👏👏👏 A truly incredible essay, Liza that if they had any sense or integrity, the New York Times and Washington Post would be running! Eric Cartman can rest easy, he’s not losing his job anytime soon. Matt Stone and Trey Parker are doing some wishful thinking here. Yes, to some extent wokeness has been rolled back with the return of Donald Trump to the White House in 2024. But to say wokeness is dead is just ludicrous! It’s still very much alive and well and is still predominate in our institutions. Let’s be honest the radical left won the cultural war and it is all the younger generation knows. In order to truly be rid of it, our country will need deep and widespread reform! The examples you gave illustrate this perfectly.
Your old high school is having students read Baldwin, Morrison and Angelou but not Shakespeare. Your high schoolers are getting assigned junk like The Hate U Give, Between the World and Me and The Nickel Boys instead of actual works of literature like Romeo and Juliet, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Great Gatsby. Columbia University continues to espouse the same pro-Hamas garbage they’ve been teaching since the 1970s. They also still employ Dr. Joseph Massad who declared October 7th “awesome!” Dr. Massad is an out and out Jihadist who doesn’t even bother to hide this fact anymore he’s Columbia’s version and a modern day version of, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Amin Al-Husseini let’s be honest, he just wears a suit, tie and glasses rather than a long beard, robe and turban. They are pushing an anti-racist agenda in their core curriculum and have updated their year-long political philosophy course to include units on such rubbish as “Anticolonialism”, “Race, Gender and Sexuality” and “Climate Futures.”
The Telluride Association Summer Seminar makes no attempt to hide the fact their indoctrinating high school students with their politically slanted essay topics. Then of course, their is the publishing industry who only want books if they have homeless queer Leprechauns who’ve been previously incarcerated as their characters. They only want stories about BIPOC struggles or about a protagonist who’s a pansexual black Latina who identifies as a horse. Yeah…not books 📚 any sane person would want to read. Oh, how John Steinbeck, Lord Byron, William Faulkner, Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Mary Shelley, and Zora Neale Hurston are collectively rolling over in their graves right now.
I could go on and on, the Arts and Culture scene, the history field, the social sciences, science, news outlets, the National Park Service, museums, etc. All our institutions remained captured by the far-left. Many of our universities remain ideologically captured as well with a majority of college students identifying as liberals, progressives and leftists. So as much as I would love for South Park and it’s creators to be right, they are totally wrong, getting ahead of themselves and practicing wishful thinking. We need to rescue our country and deradicalize our youth! That will be one of the top things on the agenda of a future U.S. President. Wokeness will never make us a better more inclusive society and people are starting to see that.
Such a rich essay. 'Tale of Two Cities' acted out in St. Pascal Baylon (Queens) social studies by a Mr. Hahn to teach us about the French Revolution and "Hamlet" "Romeo and Juliet" "Othello" and "King Lear" and read out loud in 11th grade English in my second public high school McArthur on L.I. are just a shortlist of literature that made high school tolerable. I'm also the child who preferred meeting friends at the Cambria Library on Linden Blvd. in Queens (2nd to 9th grade) v. anywhere else. I didn't realize there are so many changes.
The idea that wokeness is over because of an election, or a year of pushback, was always silly. The true believers in Critical Social Justice are still true believers. I don't know anyone who changes their entire worldview so simply.
I believe that what we're seeing now is simply the people who never really believed in wokeness, finally feel free to stop going along with it. We can openly point out its awfulness, and we can openly mock it.
But that's never going to change the true believers. Instead, they will simply point to the newly emboldened say: "SEE! The privileged are never going to give up their power peacefully. They were hidden there all along. We need to fight for wokeness harder and nastier than ever before."
And where it is fully entrenched—especially in education, as you point out—the fight is going to get nastier than ever before. After all, the woke know that if they can convert the kids, once they become adults then they will win.
I don't think the "woke" stuff is nearly as objectionable as the business model is at this point, and my hope is that the Trump admin will start to go after the actual model. Those who don't like the woke stuff will find that if you target the model, the woke stuff gets dropped too.
