Christopher Dummitt: Woke may have peaked, but on campus, it's far from dead

Despite changes in the broader culture, the skewed ideological demographics of our universities remain an ongoing, unaddressed problem.

By: Christopher Dummitt

Sometimes when Matt and Jen tell us on The Line Podcast that we’re living post-peak woke, I find myself fantasizing that they really are right. Then I look around at the university world I inhabit, shake my head, and think: “If only it were true.”

I half-buy what they are selling. The mania of 2020 came and faded (somewhat). It’s safer now to be heterodox in the media. It’s also hard to make sense of the centrist and even mildly conservative Mark Carney’s takeover of the Liberal Party without acknowledging that something has changed. I even see it in my students who tend to be much more laissez-fair about online controversies, many of whom now chuckle in amazement at the kind of online mobbing that their peers led only a few years ago.

But what this kind of post-woke argument misses is that many of our cultural institutions — like our universities — resist the broader trend towards moderation because they have already been captured.

Perhaps you bristle at the use of “captured.” But what I mean here is the established fact that studies for Canada, the United States, and United Kingdom consistently show university faculty are overwhelmingly made up of those who vote for left-leaning parties. The skew is so significant that if it were for any other feature of identity — whether race, gender, or sexuality — it would be considered a crisis.

Whatever moderation is happening in the broader culture isn’t coming for ideologically lopsided institutions that are and continue to be populated by just one political group.

Some dispute the data, pointing to faults in survey methodology — as if asking individuals which party they voted for is especially complex. Others call the viewpoint diversity issue a “right-wing talking point.” This classic example of an ad hominem argument is a sleight of hand. It’s also ironic that a right-wing talking point is assumed to be something irrelevant — exactly the kind of argument that depends on a lack of viewpoint diversity to be convincing in the first place.

The most serious critique, though, is that viewpoint diversity doesn’t matter because academics are responsible professionals who can be trusted to accurately evaluate all ideas, regardless of their own personal preferences. On the surface, this is a reasonable claim. But it collapses in disciplines and departments where political goals like “social justice” are now explicitly embraced as the main pursuit in competition with the search for truth.

Even if every academic could reliably subordinate personal preference to professional judgement, a problem remains: homogenous groups make bad decisions. They face the problem of group polarization, becoming more skewed and radical in their assessments when alternative perspectives aren’t offered.

Even more importantly, it’s a matter of what isn’t said in politically lopsided groups: the taken-for-granted assumptions about what is true and false, what’s reasonable or irrational, what’s fair or offside.

This affects vital academic processes like peer review — whereby experts in a field test out the truth-claims of others who want to be considered expert. Peer review certainly doesn’t eliminate errors or the possibility of falsified research, let alone human ego or confirmation bias. Yet peer review is to academic life as democracy is to political systems. As Churchill might have said, it’s the worst system of truth verification “except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”

In one knowledge domain after another, however, political homogeneity has messed this up. Assessors are simply no longer aware when their own ideas are off-base or questionable.

The consequences aren’t abstract. Take today’s live policy debates: the housing crisis, the drug crisis, or claims of systemic discrimination. On each of these, our experts are not simply answering technical questions. They are filtering evidence and arguments through unexamined ideological frames. It’s naive to think a politically uniform peer review process yields reliable, well-rounded knowledge on these urgent issues.

No matter what happens in the broader culture, the already skewed ideological demographics of our universities remain an ongoing, unaddressed problem.

I’ve seen this firsthand in my own field of history. For an article I submitted to a top journal on the debate over renaming Toronto’s Dundas Street, three different peer review experts thought it was irrelevant to mention the wider history of slavery in Africa before and after the Atlantic slave trade and amongst Indigenous peoples in Canada. The peer reviewers didn’t question the truth of what I claimed. But they made it their “expert” opinion that such a topic was irrelevant and “off limits.” On the progressive part of the political spectrum, to mention the involvement of Africans or Indigenous peoples as slave traders themselves is seen to be in bad taste. It’s just not done. And so the public record is quietly edited by consensus.

This will only get worse as our Google searches increasingly rely on AI like Chat GPT. These technologies draw on available expert opinion. But if that expertise is ideologically skewed — as it is — the same will be true of our new AI created version of reality.

This should alarm us. Peer review is not supposed to be an ideological sorting machine. At the most basic level, it ought to work like a highly selective marketplace of ideas. But markets only work when there is real competition. If peer review is monopolized by one political tendency, the result is not truth, but conformity.

My worry is that the talk of post-woke acts like a smokescreen — obscuring the many places where the generalization is untrue. It’s based much more on observations of what’s happening south of the border. The vibe shift definitely happened there. But in Canada — in universities — many are now doubling down on woke ideas precisely in reaction to what’s happening in the U.S.

The stakes could hardly be higher: a democracy without trusted sources of knowledge cannot govern itself wisely. And peer review, like democracy, only works when everyone has a voice.

All of this, though, depends on genuine viewpoint diversity amongst our expert peer reviewers. If only that were so.

Christopher Dummitt is a professor of history at Trent University, and a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.

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