A deadly virus that threatens our way of life is spreading rapidly across the land. It is not COVID-19, but wokeism and academia is its mothership. Wokeism is the product of an educational system that has lost its way. Universities have become the de facto farm system for progressives.
The indoctrination process begins with suppressing the free exchange of ideas. Citing the risk of violence, university administrators have banned certain (predominantly conservative) speakers from campus because they are deemed too controversial. These concerns, while not patently unreasonable, must be more than thinly veiled attempts to control students’ thinking and squash debate. A recent survey finds that eighty percent of college students self-censor in their interactions with peers and professors. These results align with my own academic experience: approximately 85% of my students reported that they felt pressured to answer in-class or examination questions to placate the political or social leanings of their professors.
Paradoxically, the concerted effort on college campuses to increase faculty and student diversity has encouraged not a diversity of ideas, but the opposite. Learning is a process of creative destruction in which new ideas continually challenge and displace old ones. The economist John Maynard Keynes described this as “a struggle of escape from habitual modes of thought and expression” because “the difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones.” Just as diamonds are formed when high pressure is applied to carbon, knowledge is the product of the unrestrained clash of competing ideas. In 1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson underscored this theme in an oration before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard College entitled “The American Scholar“…
