I also think that Jenn and Matt's view that woke is dead are optimistic and myopic.
We need to differentiate aspects of the "woke" phenomena. It's true that the peak of cancel culture has come and gone... the moderate mainstream found its voice/courage, and you can say things (in public, in newspapers, etc.) that run against the woke vanguard and not necessarily be hounded out of a job. But, as the author notes, many large institutions, especially public sector, remain captured by woke-era DEI ethos and policy, especially around hiring, funding, etc. And, in Toronto at least, woke zealots still seem able to secure outlandish "wins" such as the renaming of major public spaces (Yonge-Dundas square") and streets.
Yes, that nuanced comment is very helpful. I wonder about the author's point regarding the renaming of Dundas Street, was he for or against? Was it that the Dundas name was wrongly being tarred and feathered?
The travesty of hating Dundas pales in comparison to the silliness of picking an African name. I could have swallowed a First Nations name (with English spelling), like "Toronto" or "Mississauga", but African? Why not Mongolian?
The stupidity of it all astounds me. As done the placing of first people's tribes names on streets and buildings where it is widely knows that they did not have a written language and the words have no meaning in English or French and are impossible to pronounce. The cost of doing this....well it is in the name of social justice and reconciliation. /s
Boy oh boy CF. That’s a pretty dumb comment if you really think about. I won’t speculate on what motivates you to post such nasty foolishness, but I will make two observations: The name we gave our country is widely believed to have a First Nations origin. It may not have been written down at the time, but it seems to have stuck, and I’m quite fond of it. The other thing is that most of us learn how to pronounce almost any name with sufficient practice. I’m guessing even you know how to pronounce the name of the province to the right of Alberta.
Worse, the new name actually glorifies slave traders now - as opposed to the old name, which was named for an abolitionist who was deemed to have moved too slow.
It ends up being exactly the opposite of what the woke activists were aiming for.
Really? Is that what keeps you up at night? I hope you didn’t lose too much sleep when they renamed part of Peter Street to Blue Jays Way.
Maybe you can tell me why it’s so vexing for the City to use names taken from the language of the people who lived and worked on the land for centuries before the rest of us showed up. If you did a quick Google, you’d learn that Embaadiimok means "where the road goes to the water." Sounds like a culturally and historically appropriate name to me.
And before you mutter into your beer about yet another woke lefty, I just want to note that I am appalled at what they’re doing to the memory of Sir John A. *That’s* historical ignorance for you.
See, the "vexing" thing about it is that Embaadiimok already had a name - "Lower Coxwell". And there was nothing wrong with "Lower Coxwell"; it carried our shared history and culture as do the names of all public spaces (no different than statues and monuments). It's the culture of those who actually built the roads, and the city, and the country, etc.
By what right did a bunch of self-anointed moral vanguards go about changing the name on a fad - as though our collective inheritance was a blank canvass for their moral visions? Answer me that?
It's only because of Trump's success that we are able to push back against woke in Canada. Sure, there is a backlash, but the overwhelming media uniformity has been broken. It is no longer possible to keep Canadians from hearing dissenting opinions on DEI, gender ideology, or immigration.
Trump is liberating Canadians by attacking woke in the US and I, for one, am glad of it
Nonsense. "Woke" peaked in the US *in Trump's first term*. His approach created a thermostatic response on the left that *increased* the intensity of "woke". It wasn't until Trump left office that the peak passed. Anything Trump has done since then has been like pushing on an open door.
Laughably false. The rest of the world had started moving past peak woke before and despite Trump. If anything Trump is a threat to the world moving past woke ideas, as he fires various senior leaders only because of their skin color.
Looking back at the last thirty years, one can see how we got here. In rich countries we’ve basically conquered scarcity, our technology gives us seven flavours of Doritos and all-night food delivery and overseas air-travel vacations and comfortable houses. But not everyone has equal access to this abundance — some people don’t even have homes, and reasonable academics can ask why.
Likewise, reasonable academics can look at the situation where top execs are 80% men and ask: why? Or the incarceration rates in Canada being 20x higher for Indigenous people: why?
I think where we ran into the real closing of the academic mind is when instead of studying these things with the usual academic debate and willingness to consider controversial ideas, we started having equality of outcome as the goal that supersedes all other goals, and making certain lines of argument off-limits under pain of social/professional ostracism.
An example: 13 years ago, in 2012, Anne-Louise Slaughter (Hilary Clinton’s chief of staff) could publish the feature article in The Atlantic called “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” that fearlessly explored issues around women’s willingness to basically not be there for their kids like men do to get those top-execs jobs. Having been in high-performance professional services cultures in my own career where we hired 55% women and they generally performed equal or better in the lower ranks, this was obvious to me — the “pipeline” broke when they had kids and weren’t willing to have those kids raised by a nanny or a stay-at-home husband. Men are much more fine with this.
In retrospect, though, 2012 was the last year that that article could have been published. After that, it couldn’t be different biologically-driven preferences, it had to be 100% social (that the patriarchy MADE women have those different preferences), or else that the very idea of top execs is unjust in the first place.
Academia lost its mind from 2012-2022 and only is starting to regain it now as the academy has lost credibility with average people.
If you seriously believe that, you’re just as much of a radical as the people who believe that we need to abolish police or whatever because incremental change can never succeed and we need to burn and rebuild.
It never works. Burning down is easy, but what comes back is usually really bad to start. Building good instititions takes centuries.
Our academy still has a lot of good in it. We should fix it, not try to destroy it. Like seriously, you think we should shut down the humanities schools of McGill and U of T, and that’s going to lead to a better outcome for Canada vs a deliberate programme of fixing the culture through grant programme changes and fostering real debate about these important issues?
Nature abhors a vacuum. The need for education would be fulfilled by something else.
There are already institutions that exist to fulfill that need. Defunding academia would just serve to cull the corrupt and useless ones.
The competent institutions would find ways to fund themselves without government funding and probably do so at a fraction of the cost.
