1/ WOKENESS IS KILLING THE ACADEMY. By design, perhaps?

Me in grad school (1990s): "You are kidding, right? Why are you defending postmodernism and using that as a theoretical foundation for your field research? PoMo isn't a theory; it is a CRITIQUE. And it is waaaay anti-

2/ science. How do you reconcile doing scientific research with a critique that is anti-science? That is just #stoopiddumb and #stoopidbad."

"Dude, you won't be able to get tenured jobs with that bullshxt. The University is about academic freedom, and PoMo creates the opposite

3/ of academic freedom. No university is going to hire more than a handful of PoMo proponents because, well, a university full of them would KILL academic freedom and the university would cease to generate knowledge. And perhaps cease to exist. Like, don't be #stoopid. PoMo is

4/ just a fad. Don't tie your future to it, please."

Me now (2020): " #Holyyikes. That Frankenstein abomination of PoMo did not die. Instead, it mutated and morphed into Critical Social Theory. And it has migrated from graduate departments to undergraduate studies. And it is now

5/ all about pedagogy and teaching undergraduates how to be frickin' activists. Militant activists, even. Like ... this is soooo not good for America."

* * * * *

In her 12/22/2020 article on NewDiscourses dot com ("The University as the Woke Mission Field: A Dissident Women's

6/ Studies PhD Speaks Out") ( h/t @thespybrief ), the pseudonymous Samantha Jones accurately describes the bleak situation in the Academy in which Wokeness prevails as a sort of pseudo-religious faith, evangelizing (even radicalizing) innocent young people into missionaries of

7/ Wokeness.

Jones correctly identifies Critical Social Justice as an extreme danger to liberal democracies and she outlines steps that need to happen within the Academy in order to combat an allegedly liberal project that is anything but liberal.

I share her alarm and want to

8/ add my voice to the growing chorus decrying the prevalence of Wokeness with a call to break Wokeness from *outside* the Academy.

Make #WokeIsBroke a Thing, or Wokeness will completely subvert American democratic norms and values, not just in the Academy but in Society

9/ writ large.

Critical Social (Justice) Theory (hereinafter, CST) is a wolf in sheep's clothing and a great example of an agent of mass #CulturalSubversion. It pretends to be something that it is not and, in that process, it destroys one set of values and replaces them with

10/ another ... while leading Society to authoritarianism. Or worse.

(Some critics of CST define the end goals as authoritarian; and others see the end in totalitarianism. Either way, the end game of CST is NOT democratic. Ahem.)

CST claims to be a theory, but is more a

11/ method bundled with a *criticism* of theory.

It creates more criticism, not knowledge; it creates activists, nor scholars; and it is just bad science, as I observed of its PoMo predecessor during grad school: CST starts out with a critical stance, then looks at some social

12/ phenomenon with an aim to proving that the critical stance is true ... which is decidly NOT real science.

The scientific method, in contrast, creates hypotheses to be falsified through testing as a means to generate new scientific knowledge. Real science, then, is based on

13/ the concept of falsifiability. CST, instead, is unfalsifiable -- not capable of being proved false. (!!!!) By design, I think.

Since destroying the Academy and leading Society down illiberal and anti-democratic paths are goals that CST shares with some of our geopolitical

14/ enemies, I think it is worth considering that the rise of CST in Society at this particular historical moment may NOT be accidental.

If this proves to be true, then CST is not only a threat to academic freedom and other democratic freedoms like speech and assembly, it may

15/ also prove to be a grave national security threat.

Consider the history of CST: It emerged at the Frankfort School in 1923 with a somewhat pessimistic, even dystopian, view about what it calls 'technoscience.' The rise of Nazism in Germany forced the new movement into exile

16/ in America where it first found a home at Columbia University in 1935. There, the progenitors Adorno and Horkheimer met with American pragmatists, a mind-meeting which caused CST adherents ultimately to see technoscience as less dystopian and more liberating and progressive.

17/ (We see this train of thought today among a lot of the Tech Bros who seem to want us to believe that Big Tech will bring us better and greater things ... instead of the surveillance state elements that we are all confronting today.)

18/ Finally, the school eventually re-established itself in Frankfort in 1953 but also continued in the US with academic evangelists in NY, TX, and CA and pre-eminence in US colleges and universities all over the country.

Further, a brief CST timeline reveals an atypical

19/ development of a new field of study, in that it started out as a philosophical abstraction in the Academy (1930s) but then ended up in the hands of younger activists in the streets with a specific agenda to force societal change (1990s).

20/ Note the current CST agenda is not to study social change, nor to understand or explain it. It is to critique it by identifying enemies of progress with an aim toward deconstruction and even destruction ('canceling') of those enemies.

21/ This is highly unusual, to say the very least. And scary.

In the 2000s, Academic CST took another dangerous turn: It began to focus on pedagogy and on teaching undergraduates its method of immanent critique with an aim to push for social changes in Society. In the name of

22/ progress. Um, sorry, that is neither liberal, scientific, nor democratic.

The alignment with the goals of our major geopolitical enemies becomes downright alarming when you consider that CST is, essentially, reformed Marxist social criticism that:

23/
rejects mainstream political/intellectual views;
criticizes capitalism;
focuses on dominance and oppression; and
highlights the importance of technoscience toward achieving social change. (Hello, Big Tech!)

