3 ms·

Indeed very cryptic. Not clear at all what the author is trying to say about the university aside from “wokeness” which is a very generalized term.

kevinmchugh 4y ago
As I read it, the author believes this project would only be successful if it completely reinvented ~all aspects of a university. The rest of the board would be happy with an antiwoke or unwoke institution which otherwise is recognizable as a university. I presume the intended audience has a shared understanding of "woke" and more particularly "scrape the woke off the top". There is probably more specific interpersonal drama - possibly she feels the politics of the rest of the board will be bad for this institution in some form.
weakfortress 4y ago
It would appear the author is expressing concern that the board is not focusing sufficiently on removing the actual blight on academia. Scraping the woke off the top is not enough. In this context, it likely means just getting rid of the usually University faire: bigoted admission policies, bigoted language from university leaders, racial preference, "diversity for diversity's sake", forcing gender studies classes on non-gender studies majors, etc. Getting rid of these blights would certainly make the university more liberal in the truest sense of the word. However, you have to go deeper and clean the rot from within. Once the top has been scraped clean you now need to go into academia itself and root out the same problems. Not just the problem of what can be called "militant diversity initiatives" but even more so the problems that exist in research, grant funding, choices for tenure, election procedures for positions of power, etc. Not only do these suffer from the same "surface wokeness" but they also give large amounts of money based on so-called diversity quotas. To be truly a liberal institution this must be stopped. Worse, that is just simply the start. It sounds like the current board liked the idea of scraping the wokeness off the surface but otherwise wanted to keep the same ole system in place. I tend to agree with the author. With the core rot left in place, the surface will become blighted again. Academia is basically a matryoshka of pseudo-intellectual progressive virtue signaling today. Academic politics resembles a twitter argument more than a meeting of the minds to advance humanity. To decompose this matryoshka it'll take more than just a wave of a wand.

kevinmchugh 4y ago

As I read it, the author believes this project would only be successful if it completely reinvented ~all aspects of a university. The rest of the board would be happy with an antiwoke or unwoke institution which otherwise is recognizable as a university. I presume the intended audience has a shared understanding of "woke" and more particularly "scrape the woke off the top". There is probably more specific interpersonal drama - possibly she feels the politics of the rest of the board will be bad for this institution in some form.

weakfortress 4y ago

It would appear the author is expressing concern that the board is not focusing sufficiently on removing the actual blight on academia. Scraping the woke off the top is not enough. In this context, it likely means just getting rid of the usually University faire: bigoted admission policies, bigoted language from university leaders, racial preference, "diversity for diversity's sake", forcing gender studies classes on non-gender studies majors, etc. Getting rid of these blights would certainly make the university more liberal in the truest sense of the word. However, you have to go deeper and clean the rot from within. Once the top has been scraped clean you now need to go into academia itself and root out the same problems. Not just the problem of what can be called "militant diversity initiatives" but even more so the problems that exist in research, grant funding, choices for tenure, election procedures for positions of power, etc. Not only do these suffer from the same "surface wokeness" but they also give large amounts of money based on so-called diversity quotas. To be truly a liberal institution this must be stopped. Worse, that is just simply the start. It sounds like the current board liked the idea of scraping the wokeness off the surface but otherwise wanted to keep the same ole system in place. I tend to agree with the author. With the core rot left in place, the surface will become blighted again. Academia is basically a matryoshka of pseudo-intellectual progressive virtue signaling today. Academic politics resembles a twitter argument more than a meeting of the minds to advance humanity. To decompose this matryoshka it'll take more than just a wave of a wand.