I write in haste to respond to John Tomasi’s rebuttal of Nathan Cofnas’s critique of the HxA. I’m afraid to say it, but Nathan’s piece struck a chord.

And I don’t think I am alone.

HxA has indeed become a leftist club – and seems unwilling to make the kind of political interventions and alliances necessary to change the culture of HE. If your left-liberal members are not willing to fight woke culture and expose it for what it is – a dangerous, totalitarian religion – then, to be honest, you are part of the problem.

This last week, I learned that:

• 1300 colleges in the US are using Maxient software to create a culture of spying and informing among students and faculty with the explicit aim of ‘regulating conduct.’ This system is gene therapy compared to the Stasi’s 18^th century naval surgery.

• A 16-year-old student in Ontario was arrested for denying gender fluidity

• Thousands of text changes have been made to the corpus of Roald Dahl to re-write literary history in a way that makes 1984 look like a Haines ‘How to…’ manual.

• An NHS trust in the UK, is abandoning any reference to ‘mothers.’

• An old and respected STEM journal has published an article recommending that the language of sex differences is expunged entirely from scientific research and discourse.

• A teacher in BC was sacked for repeating a statement of fact and quoting from the governments’ own Truth and Reconciliation Committee (to the effect that residential school kids died of TB)

• School boards across America are imposing curricula derived entirely from woke race/gender studies disciplines in universities. Recent examples include a parent shut down for quoting from a schoolbook designed to teach children how to use Photoshop to conceal their identity when posting explicit child-pornographic selfies online.

More generally:

• Thousands of universities employ academics who teach/tweet on a daily basis to the effect that whiteness and white people are ‘the problem.’ They are not sanctioned, and often endorsed and even celebrated by their university administrations.

• Every university in North America is actively sponsoring and in many cases enforcing an ideology of gender fluidity (for instance through the normalization of ‘pronouns’) that is creating a devastating psychological pandemic among teens and young adults, and leading to the abuse of very young children.

• A very large number of academics – tens of thousands – across every conceivable discipline, use their state-funded positions to push the most egregiously partisan ideology on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, op eds in the MSM. On the basis of a notional expertise in ecology, physics or medieval literature or nursing – the discipline has no bearing – they pronounce on all manner of hot button political issues. This is not a matter of expressing private political opinions (clearly this is fine). It is done explicitly with a view to weaponizing status and academic expertise to delegitimate the entire spectrum of political opinion to the ‘right’ of woke. In a very real sense this is a betrayal of a fundamental professional ethic that would see academic and scientific culture one step removed from, and partially insulated from, the dirty logic of political contestation. For liberal societies to survive, let alone thrive, campus politics (at least on the part of the faculty) should always be small ‘p’. Small ‘p’ political culture is dead and buried. Triumphant woke standards and ensigns fly from every flagpole, are displayed in every office window and flutter on the website pages of university libraries and of course the daily communications from every part of the administrative hierarchy. DEI is just the icing on the cake. 

When HxA was established, I wanted to see a manifesto for a raft of legal and regulatory changes:

• Punitive and crippling penalties for universities that don’t uphold freedom of speech (zero funding for three years)
• Policies to remove ideological grade schoolteachers and de-politicize education.
• Grievance disciplines to be defunded, closed down and or folded into more general social science departments where ostensibly ‘critical’ ideas will perhaps be subject to critique.
• The defunding of all DEI initiatives and hirings on campus
• Targets for conservative voices on campus – and real diversity of perspective
• Deregulation to make it easier for university start-ups.
• Hard, legal caps on admin versus faculty ratios
• Diversified funding channels (if necessary, funding distributed by think tanks from across the political spectrum)
• Bans on DEI/ ideological allegiance pledges in recruitment processes.
• Bans on the enforced acquiescence to pronouns culture.
• A ban on the use of software such as Maxient (https://www.maxient.com) [Seriously guys, why is this not front and centre on the HxA agenda?]

AND FINALLY, I wanted to see HxA endorse or disavow political candidates based on these commitments – and explicitly to move away from the reflex distaste for Republicans and Conservatives.

For instance, in Canada, HxA should be presenting Pierre Poilievre with a package of legislative and regulatory changes that would create a more open and politically balanced ideological culture on campus. This could start by making any state funding at all conditional on a transparent and binding commitment to the Chicago Principles (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_principles). The Conservative government in the UK should be facing similar pressure. Jonathan Haidt should be using the HxA and his own platform to extract cast iron public commitments from prospective Republican presidential nominees. HxA could play a significant role in creating an arms race in Republican discourse, shifting the Overton window (in the same way that Poilievre is now pinioned by his public commitment to defund the CBC). Haidt of course would be horrified, not least because this strategy in way leverages exactly the kind of purity spiral that has seen academia lurch towards a degree of leftist authoritarianism that would have been unimaginable, just ten years ago. This is a case of fighting fire with fire. The difference is that our goal is to re-establish the conditions for a liberal, colour-blind civic society.

