Rarely is the question asked – is our children learning? – President George W. Bush
The overwhelming majority of today’s journalists are college-educated, quite a change from most of American history. As Batya Ungar-Sargon reports in her fine book, Bad News: How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy, as recently as World War II, only about 40% of the nation’s journalists had a college degree and two-thirds of them were from working-class backgrounds. Now, it’s all but impossible to find a journalist without a college degree and the way news is reported reflects the change. Working-class perspectives are essentially absent from the news.
And of course members of the working class seldom find their way into the ranks of governing elites. In short, we receive our information on our college-educated power elites courtesy of the like-educated and like-minded in the press. Given that, it’s worth knowing something about the college-educated.
Enter the Buckley Institute and its latest yearly survey of attitudes held by college students. The results are either alarming or somewhat encouraging, depending on how you read them. While much of the country eschews woke ideas and attitudes, large percentages of college students embrace them and those percentages tend to tick up slightly with each passing year. But those holding woke views are not yet a majority on campus. Despite the almost complete absence of viewpoints questioning woke principles, most students either reject its blandishments or aren’t decided.
A few salient points:
· 46% of college students say it’s appropriate to “shout down” speakers saying things with which they disagree;
· 51% support speech codes on campus;
· 46% say students who express unfavored opinions should be reported to school administrators;
· 45% say physical violence may be used against a person who uses “hateful” speech;
· 63% say professors should be required to make statements supporting “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion;”
· Only 27% believe college students should be able to deal with any topic raised in class;
· 37% say they’d prefer living in a socialist system over a capitalist one while 31% say the opposite;
· 48% believe the U.S. Supreme Court is an “outdated” institution.
On a positive note, by a margin of 59%-32%, students believe that trans athletes should compete only against members of the same biological sex. Plus, 46% of students understand that even “hate” speech is protected by the First Amendment, while 43% aren’t so informed.
In short, there remains on campus robust support for woke notions including a distrust of free speech and the belief that students are fragile flowers in need of protection from ideas. Most of that support outweighs its opposition, but substantial numbers remain immune, or at least resistant, to the siren song of DEI.
Of course, there was a time when we believed correctly that college students, while easily susceptible to the ideas they encountered on campus and lacking in the critical thinking and factual background necessary to intelligently evaluate them, would eventually come to jettison the sillier ideas that flourish in the hothouse environment of “higher education.” No longer. In fact, far from slamming into the hard real world, many of those students find employment in businesses and organizations – Google, the New York Times, e.g. – that look a lot like the campuses they just left.
Cancel culture too has grafted nicely onto those post-college institutions. So, just as students feigning trauma get professors fired or disciplined, they find they can do much the same to editors and fellow employees. Once proud newspapers like the Times now kowtow to those who are simultaneously too fragile to hear a discouraging word and too powerful to be gainsaid by a top editor twice their age or more.
Still, despite the entirely one-sided discourse on campus that stifles ideas competing with woke ones, despite the fairly serious consequences for Wrong-Think, despite the youth and impressionableness of the students, significant numbers of them remain unconvinced. It’s almost as if basic skepticism and critical thinking aren’t entirely dead, even as woke propaganda infects broad swaths of the college mind.
Ergo, a question: whither public discourse and policy, both of which are and will be dominated by college graduates?
British spymaster and traitor, Kim Philby once commented that U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles needed communism like the Puritans needed sin; he and they would have been lost without their respective enemies around whom they’ve organized their entire worldviews.
Today we can say the same about the woke. Without racism and sexism, without a world populated entirely by oppressors and oppressed, they’d have no worldview at all, hence their dogged fight to keep both alive. And they long ago demonstrated that they’re far too cowardly, in an intellectual sense, to honestly face their own failures and adjust their views to something other than their preferred ideology.
But that’s a worldview that holds no appeal for anyone who wants to understand humanity with anything like subtlety or nuance or with anything approaching completeness. Everyone with an inquiring and skeptical mind easily rejects woke notions as inherently dubious and at odds with known facts.
So yes, colleges and universities do their best to inculcate simplistic and dubious ideas into their students. They often succeed, but they also often fail. Because we have – at least for now – a robust open market for ideas, woke notions will continue to be tested and found wanting. If young adults can withstand the onslaught on campuses that offer no alternatives, I for one am optimistic that woke ideology’s days are numbered.
So yes, Mr. President, “our children is learning.” Fortunately, they’re not all learning the same things.
This originally appeared at The Word of Damocles.
