The Anti-Woke Mind Virus

On the Strange Temporality of "Heterodox" Thought

There is a tension at the heart of the academic enterprise, one that I think self-styled critics of this enterprise exploit. The tension is this: there are long-running debates, even ones that are assumed to be coextensive with entire academic disciplines. For instance, it would be crazy to claim that the question of the nature of justice has been laid to rest in philosophy, or that sociology has finally settled on an explanation for inequality. But at the same time we teach courses on “contemporary issues in x”, and those contemporary issues do move in time. This isn’t quite the same in each discipline, and we may lament the move from one set of approaches/questions/debates in some cases, but the way a particular problem is framed does change with each generation of academics, and the framing of the previous generation becomes consigned to the history of the discipline.

I think that a lot of today’s controversies about “the humanities” and “the social sciences” rely on confusions that arise in the process of trying to turn those two animating impulses into the actual messy business of (a) teaching these fields, (b) doing research as your job and (c) doing that job in an institution of higher learning. And you won’t be entirely shocked to learn that I think a lot of these confusions are indeed stoked deliberately by people arguing in bad faith. But I think these confusions can catch on among people who aren’t arguing in bad faith, but simply are either unfamiliar with academic research and institutions, or haven’t worked in one in a while.

Ignoring the institutional framework of the university — to focus, for instance, on “arguments”, on a “marketplace of ideas”, or on “tradition” — will almost always involve a failure to answer a simple question: as what is a specific text, position, or author being offered? Are we saying: “people have thought this at some point, and that’s significant”? Are we saying “this is an important position in the field, and you should know it”? Or are we saying “this is a foundational idea in our field and you need to know it if you work in it”?

The as what cuts to the very nature of academic freedom. “Every viewpoint” should be represented on a college campus? Yes, sounds nice, but also obviously wrong. Most viewpoints should be expressible somewhere on a college campus, but they don’t have a right to be represented as scholarship there. If a student casually drops that he’s a flat earther in my class on the bourgeois tragic drama, I don’t get to lower his grade for that. But if someone were to demand the geology department platform more flat earthers, then that would be obviously counterproductive to the mission of the university. Universities should not discriminate against people; scholarship by its very nature discriminates. No progress would be possible without it.

Likewise, any lecture invited by a university faculty should be given the widest possible deference. Otherwise, how could unpopular research positions be given room to assert themselves. But what if someone is invited as essentially a provocateur? What if a student group invites a comedian? It’s their right, of course, but I think it’s important to ask as what are they inviting this person? Not everything that happens at a university is covered by academic freedom. You can tell how absurd that proposition would be if I argued that a pop star’s academic freedom would be infringed for shooting heroin on stage while performing on a college campus. So when we talk about ideas that are “taboo” or “forbidden” “on campus”, I think it’s worth pausing to think about what we’re talking about. And what we find is I think this: yes, academics can tends towards faddishness, yes, there’s something sad about certain authors, approaches, debates being mothballed (for the time being, at least); but eppur si muove. Whereas the same can’t be said for critics of academic debates and systems of knowledge productions. They, on the whole, have proven unable to move on, to build on previous research, or even to update their material.

I. The Taboo as Totem

Last quarter, I became aware of a course offered by two colleagues at Stanford, which was not listed in official course lists. Intrigued by what might have occasioned such secrecy, I set out to get a hold of the syllabus. The course bills itself as “Taboo Topics: Adventures in Critical Thinking”. The framing of the syllabus will be familiar to many readers, since it’s basically also the pitch for Bari Weiss’s University of Austin and its offering of “forbidden courses”. “We named our program Forbidden Courses,” the university explains on its website, “because higher education has made it difficult to inquire openly into vexing questions with honesty and without fear of shame.” Those “vexing questions” include “When the Truth Is Too Much to Bear: The Fearful Pursuit of Truth in Ancient Greek Tragedy”, and “Who’s to Blame for Inflation?”, both of which I’d venture to say you could offer at any US university “without fear or shame”, but whatever.

Here’s how my Stanford colleagues frame their course on the syllabus for “Taboo Topics”:

“Certain topics are taboo in current academic culture—there are implicit and explicit norms against even discussing these topics. Some of the topics are so taboo that even mentioning them is risky. This is a sorry state of affairs. We believe that any topic, however controversial, can be discussed rationally. We do not believe that students are harmed by encountering arguments for positions that they disagree with or even find abhorrent.”

If it is indeed about adventures in critical thinking, it’s a set of adventures we’ve all been on before. An entire week appears to be devoted to the work of James Damore, author of the famous Google-memo. There’s a week on COVID restrictions. The week that really caught my attention though was “Race Differences in Intelligence & Criminality”. Here are the selections for that week: