Raymond Da Silva Rosa: Universities are criticised for being woke, but are they really?

Donald Trump has said “I don’t like the term ‘woke’ because I hear ‘woke woke woke’. It’s just a term they use, half the people can’t even define it, they don’t know what it is”.

Even so, it seems “woke” is a thing and president-elect Trump knows it when he sees it because he has appointed people with an avowed mission to rid US universities of their woke ways.

But are universities really woke?

Not really. The claim of universities pushing woke ideas is equivalent to saying the Prado Museum condones pornography because it hangs up Goya’s The Naked Maja. It’s hardly subversive of moral standards, although controversial back in the day.

It’s the same with universities. They are long-lived institutions. They don’t survive by taking risky positions that are far ahead of the curve. What might appear literally radical is inherently prudent.

A reason universities survive is that they follow American futurologist John Naisbitt’s definition of leadership: “ … finding a parade and getting in front of it”. Universities are adept at going where the wind blows in terms of social trends.

Elite US universities are often accused of being the most radically woke. In assessing the validity of this claim, consider that five of the eight universities in the Ivy League — Dartmouth, Princeton, Yale, Penn and Brown — have more students from the top one per cent of the income scale than from the entire bottom 60 per cent.

Further, a recent study found that “children from families in the top one per cent are more than twice as likely to attend an Ivy-Plus college (US universities distinguished by their exceptional academic reputation and global recognition for scholarly excellence) as those from middle-class families with comparable SAT/ACT scores”.

We can be confident that the top one per cent have a well-honed sense of where their self-interest lies. They don’t send their offspring to institutions that threaten the social order.

So, if universities are simply following the parade, why are they widely criticised for being woke?

Wokeness might be difficult to define but it seems intuitively true that universities push woke ideas that discomfit, even outrage, much of the population, which is why president- elect Trump has got political mileage by attacking wokeness in universities.

The answer lies in what Naisbitt said directly after claiming that leadership was about getting in front of parades: “What is happening in America is that those parades are getting smaller and smaller — and there are many more of them.”

In the US, as in Australia, a combination of increased material wealth, greater individualism, and more ease of identifying and coordinating people with like-minded interests, has meant that more groups each with fewer members (ie smaller parades) now actively promote their interests.

A person can participate in several parades, but they are unlikely to participate in all. They see other parades in which they do not participate as discordant and not legitimate. Universities are caught in the middle.

Take, for example, the common criticism of universities that they spend too much on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs rather than their core business of educating students. The same people are wont to criticise universities for their inadequate response to reports of sexual abuse on campus.

It is right that universities do more to prevent such abuse and provide support for victims. Doing so requires an administrative structure and costs that fall under DEI programs.

The point is what one person thinks is the right amount to spend on any given DEI program is likely another person’s idea of an outrageous waste.

In an age where social norms are in a state of flux there is no getting around the fact that universities seeking to exercise the semblance of leadership will not have an easy ride. There are too many small parades marching in all directions.

A potential palliative measure is for universities to undertake more activities that underscore their stakeholders’ shared humanity. The life of the mind includes the emotional as well as the cerebral.

Winthrop Professor Raymond Da Silva Rosa is an expert in finance from The University of Western Australia’s Business School