The marxists hate you and want you dead. It's a fight for survival. Cut their funding or suffer the consequences of being tolerant of their anti-human agenda.
We have far too many universities and a cull would allow for redistribution of funds. The arts programs are what keep the lights on, regardless of any other value.
So yes, take the technical colleges that "evolved" into universities and devolve them.
As an aside, do the universities want to be fixed?
Woke is still in "full swing" in our school board, working its way into hiring policies, school programming, and whatnot. I would like to see it fade into oblivion! Money is being poorly and foolishly spent, and it is starving more essential aspects of education. I can understand why our Ontario ministry of education wants to do away with school boards entirely: all that diversity of opinion gets hopelessly messy, and expensive!
The real tragedy is that the social justice issues which are real and overwhelming have become overshadowed by identity politics. Special education supports and strategies remain underfunded. Gender politics aside, the discussion about being post-woke will not make these children disappear, nor will it lessen the urgent need for more qualified support staff and program places for those kids.
Is it actually sucking up funding? I’ve never seen good numbers on this. I hear this as a (partial) explanation for why the provincial government put the Toronto District School Board under provincial supervision, but never with anybody showing any real numbers (“TDSB hired 100 diversity consultants for a cost of $16M” or whatever).
My personal view is that some US universities really do have 100+ person diversity offices but it never was anything like that in Canada.
Where you saw it was stuff like the Police in Schools policy where TDSB banned it based on perceived stress to children of certain races, and part of the provincial Supervision of the TDSB is that they’re ordering the programme to start up again. But this isn’t really a cost thing, more of just a disagreement on policy based on which outcomes are more important.
I write as a former (retired) teacher with direct contact with people who are currently teaching in the public system (not separate). I'm not going to deeply analyze the board budget and make a forensic comparison. I'm making an inference based on what is happening, and what is not happening.
My point is that money can be poorly and foolishly spent. The woke agenda is a distraction to draw attention away from other, more costly and pressing issues. The result is that other urgent needs are going by the wayside, and that they are being downgraded in practice, and in the appearance of what matters. Sufficient spending on essential supports is being replaced by less expensive attempts at feeling good about ourselves.
It's more about the optics and the sense of institutional capture. It's me asking the question, "why is important educational stuff no longer the main thing? Why is this big new shiny object called Diversity all that matters?" It's the fact that all of a sudden the diversity and equity agenda becomes the big story, and all the language, press releases, news coverage, and talking points are about "wow we are doing such a great job at growing and being diverse and representing..."
One anecdote: when the Director held a special "get to know our staff" event that was clearly just for underserved and visible minority-representing teachers, there was definitely money being spent on pumping up and supporting one group of staff over another.
Well, to the author's point, the classroom teachers see what's going on, and they for the most part are feeling ignored and that the leadership is not focusing on the right priorities.
The institutional ideological capture in education in the provinces I've taught in is very real and ongoing. I see no contrary evidence. Quite the opposite. The result that matters most about this capture is all about yet another generation of Canadians who then frame seeing and understanding the world this way - a binary falsehood about power hierarchy and the importance of some group-based identity within it - and keeping the divisive identity ideology thriving in everything these students then go on to do... including in education!
Now my prediction is that Matt is going to insist yet again that because his spouse as teacher remains oblivious to this core change in what education is (away from the training of the mind to think in different ways and towards ideological conformity), this means 'woke' is somehow past peak and is losing cultural dominance because of a few of its most public aspects (like DEI statements) is in retreat. This couldn't be more wrong; wokism throughout education is doubling down - especially in teacher training programs and Colleges - and has entire generations believing straight up lies and false narratives not just about the world but especially about the country of Canada and its history. These students as parents then go on to indoctrinate their own children even if oblivious to the taught framing. Just because one doesn't see or removes the surface rot doesn't mean it gone from the core. Education today is rotten to this core.
It's not really a funding issue. Woke in public education manifests itself (aside from the grooming and plain stupidity of it all) in things like zero academic or behaviour standards for certain groups, which harms those kids without directly costing money.
“What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas”. Unfortunately what happens in Canadian academe does not stay there but metastasizes to the rest of Canadian society. Listen to Pravda North (CBC for you postwar-born youngsters) for their constant broadcast of victim of the day pity parties that are only interrupted by wildfire reports and “we are not American” oaths of Canadianhood.
The parent poster (Glen) said it’s sucking up funding:
“Money is being poorly and foolishly spent, and it is starving more essential aspects of education. I can understand why our Ontario ministry of education wants to do away with school boards entirely: all that diversity of opinion gets hopelessly messy, and expensive!“
"Woke" will not end until it is seen as self-evidently abhorrent to base any kind of hiring, promotion, funding, or favour based on race, gender, identity, or any other characteristic.
Everything Chris says here is right on. I would put it even more strongly. It's not just that academics tend to vote left. That, in itself, would be fine, understandable, and arguably productive, given the human emphasis in the social sciences and humanities. Left-leaning or at least more socially liberal movements have tended to bring about social improvements that more conservative movements have tended to resist; e.g., women's suffrage; employment standards legislation. The problem is not that academics tend to lean left, just as executives tend to lean right -- it's that in the last 30 or so years the academic world in the social sciences and humanities has been dominated increasingly by hard core, ideological, ultra-Marxists who see their role primarily as contributing to radical left social movements via indoctrination. The scholarship of this era has become increasingly pedantic and unscientific, with evidence, when it is used, harnessed to serve hard left ideological positions. And then there's the way courses are taught. I've seen things; I could say things -- I taught at one of Canada's more radical universities for 25 years.
I want to say very clearly that a great deal of very excellent and vital scholarship continues in the social sciences and humanities. I will also add that intellectual and even ideological fetishes are not a new thing in the academic world, on both left and right. But there is an increasingly pervasive anti-intellectualism in contemporary scholarship and teaching that puts knowledge and understanding in peril. And highly politicized performances of 'reining in' leftist excess are equally anti-intellectual, and at least as harmful to knowledge, understanding, and democracy more broadly.
