And it’s older colleagues who stood by nodding it all through.
From Rhodes Must Fall, a student campaign to press the university into removing a smaller-than-life-size statue of the Victorian imperialist from the façade of Oriel College, to the mass sit-ins of Black Lives Matter and the pro-Palestinian encampments of recent summers, each season has brought a new style of ideological fast fashion. At least such political posturing will have provided ripe material for student satire magazines, you may think. Well, not exactly: our own college’s satirical publication was forcibly shot down by a student vote (on account, of course, of its politically wrong-thinking transgressions).
When a satire of the modern-day woke university finally appears, it is likely to make its villain the kind of intolerant, blue-haired, placard-wielding undergraduate who has so shamelessly cast themselves as the protagonist of the past decade’s culture war. The more we have seen of university life, however — as undergrads, then PhD students and finally teaching — the clearer it has become that the damage being done by woke ideology is not confined to student skirmishes, but has infected academia at every level: taught content, research, disciplinary norms and even institutional design.
In fact, the conventional emphasis on the menace of woke student activism risks getting things backwards. There is indeed an important generational component to the malaise gripping universities. But the culpable figures are not students. They are those academics in positions of authority and secure employment who have negligently allowed the culture to be trashed, leaving a mess for the next generation to clear up.
———
more.