Needless to say, I’ve seen none of this. The system is broken. The HxA shows no real interest in fixing it. John Tomasi’s response to Nathan Cofnas’s critique seems inadequate. He says:

“Our approach will necessarily be a long-game, activating members from inside of the academy, for sustained culture change. The respective roles of voluntarism and coercion in the process of cultural formation is a classic problem with the theory of social change. I will not pretend that HxA has solved that strategic riddle. But at HxA, our theory of change is a living, evolving theory of practice’

I was never much for Leninism, but you can’t effect wholesale institutional change without wielding political power. The idea that the use of coercion of some kind is a choice is sociologically naïve. Woke politics – the long march through the institutions – is predicated on coercion. This is the essence of Marcuse’s (1969) concept of ‘repressive tolerance’, which paradoxically was derived from the Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt (1932). It is predicated on the absolute tribalism of politics and the impossibility of compromise. It is this idea that is repeated ad nauseum in the work of woke critical race and gender theorists such as Ibram X Kendi (2019) who argues that to counter historical wrongs, the anti-racist left is licensed and indeed morally impelled to discriminate and coerce in the present. A secular doctrine of original sin (whiteness) is fused with Marxist conflict theory and a Schmitt-derived Marcusian para-legal justification of intolerance. And Kendi’s (2019) rather hackneyed understanding of the role of race-conscious (‘woke’) intellectuals is lifted directly from Lenin’s (1901) What is to be Done? and Gramsci’s understanding of the role of ‘organic intellectuals’ – basically leading the workers by the nose and training them to see their own situation in terms of a zero-sum conflict with a contending other. It’s easy to see the influence of Schmitt’s justification of the Nazi state’s emergency powers Sadly for John Lennon, the working class are yesterday’s heroes, replaced now by intersections of race, gender and an ever more bewildering array of identity-victims.

In short, the ground zero for 21^st century campus woke was Western Marxism and the Frankfurt school’s response to the perceived failures of the 1920s. HxA has not ‘solved the strategic riddle’ of coercion. Of course not! But by eschewing any explicitly political project at all, it has opted to simply ignore the problem of coercion and institutional power. And, in effect, this means a policy of strategic acquiescence to woke authoritarianism. If there is any prospect for the recovery of a balanced, liberal pattern of negotiated centrism – and the healthy, weaving, mutually balancing interplay between left and right; between progressive change and conservative skepticism – then this means, at the very least, deposing the ideologues whose foundational premise is that there can be no tolerance of dissent and no possibility of compromise or coexistence.

The culture war is a fight between genuine ideological Liberals (including conservatives who are happy to co-exist with liberalism in the public square) on the one hand, and genuine totalitarians on the other. If ‘moderates’ choose to ignore the extent to which the liberal-democratic ‘society of individuals’ relies on the covert monopolies of violence, education, currency etc – which is to say on the power of the state – they will lose. This is an academic’s version of the maxim ‘don’t bring a knife to a gun fight’.

Finally, a specific example: Ron DeSantis introduced a raft of very moderate and reasonable changes to the treatment of sex/gender education in schools and the curriculum with regard to race in American history. The woke rendering of these changes was hysterical, deliberately inaccurate, highly motivated – AND diffused through the entire mainstream media ecosystem. HxA, as far as I can see, said nothing. Handwringing ‘both sides-ism’ is not neutral. Rather it brings to mind the diplomatic contortions of Chamberlain’s ‘Peace in Our Time’. And as with the Munich conference, there will be no peace.

Case closed. The system is broken. HxA has no answers and I’m unsubscribing. Please delete my details. You might also pass on my comments to the board and the advisory committee.

Yours sincerely

Professor Scroger Ruton

References:

Gramsci, Antonio (1971) [1929–1935]. Hoare, Quintin; Smith, Geoffrey Nowell (eds.). Selections From the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (11th printing) (International Publishers)

Kendi, Ibram X (2019). How to Be An Antiracist (New York: One World)

Lenin, Vladimir (1901). "What Is To Be Done?". Lenin's Selected Works. (Marxists Internet Archive)

Marcuse, Herbert (1969). "Repressive Tolerance" in Wolff, Robert, Moore, Barrington; Marcuse, Herbert A Critique of Pure Tolerance (Boston: Beacon Press)

Schmitt, Carl (1932) The Concept of the Political. George D. Schwab, trans. (University of Chicago Press, 1996; expanded edition 2007, with an introduction by Tracy B. Strong)