How can this be fixed? Not by defunding universities or programs, or putting scholarship under government control (as in China's approach and now, apparently, the US too) -- but, as Chris puts it here, by broadening funding oversight and improving peer review. We need more and better scholarship, not less; more willingness to argue out difficult questions, not less. Philosopher of Science Karl Popper has a brilliant closing essay in vol 1 of The Open Society and its Enemies, arguing, in a typically vigorous defence of liberal democracy, that knowledge, understanding and freedom are inextricably tied to openness and rigour in research.
But when respect for what's independently true - like inconvenient facts - no longer matters but holding and promoting the correct narrative does (see the EBM fiasco at McMaster's University for the latest example), independent evidence plays no role. Garbage in, garbage out.
I interpret woke as massive overvaluation of identity, as in factors such as gender, sexuality and race determining outcomes much more so in theory than in reality. It is not surprising that government institutions in general, and those focused on education in particular, are more susceptible to the simplicity of woke ideology as they are by default more focused on the theoretical.
I'm fortunate to be a Gen X'r who attended university at the nadir of identity. I took a PoliSci course at U of A on Contemporary Moral Issues. It covered topics such as abortion, gay rights and capital punishment from the perspective of right or wrong being irrelevant. The outcome was for students to build coherent arguments both in support and against these issues. The exams were to pick a topic out of hat, such as "abortion should be criminalized except when the mother's health is danger", write an easy, present and rebutt the class. In today's academic environment, the prof would have been fired.
You can't construct an argument without premises. Right/wrong will necessarily need to be replaced by some other objectively arbitrary premise. I'd be interested in hearing more about that exercise.
So, the premise(s) argued from in providing the new coherent argument simply becomes the new "right/wrong", and like it, will always be a nuanced personal decision based on available information, but subject to societal censure if found wanting.
Except for the societal consensus. It was a different time at one of Canada's least left leaning schools and I'm from a generation that valued authenticity over conforming with expectations.
Find a different word. "Woke" has been so overused and abused as a catch-all pejorative that each time it's invoked it just makes the writer sound like a lazy ass hat.
The definition of "Woke" has not changed. The connotation has. It is the refuge of the unthinking, the natural followers who somehow believe they are leading.
I believe "omni-cause" is a less pejorative, and more inclusive, descriptor.
I disagree. It started as cool slang to define the enlightened as a generation, morphing into a pejorative as discourse was suppressed, execution and results failed.
Universities are skewed left because the humanities departments were thoroughly colonized by the left wing back during the hiring binge of the '60s. They brought all of the various pathologies of that movement with them, including the same attitudes towards conformity and thought crimes that were expressed in other leftist movements like China's Cultural Revolution. That left wing approach doesn't find a natural home in the sciences, medicine, or engineering (certainly not business), but the people who work in those fields also don't tend to spend a lot of time thinking about politics - their interests lie elsewhere. Instead, they just sublimate the attitudes emanating from the humanities on campus. If they're inclined towards left wing notions of central planning, it's because they're scientists and engineers and they naively assume their methodology can solve complex social and economic problems.
I'm not surprised "woke" politics remain intense on campus: universities were the source of this ideology, and campus governance structures and processes are uniquely adapted to continuing policies like "cancellation" that have lost their effectiveness in the real world. Moreover, there's a constant influx of young people who lack the experience and knowledge to push back on the ideas that a "woke" academic staff introduce to them. The feedback loop that's eventually going to break the hold of left wing politics on campus is brutal and already in progress: humanities departments are suffering declining enrollment and declining funding. A big factor is that "woke" politics are not producing grads who are attractive to the job market. I don't want to see the humanities go extinct, but that's what happens when things are maladapted to their environment.
It's not just academia. Entire industries are still woke AF. In my industry (architecture and design) there is a constant barrage of woke platitudes and DEI consultants are treated like god-saviors.
If there are non-woke people, they are being very quiet (they do in fact exist, but the ones I know keep a low profile).
As for academia, it was already woke 20 years ago. When I came here to study, coming for socialist France, I could already see how my beloved alma mater (OCAD) was already ideologically captured by marxists and commies of all stripes.
All the useless but mandatory liberal studies courses were just a regurgitation of all the failed french philosophers that leftists love so much (Baudrillard, Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida).
"The End of Woke", by Andrew Doyle, is a great summary of the rise of woke and its current decline. More importantly, it argues against authoritarianism of all kind. But woke isn't dead, it has just gone to ground.
Our universities must get back to their core mission. The financial crisis they are now facing is going to force decisions on where and who to cut. Laurentien University is a good example where they went broke, cancelled 60 programs and 200 job cuts. Perhaps financial reality will resolve things. Can we start exposing kids to the skilled trades where they can become a journeyman in four years, command a damned good wage, marketable skills, and no student debt hanging over their heads.
I disclaim: in the way way back time when I was a first-year university student, I had concluded back then that the program I was in, and the institution itself, were both a colossal waste of my time and money. I simply concluded that I was not yielding anything meaningful or useful from my university experience; which informed my decision to abruptly drop-out and return to the sanity of the workforce I had originally removed myself from in the first place. This was decades before woke-ism was a concept, let alone a mennacing cultural thing that won’t go away. I can only imagine how much worse such institutions have become under the ultra-left governance and faculties plaguing universities these days.
