HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Georgetown’s Cultural Revolution.

The silence to my mind is telling. It speaks of the lack of resources within progressive thinking that could be drawn upon to resist the trend that has bedeviled American academia over the past few years. The academy is a different place today than it was only a year ago and was different a year ago than it was five years before. Terror and dread fill academic workers, professors, and staff alike, and it is everywhere. Neither the call for distinguishing between unconscious bias and structural racism; nor for dismantling “merit” so that “minorities” succeed, seem able to do the work the authors of these emails want them to do. They fail to deliver responses of the kind, “Let’s just talk about this. Maybe the problem is overdetermined and is not reducible to ‘unconscious bias.’” What they beget instead is a combination of dread and virtuous self-congratulation. These two sentiments, dread married to virtue, constitute to my mind the affective embodiment of progressive ideology prevalent among white liberals as developed in its most privileged space: academia. They are typical. They are two faces of the same coin: flip and you see dread, flip again and you see virtue.

This is what dead or dying institutions look like. In this context, “woke” politics is the bear shirt cult, the ghost dance movement, of academia. It’s what anthropologists call a “revitalization movement,” the last convulsions of a dying culture. The chief characteristic of revitalization movements is that they always fail. Which doesn’t mean that they aren’t dangerous on the way down: Nazism was a revitalization movement, too.