Here's the background. Starting in about 2012, people in Higher Ed leadership almost across the board knew that domestic secondary enrollment pipelines would eventually dry out (a function of low TFR among college bound cohorts), and their response or plan was to build out more grad programs, drop admittance standards, seek overseas enrollees, and stand-up online programs with cut rate offerings and even lower standards. This was the MOOC age. Basically, a version of "invade the world, invite the world" but for Higher Ed. But this was just a function of long-term structural demographics. In the '08-09 downturn we got a systemic/cyclical shock that added to the long term headwind, as TFR for the college bound/enrollee producing sets went down even more, and by 2016-2019 we had even more and better data from folks like Nathan Grawe that showed where and when the downturns were and would be hitting the hardest - basically at sub top 100s in the Northeast and Midwest. Where does wokeness in Higher Ed fit in? It's the moral cover for dropping admissions standards, for bolstering retention efforts for shoddy and mismatched admits, for hitting diversity targets with overseas enrollees who pay full freight, and for hiring lower end faculty. Granted, many of the folks in the trenches - adjuncts and tenure track - are true believers. But in cabinet, it's a year-to-year enrollment yield and discount mix struggle, and the stakes can be high.
By all means, go after the R1s by stripping their funding on grounds that they're antisemitic or woke. But the Achilles heel for those in the sub-100 by ranking - the vast majority of the 4.500 institutes in the U.S., that also happen to enroll 90% of our students - is their population of overseas enrollees. Consider a smaller lib arts institute - if you can take out just 5-15 overseas students who are going to be paying full freight, it can mean millions in lost revenue which means budget cuts and more financial discipline.
These cabinets aren't stupid, and they're not usually that woke. The first thing they cut when money tightens tends to be the cushy DEI positions and programs that are loss leaders on average salary starts and a drag on the 4-6 year grad rate, which also tend to be the most hospitable environments for the woke stuff. They might take a hit on the USNWR equity ranking categories, but when money within the next budget cycle is on the line and they're already out of top 100 ranking territory, they'll take the hit on optics. So my advice to the DoE, DoS, and admin would be to go after student visas (reduce them, radically), financially penalize any institute that has an elevated number of overseas admits (maybe 5% or more?), and start bull horning this to the public, that their so-called partners in American progress and socio-economic mobility uplift (Higher Ed) have been selling them out and literally replacing them with rich kids from overseas. I bet this would resonate even more with the non-college set or majority who've been paying for all this, and who haven't even been able to attend or graduate, or send their kids to do the same. And some are truly egregious - at Columbia for instance, close to half of their undergrads are overseas enrollees, with grad program enrollees being in the majority. Why are we cross subsidizing any of this? Are people really concerned that students are going to brain drain to China or India - where fake scholarship leads to fake vaccines and Potemkin economies? U.S. Higher Ed is an absolutely strategic asset. And it should be leveraged to the benefit of U.S. states, U.S. citizens, and U.S. employers. I think the woke stuff is a bit of a distraction sometimes. Normies often don't care - but they do care about getting sold out.
It’s DEFINITELY not dead. And it’s been infiltrating universities for more than a decade. It began at least 35 years ago, when _I_ was in school. They called it political correctness then. Wokeism is political correctness on steroids and meth, at the same time.
Good observation . Thanks for posting. I wanted to watch the South Park episode before responding. I'm just going to add a few points. Like you, I am very involved in education and I write and read a ton. When I was managing urban charter high schools, I noticed a couple of alarming practices:
1. Required Reading : I did an audit of the Freshman and Sophomore reading lists and found that the books selected were similar to what you note-- the average dates of publication being in mid-to-late 20th century. One of the poetry units focused on a Tupac piece.
2. No library usage or no libraries at all: In urban charters, libraries are very difficult to find due to the cost of building them. Sadly, this reduces the options for kids to magically find books that challenge student thinking.
3. College Statements: Often very formulaic and very edited by counselors-- Identity-based trauma stories , resolved when the students overcome the challenge in their senior year.
However, I don't want to overgeneralize-- I believe that when we talk about education, we are generally hyperfocused on what's happening in urban education-- which has its own susceptibilities. Urban districts often have more resources than rural, and many students qualify for free and reduced lunches. Some elements that make them more susceptible is that they serve more kids, the boards are elected and viewed to have real power so the positions are sought sometimes as a first step in a political career, and consultants can influence decision making easily based on the fear of failure. Additionally, philanthropy may play a part as urban districts receive more than rural.
