Unwokening the universities

The great unwokening of the public universities has begun, reports Laura Meckler in the Washington Post.

University of Florida's Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education "has grown from an idea into a full-fledged school with nearly 50 professors, four majors, 69 classes this spring and tens of millions of dollars appropriated directly by the Florida legislature," she writes.

Classes legislators see as "woke" indoctrination are struggling to survive. Starting in the fall, Introduction to Sociology, which covers "issues of class, inequality, race and gender, will no longer count as one of the general education courses required for graduation," she writes. It's one of 500 courses, including all Women's Studies and African American Studies courses and most history and literature offering, that will not qualify for general-ed credits. "Enrollment is expected to plummet."

The university added 26 courses to the general-education list; 20 were from the Hamilton School. 

In 2023, Florida legislators passed a statute that "bars state schools from giving general education credit to classes that teach 'identity politics' or are based on 'theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression, and privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States',” Meckler reports. "The law also requires that general education courses 'promote and preserve the constitutional republic'.”

Hamilton provides an alternative to the tendency to see history through the lens of race, gender or colonialism, says its director, Charles T. Canady, a former congressman and state Supreme Court justice.

Nine Republican-led have created civics centers since 2017, Meckler writes. "In Ohio, there are centers at five public universities, and in Utah, state law now mandates that all general education classes required for graduation at Utah State University be crafted by the new Center for Civic Excellence." In addition, "humanities courses required for graduation teach texts predominantly from Western civilization."

Hamilton offers two majors in Philosophy, Politics, Economics and Law and in Great Books and Ideas this year. In the fall, it will add two more: American Government, History, Literature and Law; and War, Statecraft and Strategy.

Civil Discourse and the American Political Order is the most popular Hamilton class. "Of the 343 readings authored by individuals and assigned across eight sections of this course this spring, 83 percent were written by White men," writes Meckler. "In a Great Books of the Modern World class, the syllabus lists 13 required or recommended authors; 12 are White men."

By contrast, the university’s English Department will offer courses on Latinx Feminist Fiction, Hip Hop and Young Adult Literature on the Gulf Coast, and Black Diasporic Thought, this fall, according to the course catalogue.

Turning the humanities and social sciences into "vehicles of social justice" is distorting academic scholarship, argues the State of Scholarship report commissioned by the chancellors of Vanderbilt and Washington University. "The advancement of knowledge and understanding" has become secondary.

Some scholars -- the report names several leading anthropologists -- describe their mission as political and reject "the core idea that scholarship aims at understanding."

"If scholars committed to social justice believe that the cause can only be advanced by finding, for example, that there are no behavioral differences between men and women traceable to biology, they will be under enormous pressure from their own commitments and from their colleagues to find no such differences," the report states. "Either the research will not be done, or if it is done and the results look bad, the finding will be suppressed or the evidence reinterpreted so as to obscure it."

Dissenters are stigmatized and defunded. Anyone who wants a career in the field will fall in line with the "ideological monoculture."