Lots of people, especially those on the right, are blaming Woke for the iffy mode of student protest currently taking place e on college campuses. (“Iffy” here means not knowing which bodies of water are being referred to while shouting “From the river to the sea,” somehow imagining Hamas would welcome the trans crowd and, like those protesting on the other side of the issue, imagining college as a place that should confirm, rather than challenges, one’s core beliefs.
Maybe Woke is just as bad as conservatives think.
But in all the hand-wringing and accusations of how colleges must change ideologically, I have not seen anyone say they must change the capitalist values built into elite education’s business model.
Today’s kids are not just shaped by CRT indoctrination (or whatever) they are also shaped (and far more so, I would argue) by an assembly line model in which there are winners and losers, with winners getting into Harvard, obviously.
You can say that is how it should be and that excellence as confirmed by Ivy League admission is unarguable. It must be the kinds of classes kids take—too much lefty Wokeism, not enough basic info—that cause the entitlement, fragility, and ignorance we are seeing on campus. But the kids I know are more desperate for connection and meaning than they are moved by ideology. Their need to belong and basic insecurity comes from the system they are in as much as, or more than, the politics that system preaches. Besides, if these kids were as indoctrinated as the right seems to think, they would not all looking to become tech bros, Wall Street analysts, and consultants.
Maybe we have a system clouded by the left, but it is driven, more and more, by money. And I don’t see anyone on the right making the connection between that and the transactional, uncivil, and superficial dialogue we are now hearing on campus.
This newsletter:
Monday: The Up and Down of It
Tuesday: Amsterdam-ia
Wednesday: At The Bottom of the Internet
Thursday—Notes on Education
Friday—Today, or Some Day Like It
Saturday—Muntrem, er
Sunday—Everything is Everything, Almost