I’ve also long said (including in various comments on the The Line) that diversity advocates are seized by the only form of diversity they know — the kind of diversity that only runs skin deep. They want diversity of optics but conformity of views. Any deviation from this leads a perceived “offender” to be ruthlessly scorned, accosted, and punished. Universities are ground-zero for this caliber of thought and behaviour. It needs to stop, but it won’t come from within, otherwise it would’ve ended long ago. Much like other types of institutional changes, those are typically driven by outside forces by necessity; forces that speak truth to power and expose the systemic harms of what these institutional cultures are breeding. Universities cannot and should not be trusted to identify and expel its own institutional-cultural rot. For meaningful change to happen, faculty (while they may be wisely reluctant to stick their necks out) should be leading the chorus of those speaking out about this worsening problem. Prospective students should also really consider what they are getting themselves into when considering what (if any) university applications they wish to submit. Parents would be wise to also weigh-in with their kids to nudge them into other career and life options rather than what the public school system insists is the only pathway to prosperity (ie. a university education). More importantly, governments need to step-in and set out funding compliance standards for these university institutions to eliminate woke-ism AND withhold that funding from the worst offenders who fail or refuse to do so.
As for me, let’s just say that after I quit university decades ago, I never once looked back with regret. Quitting university was among the best decisions I ever made in life, and many more good decisions followed. :)
I completely agree with this. Having just finished a bachelors degree in the spring, I saw first hand how much bias exists. There are things you don’t write about in papers for fear of getting a poor mark no matter how well researched it is, and there are opinions you simply don’t share. And I don’t have extreme viewpoints. I’m center right - not far right. I know that the far right friends who once considered me an ally will eventually call me a crazy leftist because I’m a moderate who pushes back on extremes and will present an alternate viewpoint when they provide misinformation that is skewed on social media.
But so far as university goes? I felt like my beliefs stuck out like a sore thumb. I’ll also add that the industries I interacted with during my degree were still fairly strongly biased in the places where they intersected with university students. Maybe not the rest of the parts of the industry - I can’t speak for that, but certainly at the intersection point, DEI wasn’t a buzz word but a deeply ingrained belief even at the cost of active discrimination against white heterosexual men which the white men talking about DEI somehow never appreciated the irony of their push for discrimination that would have excluded them if done thirty years ago.
However, hopefully things shift at universities as time passes. Eventually their bubbles won’t be able to self sustain and diversity in views will reemerge.
I have a gap of 30 years between my BA and my MA and did a two-year college program in between the two. I don't remember my BA professors being partisan at all, and challenging ideas was the norm then. In my two-year college program (in which many students were of a similar age), the leaning was more left, both among students and instructors. In my MA, I didn't notice too much partisanship among the professors, but I encountered wokeness big time, especially with one student, who would try to take control of the class and accuse everyone of white privilege (she was also white) and say things like, "Sure, play the my-people-are-oppressed-too card!"). After that time, my daughter was in university and noticed overt antisemitism that was not called out by the prof and also noticed that anything First Nations could not be critiqued in any meaningful way. It was basically agree with it or say nothing at all. I'd probably encourage my kid to go into a trade now haha.
I have been trying to encourage one of my kids to go into a trade. Lol. One is in university right now and often tells me how woke the university is. I do hope this changes in the coming years.
This article seeks to equate political belief with inalienable traits such as race and sex but then doesn’t interrogate that idea.
What might it say that the better educated you are the more likely you are to be progressive? Could it be that so called progressive values are rational beliefs and are more prevalent among the educated because they are correct?
I love this argument that the left makes. They think they are better than others and more tolerant because of their level of education. But ironically, their whole personality and worldview is based on them looking down on others.
The majority of educated people do not work in academia, the topic of this article. The old adage, those who can, do, those who can't, teach,has more than a modicum of truth.
DEI initiatives, outside of educational institutions, are in decline because the real world prefers merit, as measured by performance, over social engineering.
I was a progressive when I was young and even, horrors, voted NDP one time. Not for long as my empathy ran out when even though I was left leaning, I wasn't left leaning enough. So I read some books, I leaned some things that encouraged my now centrist views. You might consider that everyone, particularly those in power, need to feel-good about themselves and what they are doing. They are humans after all and subject to the same needs as those less educated. When in an echo chamber that includes the media this is a particularly problematic position of righteousness.
I refer you to the Midwit Meme, which describes my political journey.
I was pretty right-wing in high school, based on intuition but not much knowledge or thought. Then I became a leftist in university, swayed by idealistic theories that sound so good, and are explained by people who use lots of big words and seem so bright. Then I did more degrees and acquired a decade or two of professional experience and realized that those theories are all bullshit and the world doesn't really work like that, and that we are surrounded by corruption and lies and waste plastered over by sweet sounding words.
Those who think education and more importantly knowledge makes you more progressive, just don't have enough yet.
"They are filtering evidence and arguments through unexamined ideological frames"
from the author, added to,
"we started having equality of outcome as the goal that supersedes all other goals, and making certain lines of argument off-limits under pain of social/professional ostracism."
from G Olynyk below.
I think this is the toxic combo that has so wrecked our universities. A judge, and graduate of UVIC, I spoke with last year said he won't hire lawyers from UVIC or UBC because they teach what they wish the law to be, not what the law is.
An echo chamber of people who all think the same suppressing unaligned ideas, determined to make the world "fair for everyone", without regard to history or human nature. Sounds like hell.
Where does one go to discuss diverse dangerous ideas, to explore, test, try or reject with other smart people if you're not a left winger?
I also think that Jenn and Matt's view that woke is dead are optimistic and myopic.
We need to differentiate aspects of the "woke" phenomena. It's true that the peak of cancel culture has come and gone... the moderate mainstream found its voice/courage, and you can say things (in public, in newspapers, etc.) that run against the woke vanguard and not necessarily be hounded out of a job. But, as the author notes, many large institutions, especially public sector, remain captured by woke-era DEI ethos and policy, especially around hiring, funding, etc. And, in Toronto at least, woke zealots still seem able to secure outlandish "wins" such as the renaming of major public spaces (Yonge-Dundas square") and streets.
Yes, that nuanced comment is very helpful. I wonder about the author's point regarding the renaming of Dundas Street, was he for or against? Was it that the Dundas name was wrongly being tarred and feathered?
