marriage, including the role ADHD might have played in our struggles over the last few years of our marriage.
More icing on the cake: a counselor has gotten to know me well over the past few months. He recently blurted out: “You are ADHD from top to bottom.” Hmmm. That I am indisputably high-functioning (unlike many people who receive the diagnosis) doesn’t rule out ADHD, but it explains why I pushed back when a diagnosis was hurled at me. I’ve thought further about my ability to writing for many hours at a stretch? After the divorce learned that hyper-focusing is something that some people with ADHD diagnoses do well.
The above paragraphs are a bit awkward for me to re-read because my purpose is here is not to tout my accomplishments. It is not my purpose to drag my marital struggles into the public, post-mortem. My purpose is to show the reasons for my initial confusion and to set the stage to explain something fascinating I’ve recently learned about my way of processing the world. Perhaps my journey might help others. [More . . . ]
Camille Paglia: How Postmodernism (Woke ideology) is Destroying Education
I just finished reading Camille Paglia's essay, "Free Speech and the Modern Campus," from a collection of her prior writings, a book titled Provocations." This essay takes aim at practices that were once called "Political Correctness," which now fall under the description of excesses of the Woke or Wokeness. Paglia begins her essay by recounting how and why many colleges and universities founded niche studies departments, such as women's studies. Colleges made the mistake of allowing these departments to serve as singularities, unengaged with traditional core studies of, for example, history or psychology. These departments
were so hastily constructed in the 1970s, a process that not only compromised professional training in those fields over time but also isolated them in their own worlds and thus ultimately lessened their wider cultural impact.. . . Working on campus only with the like-minded, they treat dissent as a mortal offense that must be suppressed, because it threatens their entire career history and world-view. The ideology of those new programs and departments, predicated on victimology, has scarcely budged since the 1970s.
These new departments confused scholarship with ideology. They became like churches:
Teaching and research must strive to remain objective and detached. The teacher as an individual citizen may and should have strong political convictions and activities outside the classroom, but in the classroom, he or she should never take ideological positions without at the same time frankly acknowledging them as opinion to the students and emphasizing that all students are completely free to hold and express their own opinions on any issue, no matter how contested, from abortion, homosexuality, and global warming to the existence of God . . .
A familiar trio of Continental philosophers was carted into these niche curricula:
The Derrida and Lacan fad was followed by the cult of Michel Foucault, who remains a deity in the humanities but whom I regard as a derivative game-player whose theories make no sense whatever about any period preceding the Enlightenment. The first time I witnessed a continental theorist discoursing with professors at a Yale event, I said in exasperation to a fellow student, “They’re like high priests murmuring to each other.”
At p. 379, Paglia explains the main problem with poststructuralism:
Post-structuralism, in asserting that language forms reality, is a reactionary reversal of the authentic revolutionary spirit of the 1960s, when the arts had turned toward a radical liberation of the body and a reengagement with the sensory realm. By treating language as the definitive force in the world—a foolish thesis that could easily be refuted by the dance, music, or visual arts majors in my classes—poststructuralism set the groundwork for the present campus impasse where offensive language is conflated with material injury and alleged to have a magical power to create reality. Furthermore, poststructuralism treats history as a false narrative and encourages a random, fragmented, impressionistic approach that has given students a fancy technique but little actual knowledge of history itself.
Another problem with political correctness is the inability to interpret the significance of events in the context of the time period in which they occurred (see here for a recent example):
The problem of political correctness is intensified by the increasing fixation of humanities and even history departments on “presentism,”that is, a preoccupation with our own modem period.
What are the solutions? Paglia offers three:
[E]ducators must first turn away from the sprawling cafeteria menu of over-specialized electives and return to broad survey courses based in world history and culture, proceeding chronologically from antiquity to modernism. Students desperately need a historical framework to understand both past and present.
Second, universities should sponsor regular public colloquia on major topics where both sides of sensitive, hot-button controversies are frilly discussed. Any disruptions of free speech at such forums must be met with academic sanctions.
[C]olleges and universities must stay totally out of the private social lives of students.The intrusive paternalism o f American colleges in this area is an unacceptable infringement of student rights.If a crime is committed on campus, it must be reported to the police.There is no such thing as a perfectly “safe space” in real life. Risk and danger are intrinsic to human existence.
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