What Does “Woke” Mean?

What does "Woke" mean? Here are two recent posts worth considering. First, Matt Orfalea posed the question on Twitter, which launched a worthy thread:

Here are a few of the offerings, among the many in the thread:

Excessive, shallow and myopic focus on social justice

Woke people are special, they feel they are above constitutional principles like equality and free speech.

A toolbox full of identity-based attacks you can use to target people you already don't like

Second, Freddie deBoer offered a detailed description of the meaning of "woke" in his article, "Of Course You Know What "Woke" Means: I'd rather use any other term at this point, but can we get real please? Here's the basic definition:

The conceit is that “woke” has even shaggier or vaguer boundaries than “liberal,” “fascist,” “conservative,” or “moderate.” And I just don’t think that’s true.

“Woke” or “wokeness” refers to a school of social and cultural liberalism that has become the dominant discourse in left-of-center spaces in American intellectual life. It reflects trends and fashions that emerged over time from left activist and academic spaces and became mainstream, indeed hegemonic, among American progressives in the 2010s. “Wokeness” centers “the personal is political” at the heart of all politics and treats political action as inherently a matter of personal moral hygiene - woke isn’t something you do, it’s something you are. Correspondingly all of politics can be decomposed down to the right thoughts and right utterances of enlightened people. Persuasion and compromise are contrary to this vision of moral hygiene and thus are deprecated. Correct thoughts are enforced through a system of mutual surveillance, one which takes advantage of the affordances of internet technology to surveil and then punish. Since politics is not a matter of arriving at the least-bad alternative through an adversarial process but rather a matter of understanding and inhabiting an elevated moral station, there are no crises of conscience or necessary evils.

DeBoer then offered a list of attributes:

Academic - the terminology of woke politics is an academic terminology, which is unsurprising given its origins in humanities departments of elite universities...

Immaterial - woke politics are overwhelmingly concerned with the linguistic, the symbolic, and the emotional to the detriment of the material, the economic, and the real...

Structural in analysis, individual in action - the woke perspective is one that tends to see the world’s problems as structural in nature rather than the product of individual actors or actions...

Emotionalist - “emotionalist” rather than emotional, meaning not necessarily inappropriately emotional but concerned fundamentally with emotions as the currency of politics...

Fatalistic - woke politics tend towards extreme fatalism regarding solutions and the possibility of gradual positive political change...

Insistent that all political questions are easy - woke people speak and act as though there are no hard political questions and no such thing as a moral dilemma...

Possessed of belief in the superior virtue of the oppressed - what was assumed by Bertrand Russel to be obviously misguided is now assumed to be true without evaluation: virtue is not just common among the oppressed, virtue is a function of oppression...

Enabling people who aren’t Black or Southern to say “y’all” - this one is unforgivable...

I could go on. And some will disagree with this or that...

This is an excellent read and I would urge those interested to read Freddie's entire article.

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Stanford Law School Earns an “F” in Student (and DEI Administrator) Behavior

FIRE's letter to Stanford Law School, based on behavior as bad as what we saw last year at Yale Law School and see here.

Dear President Tessier-Lavigne:

FIRE is once again deeply concerned about the state of free expression at Stanford University after a student-organized Stanford Law School speech by U.S. Circuit Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan was disrupted last night,2 with at least one report that his remarks ended some 40 minutes earlier than planned as a result. The apparently successful exercise of the heckler’s veto by attendees determined to disrupt Judge Duncan’s remarks, at a Federalist Society- sponsored event, is troubling enough. But FIRE must also express our deep concern regarding Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Tirien Steinbach’s temporary removal of Duncan from the podium—against his wishes—to offer commentary appearing to promote censorship. Dean Steinbach pinballs between praising free speech, accusing Judge Duncan of “harm,” and asking him if what he has to say is important enough to justify upsetting students. She ultimately suggests Stanford may wish to consider abandoning its free expression commitments altogether to prevent the “harm” allegedly inherent in hearing views with which one may disagree in the future . . .

[added March 11, 9pm CT]

Stanford issues a not-very-serious apology to Judge Duncan. Obvious step #1 would be to fire the DEI representative of Stanford. It is my suspicion that this is the kind of behavior that DEI departments promote, totally in line with what occurred at Judge Duncan's lecture. How about looking into that? How about suspending/expelling numerous law students?