The travesty of hating Dundas pales in comparison to the silliness of picking an African name. I could have swallowed a First Nations name (with English spelling), like "Toronto" or "Mississauga", but African? Why not Mongolian?
The stupidity of it all astounds me. As done the placing of first people's tribes names on streets and buildings where it is widely knows that they did not have a written language and the words have no meaning in English or French and are impossible to pronounce. The cost of doing this....well it is in the name of social justice and reconciliation. /s
Boy oh boy CF. That’s a pretty dumb comment if you really think about. I won’t speculate on what motivates you to post such nasty foolishness, but I will make two observations: The name we gave our country is widely believed to have a First Nations origin. It may not have been written down at the time, but it seems to have stuck, and I’m quite fond of it. The other thing is that most of us learn how to pronounce almost any name with sufficient practice. I’m guessing even you know how to pronounce the name of the province to the right of Alberta.
really....well dumb or not, it is my opinion as you have expressed yours. Nasty or not...you sound like a real gem.
Worse, the new name actually glorifies slave traders now - as opposed to the old name, which was named for an abolitionist who was deemed to have moved too slow.
It ends up being exactly the opposite of what the woke activists were aiming for.
Or how about them changing Lower Coxwell to Emdaabiimok Ave? Or the new portlands development with names like Biidaasige Park?
Really? Is that what keeps you up at night? I hope you didn’t lose too much sleep when they renamed part of Peter Street to Blue Jays Way.
Maybe you can tell me why it’s so vexing for the City to use names taken from the language of the people who lived and worked on the land for centuries before the rest of us showed up. If you did a quick Google, you’d learn that Embaadiimok means "where the road goes to the water." Sounds like a culturally and historically appropriate name to me.
And before you mutter into your beer about yet another woke lefty, I just want to note that I am appalled at what they’re doing to the memory of Sir John A. *That’s* historical ignorance for you.
See, the "vexing" thing about it is that Embaadiimok already had a name - "Lower Coxwell". And there was nothing wrong with "Lower Coxwell"; it carried our shared history and culture as do the names of all public spaces (no different than statues and monuments). It's the culture of those who actually built the roads, and the city, and the country, etc.
By what right did a bunch of self-anointed moral vanguards go about changing the name on a fad - as though our collective inheritance was a blank canvass for their moral visions? Answer me that?
It's only because of Trump's success that we are able to push back against woke in Canada. Sure, there is a backlash, but the overwhelming media uniformity has been broken. It is no longer possible to keep Canadians from hearing dissenting opinions on DEI, gender ideology, or immigration.
Trump is liberating Canadians by attacking woke in the US and I, for one, am glad of it
Of course, Pierre Poilievre was afraid to catch the wave and is only now, a day late and a dollar short, taking about cancelling the TFW program.
he's at least stating the case. More that the Liberals and Carney have.
Nonsense. "Woke" peaked in the US *in Trump's first term*. His approach created a thermostatic response on the left that *increased* the intensity of "woke". It wasn't until Trump left office that the peak passed. Anything Trump has done since then has been like pushing on an open door.
Laughably false. The rest of the world had started moving past peak woke before and despite Trump. If anything Trump is a threat to the world moving past woke ideas, as he fires various senior leaders only because of their skin color.
Interesting logic.
WWII ended the Great Depression by stimulating the economy through investments in armaments and defence.
Who shall we thank for that, lol?
Looking back at the last thirty years, one can see how we got here. In rich countries we’ve basically conquered scarcity, our technology gives us seven flavours of Doritos and all-night food delivery and overseas air-travel vacations and comfortable houses. But not everyone has equal access to this abundance — some people don’t even have homes, and reasonable academics can ask why.
Likewise, reasonable academics can look at the situation where top execs are 80% men and ask: why? Or the incarceration rates in Canada being 20x higher for Indigenous people: why?
I think where we ran into the real closing of the academic mind is when instead of studying these things with the usual academic debate and willingness to consider controversial ideas, we started having equality of outcome as the goal that supersedes all other goals, and making certain lines of argument off-limits under pain of social/professional ostracism.
An example: 13 years ago, in 2012, Anne-Louise Slaughter (Hilary Clinton’s chief of staff) could publish the feature article in The Atlantic called “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” that fearlessly explored issues around women’s willingness to basically not be there for their kids like men do to get those top-execs jobs. Having been in high-performance professional services cultures in my own career where we hired 55% women and they generally performed equal or better in the lower ranks, this was obvious to me — the “pipeline” broke when they had kids and weren’t willing to have those kids raised by a nanny or a stay-at-home husband. Men are much more fine with this.
In retrospect, though, 2012 was the last year that that article could have been published. After that, it couldn’t be different biologically-driven preferences, it had to be 100% social (that the patriarchy MADE women have those different preferences), or else that the very idea of top execs is unjust in the first place.
Academia lost its mind from 2012-2022 and only is starting to regain it now as the academy has lost credibility with average people.
The academy is lost. Defunding is the solution.
If you seriously believe that, you’re just as much of a radical as the people who believe that we need to abolish police or whatever because incremental change can never succeed and we need to burn and rebuild.
It never works. Burning down is easy, but what comes back is usually really bad to start. Building good instititions takes centuries.
Our academy still has a lot of good in it. We should fix it, not try to destroy it. Like seriously, you think we should shut down the humanities schools of McGill and U of T, and that’s going to lead to a better outcome for Canada vs a deliberate programme of fixing the culture through grant programme changes and fostering real debate about these important issues?
Nature abhors a vacuum. The need for education would be fulfilled by something else.
There are already institutions that exist to fulfill that need. Defunding academia would just serve to cull the corrupt and useless ones.
The competent institutions would find ways to fund themselves without government funding and probably do so at a fraction of the cost.
The marxists hate you and want you dead. It's a fight for survival. Cut their funding or suffer the consequences of being tolerant of their anti-human agenda.
