What hath woke wrought?

Tyler Cowen interviews Musa al-Gharbi, author of We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite.

AL-GHARBI: I have published an essay where I argue that the Great Awokening does seem to be winding down.

In the book, looking at a lot of different empirical measures, and in some of my other published research before the book, I argue that it seems like starting after 2011 with race, gender, and sexuality and stuff — but starting a year before that with Occupy Wall Street and things like this — but basically, starting after around 2010, there was this significant shift among knowledge economy professionals in how we talk and think about social justice issues. That does seem to have peaked around 2021.

Looking at the measures that I was looking at in the book, it seems like a lot of those are on the decline now, yes.

COWEN: Do we have a single coherent theory that explains both the rise of the Great Awokening and its apparent fragility? I can see that it’s easy to explain either of those, but how do we do both?

AL-GHARBI: One of the things that I argue in the book, that I think is really important for contextualizing the current moment, is that this current period of rapid change in how knowledge economy professionals talk and think about social justice and the ways we engage in politics and all of this — this moment is actually a case of something. As I show in the book, looking at the same kinds of empirical measurements, we can see that actually there were three previous episodes of great awokenings. By comparing and contrasting these cases, we can get insight into questions like, Why did they come about? Why do they end? Do they influence? Do they change anything long-term? and so on.

To that question — why did they come about, why did they end — what I argue in the book is, there seems to be two elements that are important predictors for when an awokening might come about. One of them is that they tend to happen during moments of elite overproduction, when it becomes particularly acute. This is a term drawn from Jack Goldsmith and Peter Turchin, for people who are not already familiar with it, which is basically when society starts producing more people who think that they should be elites than we have capacity to actually give those people the lives they feel like they deserve.

We have growing numbers of people who did everything right: They did all the extracurriculars, they got good grades in school, they graduated from college — even from the right college in the right majors — but they’re having a hard time getting the kinds of six-figure jobs they expected. They can’t buy a house. They’re not being able to get married and live the kind of standard of living their parents had and so on.

When you have growing numbers of elites and elite aspirants that find themselves in that position, then what they tend to do is grow really dissatisfied.

There's much more at the link.

Nicholas Confessore, The University of Michigan Doubled Down on D.E.I. What Went Wrong? NYTimes, Oct. 16, 2024. The article opens:

Leaders of the University of Michigan, one of America’s most prestigious public universities, like to say that their commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion is inseparable from the pursuit of academic excellence. Most students must take at least one class addressing “racial and ethnic intolerance and resulting inequality.” Doctoral students in educational studies must take an “equity lab” and a racial-justice seminar. Computer-science students are quizzed on microaggressions.

Programs across the university are couched in the distinctive jargon that, to D.E.I.’s practitioners, reflects proven practices for making classrooms more inclusive, and to its critics reveals how deeply D.E.I. is encoded with left-wing ideologies. Michigan’s largest division trains professors in “antiracist pedagogy” and dispenses handouts on “Identifying and Addressing Characteristics of White Supremacy Culture,” like “worship of the written word.” The engineering school promises a “pervasive education around issues of race, ethnicity, unconscious bias and inclusion.”

At the art museum, captions for an exhibit of American and European art attest to histories of oppression “even in works that may not appear to have any direct relation to these histories.” The English department has adopted a 245-word land acknowledgment, describing its core subject as “a language brought by colonizers to North America.” Even Michigan’s business school, according to its D.E.I. web page, is committed to fighting “all forms of oppression.”

A decade ago, Michigan’s leaders set in motion an ambitious new D.E.I. plan, aiming “to enact far-reaching foundational change at every level, in every unit.” Striving to touch “every individual on campus,” as the school puts it, Michigan has poured roughly a quarter of a billion dollars into D.E.I. since 2016, according to an internal presentation I obtained. A 2021 report from the conservative Heritage Foundation examining the growth of D.E.I. programs across higher education — the only such study that currently exists — found Michigan to have by far the largest D.E.I. bureaucracy of any large public university. Tens of thousands of undergraduates have completed bias training. Thousands of instructors have been trained in inclusive teaching.

And yet:

D.E.I. programs have grown, in part, to fulfill the increasingly grand institutional promises behind them: to not only enroll diverse students but also to push them to engage with one another’s differences; to not merely educate students but also repair the world outside. Under the banner of D.E.I., universities like Michigan have pledged to tackle society-wide problems: The vast disparities in private wealth, the unequal distribution of public services, the poor quality of many urban schools.

In practice, though, such ambitions can exceed the reach of even a wealthy university. Most people I spoke to at Michigan, including people who criticized other aspects of D.E.I. there, praised Wolverine Pathways, the school’s premier pipeline for underserved Michigan public-school students. Yet this year, after substantial growth, Pathways supplied just 480 undergraduates out of the 34,000 on campus. In explaining why it was so challenging to boost Black enrollment, Chavous and other school officials argued that rapidly declining high school enrollment in Detroit — a trend that was itself the product of social and economic forces beyond the university’s control — had drained Michigan’s traditional pool of Black applicants even as the school’s overall enrollment was rising.

D.E.I. theory and debates over nomenclature sometimes obscured real-world barriers to inclusion. The strategic plan for Michigan’s renowned arboretum and botanical gardens calls for employees to rethink the use of Latin and English plant names, which “actively erased” other “ways of knowing,” and adopt “a ‘polycentric’ paradigm, decentering singular ways of knowing and cocreating meaning through a variety of epistemic frames, including dominant scientific and horticultural modalities, Two-Eyed Seeing, Kinomaage and other cocreated power realignments.”

Only one sentence in the 37-page plan is devoted to the biggest impediment to making the gardens accessible to a more diverse array of visitors: It is hard to get there without a car. (While the arboretum is adjacent to campus, the gardens are some miles away.) “The No. 1 issue across the board was always transportation,” said Bob Grese, who led the arboretum and gardens until 2020. “We were never able to get funding for that.” [...]

But even some liberal scholars believe D.E.I. looms too large. Amna Khalid, a historian at Carleton College in Minnesota, argues that modern D.E.I. is not, as some on the right hold, a triumph of critical theory or postcolonialism but of the corporatization of higher education, in which universities have tried to turn moral and political ideals into a system of formulas and dashboards. “They want a managerial approach to difference,” Khalid said. “They want no friction. But diversity inherently means friction.”

There's much more at the link.