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The Woke Eating their Own, Latest Edition

The Woke are eating their own, which was entirely predictable based on Ryan Grimm's June 2022 article.

According to this thread, Dr. Lee told FAIR she was accused of "whitesplaining" as she tried to set a meeting agenda, and she was told that she was perpetuating "white supremacy" by valuing punctuality & engaging in strategic planning.

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FIRE’s Model Legislation

FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) has proposed model legislation to take on the ever-growing DEI Bureaucracies of Universities, a critically important move for defending academic freedom. In my opinion, aggressive legislation of this sort is necessary, given the way that DEI departments are destroying our universities. Lawrence Krauss recently detailed many of the DEI abuses in his video, "Is Woke Science the Only Science Allowed in Academia?"

Excerpts from the FIRE article:

When colleges act more like giant corporations and less like educational institutions, student and faculty rights suffer. Newly hired bureaucrats need to justify their paychecks, after all — so controversial, dissenting, or simply unpopular voices become targets. “Surely massive administrative bureaucracies of student life must be maintained,” wrote FIRE co-founder Harvey Silverglate in 2011, “if universities are going to enforce the increasingly ubiquitous — in academia —‘right’ not to be offended.”

In recent years, campus administrative growth has focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. Whatever the intentions, the imposition of DEI bureaucracy upon the academy has too often come at the expense of academic freedom and freedom of expression. DEI administrators have been responsible for repeated campus rights abuses. ...

DEI efforts have threatened student and faculty rights in other ways, too. Most significantly, colleges and universities now routinely require students and faculty to pledge their allegiance to a politicized understanding of “diversity” as a condition of consideration for admission, hiring, or promotion. FIRE has repeatedly come to the defense of faculty who have been pressured into proving their fealty to a specific conception of DEI as the price of serious consideration or continued employment. And we’ve heard concerns about the chilling, coercive effect of mandatory diversity statements from hundreds more.

Providing the “wrong” answer dooms applications and candidacies. At the University of California, Santa Cruz, for example, DEI statements are used as an initial screening tool for applicants, with one public report indicating that 45% of applicants across various searches were eliminated in a first round of DEI statement screening. (That number may be comparatively low. During one department’s hiring process at the University of California, Berkeley, reviewing diversity statements prior to the rest of a candidate’s application eliminated 78% of applicants.)

So today, FIRE is introducing model legislation that prohibits the use of political litmus tests in college admissions, hiring, and promotion decisions. Legislation is strong medicine, but our work demonstrates the seriousness of the threat. While the current threat involves coercion to support DEI ideology, efforts to coerce opposition to DEI ideology would be just as objectionable. Attempts to require fealty to any given ideology or political commitment — whether “patriotism” or “social justice” — must be likewise rejected.

To that end, because we are cognizant of the endless swing of the partisan pendulum, FIRE’s legislative approach bans all loyalty oaths and litmus tests, without regard to viewpoint or ideology. In an effort to avoid exchanging one set of constitutional problems for another, our model legislation prohibits demanding support for or opposition to a particular political or ideological view. We believe this approach is constitutionally sound and most broadly protective of student and faculty rights, both now and in the future.

FIRE strongly believes that loyalty oaths and political litmus tests have no place in our nation’s public universities. Given the pernicious threat to freedom of conscience and academic freedom we have seen on campus after campus over the past several years, legislative remedies are worthy of thoughtful consideration. We look forward to further discussion with both supporters and critics about how best to ensure that our nation’s public colleges and universities remain the havens for intellectual freedom they must be.

Model Legislation can be read at the linked article. Here are a few excerpts from the Model Legislation:

A. No public institution of higher education shall condition admission or benefits to an applicant for admission, or hiring, reappointment, or promotion to a faculty member, on the applicant’s or faculty member’s pledging allegiance to or making a statement of personal support for or opposition to any political ideology or movement, including a pledge or statement regarding diversity, equity, inclusion, patriotism, or related topics, nor shall any institution request or require any such pledge or statement from an applicant or faculty member.

B. If a public institution of higher education receives a pledge or statement describing a commitment to any particular political ideology or movement, including a pledge or statement regarding diversity, equity, inclusion, patriotism, or related topics, it may not grant or deny admission or benefits to a student, or hiring, reappointment, or promotion to a faculty member, on the basis of the viewpoints expressed in the pledge or statement.

[More . . . ]

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