We have far too many universities and a cull would allow for redistribution of funds. The arts programs are what keep the lights on, regardless of any other value.
So yes, take the technical colleges that "evolved" into universities and devolve them.
As an aside, do the universities want to be fixed?
They are oblivious.
At the very least, push through changes like RFK is doing at CDC and HHS. You can't fix the universities without mass firings.
Woke is still in "full swing" in our school board, working its way into hiring policies, school programming, and whatnot. I would like to see it fade into oblivion! Money is being poorly and foolishly spent, and it is starving more essential aspects of education. I can understand why our Ontario ministry of education wants to do away with school boards entirely: all that diversity of opinion gets hopelessly messy, and expensive!
The real tragedy is that the social justice issues which are real and overwhelming have become overshadowed by identity politics. Special education supports and strategies remain underfunded. Gender politics aside, the discussion about being post-woke will not make these children disappear, nor will it lessen the urgent need for more qualified support staff and program places for those kids.
Is it actually sucking up funding? I’ve never seen good numbers on this. I hear this as a (partial) explanation for why the provincial government put the Toronto District School Board under provincial supervision, but never with anybody showing any real numbers (“TDSB hired 100 diversity consultants for a cost of $16M” or whatever).
My personal view is that some US universities really do have 100+ person diversity offices but it never was anything like that in Canada.
Where you saw it was stuff like the Police in Schools policy where TDSB banned it based on perceived stress to children of certain races, and part of the provincial Supervision of the TDSB is that they’re ordering the programme to start up again. But this isn’t really a cost thing, more of just a disagreement on policy based on which outcomes are more important.
I write as a former (retired) teacher with direct contact with people who are currently teaching in the public system (not separate). I'm not going to deeply analyze the board budget and make a forensic comparison. I'm making an inference based on what is happening, and what is not happening.
My point is that money can be poorly and foolishly spent. The woke agenda is a distraction to draw attention away from other, more costly and pressing issues. The result is that other urgent needs are going by the wayside, and that they are being downgraded in practice, and in the appearance of what matters. Sufficient spending on essential supports is being replaced by less expensive attempts at feeling good about ourselves.
It's more about the optics and the sense of institutional capture. It's me asking the question, "why is important educational stuff no longer the main thing? Why is this big new shiny object called Diversity all that matters?" It's the fact that all of a sudden the diversity and equity agenda becomes the big story, and all the language, press releases, news coverage, and talking points are about "wow we are doing such a great job at growing and being diverse and representing..."
One anecdote: when the Director held a special "get to know our staff" event that was clearly just for underserved and visible minority-representing teachers, there was definitely money being spent on pumping up and supporting one group of staff over another.
Well, to the author's point, the classroom teachers see what's going on, and they for the most part are feeling ignored and that the leadership is not focusing on the right priorities.
The institutional ideological capture in education in the provinces I've taught in is very real and ongoing. I see no contrary evidence. Quite the opposite. The result that matters most about this capture is all about yet another generation of Canadians who then frame seeing and understanding the world this way - a binary falsehood about power hierarchy and the importance of some group-based identity within it - and keeping the divisive identity ideology thriving in everything these students then go on to do... including in education!
Now my prediction is that Matt is going to insist yet again that because his spouse as teacher remains oblivious to this core change in what education is (away from the training of the mind to think in different ways and towards ideological conformity), this means 'woke' is somehow past peak and is losing cultural dominance because of a few of its most public aspects (like DEI statements) is in retreat. This couldn't be more wrong; wokism throughout education is doubling down - especially in teacher training programs and Colleges - and has entire generations believing straight up lies and false narratives not just about the world but especially about the country of Canada and its history. These students as parents then go on to indoctrinate their own children even if oblivious to the taught framing. Just because one doesn't see or removes the surface rot doesn't mean it gone from the core. Education today is rotten to this core.
It's not really a funding issue. Woke in public education manifests itself (aside from the grooming and plain stupidity of it all) in things like zero academic or behaviour standards for certain groups, which harms those kids without directly costing money.
“What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas”. Unfortunately what happens in Canadian academe does not stay there but metastasizes to the rest of Canadian society. Listen to Pravda North (CBC for you postwar-born youngsters) for their constant broadcast of victim of the day pity parties that are only interrupted by wildfire reports and “we are not American” oaths of Canadianhood.
The parent poster (Glen) said it’s sucking up funding:
“Money is being poorly and foolishly spent, and it is starving more essential aspects of education. I can understand why our Ontario ministry of education wants to do away with school boards entirely: all that diversity of opinion gets hopelessly messy, and expensive!“
That’s what I’m asking for numbers around.
Hard to quantify, but must come at a cost, so ask the provost. Start here:
https://www.ucalgary.ca/equity-diversity-inclusion/team
"Woke" will not end until it is seen as self-evidently abhorrent to base any kind of hiring, promotion, funding, or favour based on race, gender, identity, or any other characteristic.
Everything Chris says here is right on. I would put it even more strongly. It's not just that academics tend to vote left. That, in itself, would be fine, understandable, and arguably productive, given the human emphasis in the social sciences and humanities. Left-leaning or at least more socially liberal movements have tended to bring about social improvements that more conservative movements have tended to resist; e.g., women's suffrage; employment standards legislation. The problem is not that academics tend to lean left, just as executives tend to lean right -- it's that in the last 30 or so years the academic world in the social sciences and humanities has been dominated increasingly by hard core, ideological, ultra-Marxists who see their role primarily as contributing to radical left social movements via indoctrination. The scholarship of this era has become increasingly pedantic and unscientific, with evidence, when it is used, harnessed to serve hard left ideological positions. And then there's the way courses are taught. I've seen things; I could say things -- I taught at one of Canada's more radical universities for 25 years.
