The College Fix

The good news is that the rise of woke academia and everything that it entailed is dwindling, studies and data show. The bad news is that unless the censorious campus culture is changed along with it, real problems will remain at colleges and universities.

That is according to Musa al-Gharbi, a communications and sociology professor at Stony Brook University and author of the recently published book “We Have Never Been Woke,” which argues that periods of “Awokenings” such as the DEI-craze America just experienced have come and gone over the generations, and the current “Great Awokening” is coming to a close.

In a talk at the conference “Censorship in the Sciences: Interdisciplinary Perspectives,” held at the University of Southern California over the weekend, al-Gharbi said several indicators support his theory.

“After 2010, we saw a lot of things that shifted at once, we saw the number of students … who censor on various topics went up, peaked around 2021, and started to go down,” he said.

“Research on prejudice and discrimination went up after 2010, peaked around 2021, and is on the way down,” he said. “[C]ancel culture incidents, you see the spike, it peaked around 2021, [and is] on the way down.”

Coupled with that, the current roll back of DEI initiatives, the end of speech codes, and a parade of pro-First Amendment victories in court shows “academics, on paper, are as free as you can get.”

“Then why are universities such censorious places? Well, the problem is, it’s not about rules and policies, it’s about culture,” he told the audience.

“If scholars are not taking advantage of the existing rules, laws and protections that they have, then multiplying the rules, laws and protections probably won’t do much to change the censorious nature of institutions,” he said. “If you want to change the censorious nature of the institutions, then you have to work on culture.”

Blaming cancel culture in general misses the mark, he added.

“When you focus too much on the ‘kids these days’ and Fox News, we actually miss who has the power, how that power is exercised, who the decision makers are, how they are making their decisions,” al-Gharbi said. “When we look at who is actually driving most of the censorious dynamics within campuses … the call is almost always coming from inside the house.”

He said a big driver of this dynamic is that academics “are much more likely to be conformist, are much more likely to be intolerant of views that diverge from their own, are much more likely to be dogmatic and extreme ideologically compared to the general public, and are much more concerned about status.”

“One of the things that drives these cultural dynamics in our institutions is the fact that the people who end up in these institutions just aren’t normal people,” he said, drawing chuckles from the audience.

“Not only are we kind of weird, but the process of being enculturated in these institutions tends to exacerbate the weird tendencies we already have.”

In his recently released book, “We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite,” he said he delves further into this paradox.

“To understand these dynamics and … why they are playing out, you need to look at culture,” he told conference attendees.

In an interview with The Fix prior to the conference, al-Gharbi said what he has termed “Awokenings” are not unique to the internet-age or Gen-Z, “but a phenomenon that has occurred multiple times over the past hundred years when the conditions were right.”

A big factor that seems to predict such periods is an overproduction of an elite population who find themselves “either unemployed or underemployed or find that they’re not able to live the kinds of lives they expected.” In other words, said al-Gharbi, they ultimately find the kind of life they expected or experienced as a child becomes unattainable to them as adults.

“When you have growing numbers of people who find themselves in that position,” al-Gharbi told The Fix, “what they do is they tend to indict the social order that they think failed them and try to tear down some of the existing elites in order to make room for themselves.”

“I argue this is fundamentally what ‘Awokenings’ are,” al-Gharbi said. “They’re these inter-elite power struggles by kind of frustrated erstwhile elites and more established elites who are trying to defend their position.”

But the struggles and concerns of would-be elites are not enough to spur an Awokening, al-Gharbi noted.

“Often when times are bad for elites, they’re fine for everyone else,” he said. “So it’s hard to get anyone to care about elite problems. But there are some moments when these trajectories come together.”

“[If] things have been bad and growing worse for ordinary people for a while,” said al-Gharbi, “and all of a sudden they’re bad for a non-trivial subset of elites too…[that’s] when Awokenings tend to happen.”

Frustrated elites and ordinary people form coalitions, though these coalitions “often prove unstable,” he noted. Partly, he said, this is because “the elite faction tends to have weird ideas that are not really what the non-elites are concerned about.”

As an example, al-Gharbi said, a lot of lower-income African Americans have concerns about the way policing and incarceration work in the United States. However, he said, they don’t want to abolish prisons or defund the police the way some relatively affluent, highly-educated people do.

As an Awokening dies down, al-Gharbi said, there is usually little to show for it “in terms of like actually helping people who are genuinely marginalized and disadvantaged.”

But, said al-Gharbi, “each Awokening usually leads to the proliferation of more…social justice sinecures. That’s new jobs where the main thing that the workers do is help institutions conspicuously conform with, you know, the right social justice whatevers.”

“Those,” he added, “tend to be one of the more lasting legacies of Awokenings. They don’t change much for the marginalized and the disadvantaged, but they do provide relatively good paying social justice sinecures for otherwise frustrated elites.”

As time goes on, al-Gharbi said, “some of those get cut, but usually you end up with a lot more than you started with and they do tend to persist for a while.”

MORE: Censorship in the Sciences conference speakers call on peers to organize, defend free speech

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