Maybe take a look. The talks are low-brow and awkward-- so completely on brand for me.
I think the bigger flag and what may contribute to the progressive bias and the maintenance of "woke" perspectives lies in policy.
Neither NCLB nor ESSA mention anything about Social Studies and history. Based on the research I did last year, only 12 states have any accountability for the teaching of history and social studies in K-8-- which means many students are not receiving instruction and knowledge in US, local or world history. That kind of means they have nothing to compare with what they are learning in High School and College. MY observations tell me that many students from enter HS and college as empty vessels, waiting to be filled.
“American schools are woke because they teach more American literature than British literature” is a very weak argument. Besides … both Shakespeare and Chaucer are on reading lists for US schools -> https://www.p12.nysed.gov/guides/ela/part1b.pdf
You really sound as though you are just parroting Maga talking points as clickbait for extremists.
So, so true. I think we've all become more *aware* of wokeness, but the beast hasn't been slain yet.
I've been a history and music teacher for 15+ years at a private school in the rural South. Even there--where we are *ostensibly* (albeit loosely) associated with Christianity--I have seen wokeness seep in, especially in the English Department. Our students still read Shakespeare, Homer, Greek tragedians, etc., but there's been a dumbing-down, too, of the curriculum. I'm shocked when basic works that I read in high school (1999-2003) are nowhere to be found in *any* of our English courses.
Unfortunately, I think you’re right. I’m not sure a return to normalcy is possible for us at this point. I think God may have surrendered our society to it’s delusions and the only thing for the non-deluded to do is buckle up and get ready for the descent.
Maybe the cartoon character was meant to anger the "woke" people with his words. Who said that gen z was the most "woke" generation? Don't you think that "wokeness" is an integral part of a person's character apart from cartoons and politics?
👏👏👏 A truly incredible essay, Liza that if they had any sense or integrity, the New York Times and Washington Post would be running! Eric Cartman can rest easy, he’s not losing his job anytime soon. Matt Stone and Trey Parker are doing some wishful thinking here. Yes, to some extent wokeness has been rolled back with the return of Donald Trump to the White House in 2024. But to say wokeness is dead is just ludicrous! It’s still very much alive and well and is still predominate in our institutions. Let’s be honest the radical left won the cultural war and it is all the younger generation knows. In order to truly be rid of it, our country will need deep and widespread reform! The examples you gave illustrate this perfectly.
Your old high school is having students read Baldwin, Morrison and Angelou but not Shakespeare. Your high schoolers are getting assigned junk like The Hate U Give, Between the World and Me and The Nickel Boys instead of actual works of literature like Romeo and Juliet, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Great Gatsby. Columbia University continues to espouse the same pro-Hamas garbage they’ve been teaching since the 1970s. They also still employ Dr. Joseph Massad who declared October 7th “awesome!” Dr. Massad is an out and out Jihadist who doesn’t even bother to hide this fact anymore he’s Columbia’s version and a modern day version of, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Amin Al-Husseini let’s be honest, he just wears a suit, tie and glasses rather than a long beard, robe and turban. They are pushing an anti-racist agenda in their core curriculum and have updated their year-long political philosophy course to include units on such rubbish as “Anticolonialism”, “Race, Gender and Sexuality” and “Climate Futures.”
The Telluride Association Summer Seminar makes no attempt to hide the fact their indoctrinating high school students with their politically slanted essay topics. Then of course, their is the publishing industry who only want books if they have homeless queer Leprechauns who’ve been previously incarcerated as their characters. They only want stories about BIPOC struggles or about a protagonist who’s a pansexual black Latina who identifies as a horse. Yeah…not books 📚 any sane person would want to read. Oh, how John Steinbeck, Lord Byron, William Faulkner, Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Mary Shelley, and Zora Neale Hurston are collectively rolling over in their graves right now.
I could go on and on, the Arts and Culture scene, the history field, the social sciences, science, news outlets, the National Park Service, museums, etc. All our institutions remained captured by the far-left. Many of our universities remain ideologically captured as well with a majority of college students identifying as liberals, progressives and leftists. So as much as I would love for South Park and it’s creators to be right, they are totally wrong, getting ahead of themselves and practicing wishful thinking. We need to rescue our country and deradicalize our youth! That will be one of the top things on the agenda of a future U.S. President. Wokeness will never make us a better more inclusive society and people are starting to see that.