I want to say very clearly that a great deal of very excellent and vital scholarship continues in the social sciences and humanities. I will also add that intellectual and even ideological fetishes are not a new thing in the academic world, on both left and right. But there is an increasingly pervasive anti-intellectualism in contemporary scholarship and teaching that puts knowledge and understanding in peril. And highly politicized performances of 'reining in' leftist excess are equally anti-intellectual, and at least as harmful to knowledge, understanding, and democracy more broadly.
How can this be fixed? Not by defunding universities or programs, or putting scholarship under government control (as in China's approach and now, apparently, the US too) -- but, as Chris puts it here, by broadening funding oversight and improving peer review. We need more and better scholarship, not less; more willingness to argue out difficult questions, not less. Philosopher of Science Karl Popper has a brilliant closing essay in vol 1 of The Open Society and its Enemies, arguing, in a typically vigorous defence of liberal democracy, that knowledge, understanding and freedom are inextricably tied to openness and rigour in research.
But when respect for what's independently true - like inconvenient facts - no longer matters but holding and promoting the correct narrative does (see the EBM fiasco at McMaster's University for the latest example), independent evidence plays no role. Garbage in, garbage out.
I interpret woke as massive overvaluation of identity, as in factors such as gender, sexuality and race determining outcomes much more so in theory than in reality. It is not surprising that government institutions in general, and those focused on education in particular, are more susceptible to the simplicity of woke ideology as they are by default more focused on the theoretical.
I'm fortunate to be a Gen X'r who attended university at the nadir of identity. I took a PoliSci course at U of A on Contemporary Moral Issues. It covered topics such as abortion, gay rights and capital punishment from the perspective of right or wrong being irrelevant. The outcome was for students to build coherent arguments both in support and against these issues. The exams were to pick a topic out of hat, such as "abortion should be criminalized except when the mother's health is danger", write an easy, present and rebutt the class. In today's academic environment, the prof would have been fired.
"... right or wrong being irrelevant ..."
You can't construct an argument without premises. Right/wrong will necessarily need to be replaced by some other objectively arbitrary premise. I'd be interested in hearing more about that exercise.
The premise was that right/wrong is a nuanced personal decision based on available information
So, the premise(s) argued from in providing the new coherent argument simply becomes the new "right/wrong", and like it, will always be a nuanced personal decision based on available information, but subject to societal censure if found wanting.
Except for the societal consensus. It was a different time at one of Canada's least left leaning schools and I'm from a generation that valued authenticity over conforming with expectations.
Find a different word. "Woke" has been so overused and abused as a catch-all pejorative that each time it's invoked it just makes the writer sound like a lazy ass hat.
No. Stay with "Woke". It describes intellectual and moral trash.
The definition of "Woke" has not changed. The connotation has. It is the refuge of the unthinking, the natural followers who somehow believe they are leading.
I believe "omni-cause" is a less pejorative, and more inclusive, descriptor.
I disagree. It started as cool slang to define the enlightened as a generation, morphing into a pejorative as discourse was suppressed, execution and results failed.
It's working well as short-hand for the above.
Then supply one.
Thank you for a thoughtful article.
Universities are skewed left because the humanities departments were thoroughly colonized by the left wing back during the hiring binge of the '60s. They brought all of the various pathologies of that movement with them, including the same attitudes towards conformity and thought crimes that were expressed in other leftist movements like China's Cultural Revolution. That left wing approach doesn't find a natural home in the sciences, medicine, or engineering (certainly not business), but the people who work in those fields also don't tend to spend a lot of time thinking about politics - their interests lie elsewhere. Instead, they just sublimate the attitudes emanating from the humanities on campus. If they're inclined towards left wing notions of central planning, it's because they're scientists and engineers and they naively assume their methodology can solve complex social and economic problems.
I'm not surprised "woke" politics remain intense on campus: universities were the source of this ideology, and campus governance structures and processes are uniquely adapted to continuing policies like "cancellation" that have lost their effectiveness in the real world. Moreover, there's a constant influx of young people who lack the experience and knowledge to push back on the ideas that a "woke" academic staff introduce to them. The feedback loop that's eventually going to break the hold of left wing politics on campus is brutal and already in progress: humanities departments are suffering declining enrollment and declining funding. A big factor is that "woke" politics are not producing grads who are attractive to the job market. I don't want to see the humanities go extinct, but that's what happens when things are maladapted to their environment.
It's not just academia. Entire industries are still woke AF. In my industry (architecture and design) there is a constant barrage of woke platitudes and DEI consultants are treated like god-saviors.
If there are non-woke people, they are being very quiet (they do in fact exist, but the ones I know keep a low profile).
As for academia, it was already woke 20 years ago. When I came here to study, coming for socialist France, I could already see how my beloved alma mater (OCAD) was already ideologically captured by marxists and commies of all stripes.
All the useless but mandatory liberal studies courses were just a regurgitation of all the failed french philosophers that leftists love so much (Baudrillard, Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida).
"The End of Woke", by Andrew Doyle, is a great summary of the rise of woke and its current decline. More importantly, it argues against authoritarianism of all kind. But woke isn't dead, it has just gone to ground.
The academy is lousy with these people (https://www.thetimes.com/comment/columnists/article/academics-are-to-blame-for-the-woke-wreckage-at-universities-27ht2xdjc). The interference in science is particularly troubling and has serious consequences, more so than renaming of streets (https://quillette.com/2025/09/03/an-uproar-over-facts-mcmaster-gender-trans-health/).
Ultimately we stop believing academic "experts" because they have been coerced into lying.
Our universities must get back to their core mission. The financial crisis they are now facing is going to force decisions on where and who to cut. Laurentien University is a good example where they went broke, cancelled 60 programs and 200 job cuts. Perhaps financial reality will resolve things. Can we start exposing kids to the skilled trades where they can become a journeyman in four years, command a damned good wage, marketable skills, and no student debt hanging over their heads.