Personally, I think the whole CST project, particularly

24/ in the last 30 years, is a very large, inorganic #CulturalSubversion project. Thirty years ago, I made this statement as a joke, but today, after getting a crash course in enemy infowar tactics, I am no longer laughing.

The key condition that makes me believe this is the

25/ fact that the Academy is letting #CulturalSubversion happen.

But why? Why would universities hire multiple CST faith leaders (a/k/a instructors) to teach new acolytes (a/k/a students) a deconstruction method that is anti-liberal, anti-scientific, anti-democratic, and that

26/ does not generate any new knowledge?

Surely the Academy can seen that CST taken to its logical conclusion would yield the end of new knowledge generation, Academic freedom, and the Academy itself, right?

Maybe not.

27/ In the mid- to late-1990s, I was in my first teaching position at a large state university campus in a blue coastal state. I distinctly remember one day during office hours learning that the university's medical school had accepted a huge donation from Big Pharma and that

28/ it would be renaming the main medical school building after the donor company.

I was incensed.

But I was also young and #stoopid -- unwise in the ways of campus politics and without a single political bone in my body -- so I made appointments with the union and one of

29/ Deans higher up the administrative food chain.

"Why is this happening? How can you say that you can guarantee faculty academic freedom if you are taking checks outright from ... lobbyists? That is going to undermine the value of student education. What happens if Big Pharma

30/ starts directing research or curriculum development? What happens to academic freedom then?" (*shakes head at past self's naive and youthful idealism*)

The next semester, my classrooms were visited by higher-up Deans (highly unusual); I was offered what felt like an academic

31/ bribe at the time -- to head up a new archaeology field center in Mexico which, had I accepted, would have ended my career as an area specialist in Oceania; and, when I declined that odd bribe, new classes I had previously been offered to teach suddenly dried up and I got no

32/ further contracts to teach classes I had been teaching for years. My income just dried up, seemingly overnight and with no explanation whatsoever.

"Weird."

I had no clue what was going on at the time. But with hindsight, I can see clearly now that the 1990s was the period

33/ when university endowments ballooned; the Academy's administrative class grew larger and its member salaries increased; and most classroom instruction got siphoned off of tenured faculty to grossly-underpaid adjunct instructors.

In other words, $$$ were coming in and the

34/ folks at the top of the Academy's food chain got much wealthier, while the instruction of students in classrooms was provided by a new under-paid wage-slave class whose members have no job security, no insurance or other benefits, and no livable wage.

35/ Oh, and campus construction boomed as campuses became luxury country clubs for the sons and daughters of the wealthy. Also, subversive. And also weird.

It was also during this period of the 1990s and 2000s that money from transnational organized crime was being pumped into

36/ all sectors of the American economy, including the Academy. It is not at all hard for me to see that some of America's academic freedoms may have been purchased by foreign investments in institutions of higher learning. Maybe even through proxy industries like Big Pharma

37/ and Big Tech (ahem).

So consider this: Perhaps our geopolitical enemies were pumping cash into the Academy these last few decades. And perhaps they were also exerting pressure on compromised administrators to also plump up departments with new faculty versed in CST.

38/ And perhaps these new faculty were incentivized to teach an illiberal, anti-science, anti-democratic method of creating social change in the streets at just the same moment that our geopolitical foreign enemies were also joining up with US #Congresscritters to orchestrate the

39/ hellscape that we have all been living for the last 4+ years.

See, the Academy is not just a place of instruction and knowledge creation. It is also a place of socialization where each year, a new group of students enters to be exposed to life-changing ideas.

40/ Or society-changing ideas.

And under the aegis of CST disguised as academic freedom, the Academy has instead become a place that creates a refreshed, never-ending supply of new street activists versed in the divisive, polarizing religion of Wokeness.

41/ We know our foreign enemies invested a lot of time, money, and effort in Big Tech, US political parties and elected officials, and in the microtargeting of individual Americans via social media to produce radicalized right-wing youth groups (among others).

42/ Is it such a stretch to see that these same enemies may have also invested similar resources to produce radicalized left-wing youth in the Academy? Can you see how this doesn't really advantage Americans but rather it only helps the enemies?

43/ Samantha Jones and I share the same dread for America's future, as we both see the #CulturalSubversion of bedrock American democratic values and the consequent erosion of our freedoms.

But where she and I split is on where the locus of change should be. She sees the locus

44/ as being in the Academy itself.

But if the Academy has been compromised by foreign investors fronting for transnational organized crime, there is no incentive for the Academy to eradicate the plague that is CST.

Instead, I think ethical conservatives and ethical liberals

45/ *outside* the Academy need to come together to find common cause in defending and preserving diversity of beliefs; freedoms of speech and assembly; and respect for science and reason. #Forstarters.

We citizens also need to show others what CST really is -- ideological

46/ lunacy that only pushes folks into the political/tribal extremes and then into a society that is ripe for takeover by an authoritarian leader.

Whether the door to authoritarianism is opened by basement-dwelling incels or by Academy-trained CST activists calling for

47/ revolutions in the streets, both groups are paving the way to the end of American democracy.

And I am definitely not down for that.

#WokeIsBroke

/END