Such a rich essay. 'Tale of Two Cities' acted out in St. Pascal Baylon (Queens) social studies by a Mr. Hahn to teach us about the French Revolution and "Hamlet" "Romeo and Juliet" "Othello" and "King Lear" and read out loud in 11th grade English in my second public high school McArthur on L.I. are just a shortlist of literature that made high school tolerable. I'm also the child who preferred meeting friends at the Cambria Library on Linden Blvd. in Queens (2nd to 9th grade) v. anywhere else. I didn't realize there are so many changes.
The idea that wokeness is over because of an election, or a year of pushback, was always silly. The true believers in Critical Social Justice are still true believers. I don't know anyone who changes their entire worldview so simply.
I believe that what we're seeing now is simply the people who never really believed in wokeness, finally feel free to stop going along with it. We can openly point out its awfulness, and we can openly mock it.
But that's never going to change the true believers. Instead, they will simply point to the newly emboldened say: "SEE! The privileged are never going to give up their power peacefully. They were hidden there all along. We need to fight for wokeness harder and nastier than ever before."
And where it is fully entrenched—especially in education, as you point out—the fight is going to get nastier than ever before. After all, the woke know that if they can convert the kids, once they become adults then they will win.
Woke isn’t dead. It’s still 1942 and the villains have a lot of fight left as yet.
Diversity is good
I don't think the "woke" stuff is nearly as objectionable as the business model is at this point, and my hope is that the Trump admin will start to go after the actual model. Those who don't like the woke stuff will find that if you target the model, the woke stuff gets dropped too.
Here's the background. Starting in about 2012, people in Higher Ed leadership almost across the board knew that domestic secondary enrollment pipelines would eventually dry out (a function of low TFR among college bound cohorts), and their response or plan was to build out more grad programs, drop admittance standards, seek overseas enrollees, and stand-up online programs with cut rate offerings and even lower standards. This was the MOOC age. Basically, a version of "invade the world, invite the world" but for Higher Ed. But this was just a function of long-term structural demographics. In the '08-09 downturn we got a systemic/cyclical shock that added to the long term headwind, as TFR for the college bound/enrollee producing sets went down even more, and by 2016-2019 we had even more and better data from folks like Nathan Grawe that showed where and when the downturns were and would be hitting the hardest - basically at sub top 100s in the Northeast and Midwest. Where does wokeness in Higher Ed fit in? It's the moral cover for dropping admissions standards, for bolstering retention efforts for shoddy and mismatched admits, for hitting diversity targets with overseas enrollees who pay full freight, and for hiring lower end faculty. Granted, many of the folks in the trenches - adjuncts and tenure track - are true believers. But in cabinet, it's a year-to-year enrollment yield and discount mix struggle, and the stakes can be high.
By all means, go after the R1s by stripping their funding on grounds that they're antisemitic or woke. But the Achilles heel for those in the sub-100 by ranking - the vast majority of the 4.500 institutes in the U.S., that also happen to enroll 90% of our students - is their population of overseas enrollees. Consider a smaller lib arts institute - if you can take out just 5-15 overseas students who are going to be paying full freight, it can mean millions in lost revenue which means budget cuts and more financial discipline.
These cabinets aren't stupid, and they're not usually that woke. The first thing they cut when money tightens tends to be the cushy DEI positions and programs that are loss leaders on average salary starts and a drag on the 4-6 year grad rate, which also tend to be the most hospitable environments for the woke stuff. They might take a hit on the USNWR equity ranking categories, but when money within the next budget cycle is on the line and they're already out of top 100 ranking territory, they'll take the hit on optics. So my advice to the DoE, DoS, and admin would be to go after student visas (reduce them, radically), financially penalize any institute that has an elevated number of overseas admits (maybe 5% or more?), and start bull horning this to the public, that their so-called partners in American progress and socio-economic mobility uplift (Higher Ed) have been selling them out and literally replacing them with rich kids from overseas. I bet this would resonate even more with the non-college set or majority who've been paying for all this, and who haven't even been able to attend or graduate, or send their kids to do the same. And some are truly egregious - at Columbia for instance, close to half of their undergrads are overseas enrollees, with grad program enrollees being in the majority. Why are we cross subsidizing any of this? Are people really concerned that students are going to brain drain to China or India - where fake scholarship leads to fake vaccines and Potemkin economies? U.S. Higher Ed is an absolutely strategic asset. And it should be leveraged to the benefit of U.S. states, U.S. citizens, and U.S. employers. I think the woke stuff is a bit of a distraction sometimes. Normies often don't care - but they do care about getting sold out.