I disclaim: in the way way back time when I was a first-year university student, I had concluded back then that the program I was in, and the institution itself, were both a colossal waste of my time and money. I simply concluded that I was not yielding anything meaningful or useful from my university experience; which informed my decision to abruptly drop-out and return to the sanity of the workforce I had originally removed myself from in the first place. This was decades before woke-ism was a concept, let alone a mennacing cultural thing that won’t go away. I can only imagine how much worse such institutions have become under the ultra-left governance and faculties plaguing universities these days.
I’ve also long said (including in various comments on the The Line) that diversity advocates are seized by the only form of diversity they know — the kind of diversity that only runs skin deep. They want diversity of optics but conformity of views. Any deviation from this leads a perceived “offender” to be ruthlessly scorned, accosted, and punished. Universities are ground-zero for this caliber of thought and behaviour. It needs to stop, but it won’t come from within, otherwise it would’ve ended long ago. Much like other types of institutional changes, those are typically driven by outside forces by necessity; forces that speak truth to power and expose the systemic harms of what these institutional cultures are breeding. Universities cannot and should not be trusted to identify and expel its own institutional-cultural rot. For meaningful change to happen, faculty (while they may be wisely reluctant to stick their necks out) should be leading the chorus of those speaking out about this worsening problem. Prospective students should also really consider what they are getting themselves into when considering what (if any) university applications they wish to submit. Parents would be wise to also weigh-in with their kids to nudge them into other career and life options rather than what the public school system insists is the only pathway to prosperity (ie. a university education). More importantly, governments need to step-in and set out funding compliance standards for these university institutions to eliminate woke-ism AND withhold that funding from the worst offenders who fail or refuse to do so.
As for me, let’s just say that after I quit university decades ago, I never once looked back with regret. Quitting university was among the best decisions I ever made in life, and many more good decisions followed. :)
I completely agree with this. Having just finished a bachelors degree in the spring, I saw first hand how much bias exists. There are things you don’t write about in papers for fear of getting a poor mark no matter how well researched it is, and there are opinions you simply don’t share. And I don’t have extreme viewpoints. I’m center right - not far right. I know that the far right friends who once considered me an ally will eventually call me a crazy leftist because I’m a moderate who pushes back on extremes and will present an alternate viewpoint when they provide misinformation that is skewed on social media.
But so far as university goes? I felt like my beliefs stuck out like a sore thumb. I’ll also add that the industries I interacted with during my degree were still fairly strongly biased in the places where they intersected with university students. Maybe not the rest of the parts of the industry - I can’t speak for that, but certainly at the intersection point, DEI wasn’t a buzz word but a deeply ingrained belief even at the cost of active discrimination against white heterosexual men which the white men talking about DEI somehow never appreciated the irony of their push for discrimination that would have excluded them if done thirty years ago.
However, hopefully things shift at universities as time passes. Eventually their bubbles won’t be able to self sustain and diversity in views will reemerge.
I have a gap of 30 years between my BA and my MA and did a two-year college program in between the two. I don't remember my BA professors being partisan at all, and challenging ideas was the norm then. In my two-year college program (in which many students were of a similar age), the leaning was more left, both among students and instructors. In my MA, I didn't notice too much partisanship among the professors, but I encountered wokeness big time, especially with one student, who would try to take control of the class and accuse everyone of white privilege (she was also white) and say things like, "Sure, play the my-people-are-oppressed-too card!"). After that time, my daughter was in university and noticed overt antisemitism that was not called out by the prof and also noticed that anything First Nations could not be critiqued in any meaningful way. It was basically agree with it or say nothing at all. I'd probably encourage my kid to go into a trade now haha.
I have been trying to encourage one of my kids to go into a trade. Lol. One is in university right now and often tells me how woke the university is. I do hope this changes in the coming years.
This article seeks to equate political belief with inalienable traits such as race and sex but then doesn’t interrogate that idea.
What might it say that the better educated you are the more likely you are to be progressive? Could it be that so called progressive values are rational beliefs and are more prevalent among the educated because they are correct?
I love this argument that the left makes. They think they are better than others and more tolerant because of their level of education. But ironically, their whole personality and worldview is based on them looking down on others.
Sophistry.
The majority of educated people do not work in academia, the topic of this article. The old adage, those who can, do, those who can't, teach,has more than a modicum of truth.
DEI initiatives, outside of educational institutions, are in decline because the real world prefers merit, as measured by performance, over social engineering.
"What is a circular argument for 100 please, Alex?"
I was a progressive when I was young and even, horrors, voted NDP one time. Not for long as my empathy ran out when even though I was left leaning, I wasn't left leaning enough. So I read some books, I leaned some things that encouraged my now centrist views. You might consider that everyone, particularly those in power, need to feel-good about themselves and what they are doing. They are humans after all and subject to the same needs as those less educated. When in an echo chamber that includes the media this is a particularly problematic position of righteousness.
I refer you to the Midwit Meme, which describes my political journey.
I was pretty right-wing in high school, based on intuition but not much knowledge or thought. Then I became a leftist in university, swayed by idealistic theories that sound so good, and are explained by people who use lots of big words and seem so bright. Then I did more degrees and acquired a decade or two of professional experience and realized that those theories are all bullshit and the world doesn't really work like that, and that we are surrounded by corruption and lies and waste plastered over by sweet sounding words.
Those who think education and more importantly knowledge makes you more progressive, just don't have enough yet.
"They are filtering evidence and arguments through unexamined ideological frames"
from the author, added to,
"we started having equality of outcome as the goal that supersedes all other goals, and making certain lines of argument off-limits under pain of social/professional ostracism."
from G Olynyk below.
I think this is the toxic combo that has so wrecked our universities. A judge, and graduate of UVIC, I spoke with last year said he won't hire lawyers from UVIC or UBC because they teach what they wish the law to be, not what the law is.
An echo chamber of people who all think the same suppressing unaligned ideas, determined to make the world "fair for everyone", without regard to history or human nature. Sounds like hell.
Where does one go to discuss diverse dangerous ideas, to explore, test, try or reject with other smart people if you're not a left winger?