Double Aspect

For all the talk of a vibe shift, of the Zeitgeist of the late 2010s and, especially, early ’20s ebbing away, there are places were wokeness seems to be going as strong as ever. The Faculty of Law of the University of Windsor, for instance, whose current round of hiring maintains the explicit ideological litmus tests that have become a habit of the more “progressive” Canadian law schools. The ad explains that

Windsor Law particularly welcomes applications from Indigenous candidates who research and teach Indigenous laws and/or Indigenous perspectives on core curricular common law courses, and from candidates who bring social justice and critical perspectives, including interdisciplinary, comparative approaches, intersectional, critical race, feminist and/or queer theory, to their research, teaching, and service.

And in case anyone still has any doubts about what the party line is, they are informed that the school is “dedicated to reviewing [its] governance through anti-racist, intersectional and decolonial lenses”. Those who would rather not work in a comprehensively ideological environment might as well take a pass.

I wrote about this stuff two years ago, and don’t have many new things to say. After all, Windsor featured prominently in that post too, and the language of their ads doesn’t change much, though this year they “particularly welcome” all the mad ideologues, instead of merely “welcom[ing]” them like they did on that occasion. So I’ll reproduce a chunk of that post here:

These ideological litmus tests are antithetical to the spirit of free inquiry and the pursuit of truth which define a research university. The point of a university is to expand and share human knowledge ― not to be the research arm of a political movement, no matter how righteous. We do not know in advance which way the data and the logic of our arguments will point; we might guess, of course, but we have to be open-minded about the possibility that our assumptions will be disproven. Maybe data and logic support “social justice”; but maybe they do not. If the latter possibility ― or the former ― is peremptorily foreclosed at the outset, then what is being done is no longer scholarship but advocacy falsely flying the scholarly flag.

This is troublesome enough when an individual does it, but, as I have argued in my contribution, over at the Verfassungsblog, to the ongoing debate about “scholarly activism” (or “scholactivism”), individual activists can contribute to academia ― provided that they are checked by people who disagree with them. But when entire institutions commit to ideological dogmas, this checking cannot take place. Indeed, attempting to fundmentally question the activist findings of a colleague becomes a form of sabotage to the institution’s mission. An institution that does research with a pre-determined valence is not a university at all but, at best, a think-tank. And when many, if not most, of a country’s law schools ― and let’s not kid ourselves; for every Windsor, Vic, and UofT who are explicit about their ideological requirements, there is another law school or three that simply isn’t transparent ― make the same ideological commitment, that country no longer has a legal academy. At best, it has a thriving industry of social justice think-tanks.

It is worth noting, too, that these are public universities we are talking about. A public university is not merely failing to discharge but actively abandoning its public mission if it decides to put itself into the service of a movement whose ideology some significant portion of the public rejects ― rightly or wrongly, this does not matter. It becomes a partisan actor, albeit one that has the privilege and the gall to be financed by its opponents as well as its supporters. When the opponents wise up to what is going on and decide to tie the purse strings, the university should not be surprised ― let alone accuse them of authoritarianism and other frightful things.

I can only add, now, that the last two years have seen a fair bit of wising up to what is going on. I do not approve of the spite-driven attempts at destroy universities or bring them to heel that is being carried out in the United States, and I have argued against “defunding” universities in Canada to punish them for ideological transgressions. But the longer this shameless capture of higher education by ideological partisans goes on, the harder such policies will be to resist.

The reactions to when I shared the Windsor ad on Twitter and Bluesky might be interesting too. Entirely predictable, too be sure — a fair bit of uptake on Twitter (by my low standards), and crickets on Bluesky. Two years ago, as I noted in that post, I got some (unconvincing) pushback on Twitter. The kinds of people who would defend the woke litmus tests in a academic hiring (often by pretending they did not exist since, for instance, “social justice” could just as well refer to a conservative or libertarian viewpoint) migrated to Bluesky in the meantime — but they seemingly aren’t interested in a debate there. Make of that what you will.