It’s DEFINITELY not dead. And it’s been infiltrating universities for more than a decade. It began at least 35 years ago, when _I_ was in school. They called it political correctness then. Wokeism is political correctness on steroids and meth, at the same time.
Anyone who says wokeness is dead should try querying literary agents and publishing fiction. It’s like a trip back into the depths of 2020.
Good observation . Thanks for posting. I wanted to watch the South Park episode before responding. I'm just going to add a few points. Like you, I am very involved in education and I write and read a ton. When I was managing urban charter high schools, I noticed a couple of alarming practices:
1. Required Reading : I did an audit of the Freshman and Sophomore reading lists and found that the books selected were similar to what you note-- the average dates of publication being in mid-to-late 20th century. One of the poetry units focused on a Tupac piece.
2. No library usage or no libraries at all: In urban charters, libraries are very difficult to find due to the cost of building them. Sadly, this reduces the options for kids to magically find books that challenge student thinking.
3. College Statements: Often very formulaic and very edited by counselors-- Identity-based trauma stories , resolved when the students overcome the challenge in their senior year.
However, I don't want to overgeneralize-- I believe that when we talk about education, we are generally hyperfocused on what's happening in urban education-- which has its own susceptibilities. Urban districts often have more resources than rural, and many students qualify for free and reduced lunches. Some elements that make them more susceptible is that they serve more kids, the boards are elected and viewed to have real power so the positions are sought sometimes as a first step in a political career, and consultants can influence decision making easily based on the fear of failure. Additionally, philanthropy may play a part as urban districts receive more than rural.
My talks on YouTube, The Courage Gap, cover some of this: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIjxiyX8mViLsRcPuZJrZ17SgeE-PJ6_D
Maybe take a look. The talks are low-brow and awkward-- so completely on brand for me.
I think the bigger flag and what may contribute to the progressive bias and the maintenance of "woke" perspectives lies in policy.
Neither NCLB nor ESSA mention anything about Social Studies and history. Based on the research I did last year, only 12 states have any accountability for the teaching of history and social studies in K-8-- which means many students are not receiving instruction and knowledge in US, local or world history. That kind of means they have nothing to compare with what they are learning in High School and College. MY observations tell me that many students from enter HS and college as empty vessels, waiting to be filled.
“American schools are woke because they teach more American literature than British literature” is a very weak argument. Besides … both Shakespeare and Chaucer are on reading lists for US schools -> https://www.p12.nysed.gov/guides/ela/part1b.pdf
You really sound as though you are just parroting Maga talking points as clickbait for extremists.
So, so true. I think we've all become more *aware* of wokeness, but the beast hasn't been slain yet.
I've been a history and music teacher for 15+ years at a private school in the rural South. Even there--where we are *ostensibly* (albeit loosely) associated with Christianity--I have seen wokeness seep in, especially in the English Department. Our students still read Shakespeare, Homer, Greek tragedians, etc., but there's been a dumbing-down, too, of the curriculum. I'm shocked when basic works that I read in high school (1999-2003) are nowhere to be found in *any* of our English courses.
Cartman would definitely be against taking Shakespeare out of the classroom.
He’s a big Titus Andronicus fan. Just ask Scott Tenorman.
I can't wait till our website starts making money so I can comission you for articles (if you'd be interested)! This is fantastic!!
This essay is far too kind. The likes of Angelou should not be part of any curriculum, except when presented in the manner of Mein Kampf.
Why should Angelou not be part of any curriculum?
Unfortunately, I think you’re right. I’m not sure a return to normalcy is possible for us at this point. I think God may have surrendered our society to it’s delusions and the only thing for the non-deluded to do is buckle up and get ready for the descent.
Maybe the cartoon character was meant to anger the "woke" people with his words. Who said that gen z was the most "woke" generation? Don't you think that "wokeness" is an integral part of a person's character apart from cartoons and politics?