“Universities Are the Enemy” -- The War on Wokeness Takes Aim at Higher Education

Turning up the culture war heat in a way that takes anti-intellectualism to the next level

By Jim Miller

The demonization of “wokeness” is a new establishment pundit jihad, and like the farcical crusade against the “war on Christmas” that preceded it, another ferocious battle against a mythical enemy that doesn’t exist.  

Pointing out the obvious, New York Times columnist Charles Blow noted last week that young activists have long since abandoned the word, leading to a situation where, 

• “The opponents of wokeness are fighting over an abandoned word, like an army bombarding a fort that has been vacated: They don’t appear fierce, but foolish.”

In his column, Blow chastises folks like “James Carville and Fox News pundits” who are weaponizing “woke” to attack a progressive strawman in the service of either fueling rightwing anger in the case of conservative provocateurs, or, in Carville’s case, resurrecting the very triangulating New Democratic politics of the nineties that helped lead us to our current dead-end.  

After all, it was a flaccid Clintonite who lost the Gubernatorial race in Virginia, and it is corporate Democratic “moderates'' who have sunk Biden’s larger agenda in Congress, not “The Squad” or “defund the police” protesters.  

Carville’s attack on Democrats he thinks sound like they are in the “faculty lounge” is as dismaying as it is also dangerous in that it plays into a darker rightwing strategy that seeks to not just dismiss progressive activism and thought, but to turn up the culture war heat in a way that takes anti-intellectualism to the next level.  

Indeed, just as Republicans have decided that attacks on school boards are the road back to power at the national level, Ohio senatorial candidate and Hillbilly Elegy author J.D. Vance took aim at higher education in a speech at the National Conservatism Conference entitled “The Universities are the Enemy” in which he lambasted college professors for indoctrinating those who then become K-12 educators to “teach that America is an evil, racist nation.”  

Vance, in a nod to Nixon, asserted that “professors are the enemy” because they take “hundreds of billions of dollars” of taxpayer money to undermine American values instead of teaching “patriotic” history.  

In a Los Angeles Times column about Vance’s agenda, history professor Benjamin Carter Hett observes that this broadside is married to other rants about immigrants and Covid restrictions and has a long series of historical precedents from the murder of Socrates to Hitler: 

• The fascist movements of the 20th century were notoriously anti-intellectual and anti-professor. In a relatively unscripted moment in a 1938 speech, Adolf Hitler said he regretted that his regime still had some need for its “intellectual classes,” otherwise, “one day we could, I don’t know, exterminate them or something.”

• Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, was irritated by academics’ tendency to examine political statements for their truth value. But he concluded that “I do not believe that university professors make history.”

I guess we can take J.D. off the list of conservatives that MSNBC and NPR liberals learned to love during their “how did Trump happen” phase.  It turns out he’s not so cuddly after all, unless you have a soft spot for fascists.  

One might think that such rhetoric would inspire everyone on the other side of the political divide to stand up for the value of higher education in the face of its demonization, but, alas, such is not the case.  As the Washington Post recently reported the neoliberal Democratic think tank Third Way is joining forces with other conservative think tanks to rebuke colleges for not providing enough bang for the buck when it comes to how much money graduates make after getting their degrees.

As the Post piece notes, their work has uncovered the fact that, “Based on students’ incomes and what they paid for college, it found that while about half will recoup their costs within five years, nearly a quarter will take 20 years or more. Of those, more than half will never make enough to cover what they spent.”  

Of course, this is a well-known crisis, but what is remarkable about the Third Way response is that it doesn’t call for free college or debt relief, but for the elimination of programs, like the humanities and history, that don’t offer immediate financial outcomes.  

Yes, rather than arguing for reining in predatory lenders or promoting populist policies that would give working people a leg up, this technocratic wing of the Democratic intelligentsia wants to discipline the universities and gut the very parts of American higher education that produce critical thinkers who just might ask the kinds of questions that J.D. Vance is afraid of answering.  

With friends like these, who needs enemies?  

Thus, less than a year into the post-Trump era, it appears that American higher education has become the central battleground of the resurgent American right and that some in Democratic circles will be perfectly happy to surrender the field.