Juno News - Ending the Woke Takeover of Universities

00:00:00.240 Universities are meant to pursue truth, not necessarily your truth. Instead, they've become

00:00:08.400 factories for ideological conformity, where entire disciplines are effectively no-go zones

00:00:14.560 for certain questions. Questions about race, gender, equity, etc. And so much research has

00:00:21.360 to pass through this filter of progressivism or woke social justice. But not every academic

00:00:28.320 is woke. Just recently, a bunch of academics and journalists and writers have been pushing back.

00:00:35.440 The Buckingham Manifesto is a prime example of this, designed to restore free inquiry to higher

00:00:41.360 education. And my guest today is at the center of the Buckingham Manifesto, Eric Kaufman. It's a

00:00:47.840 statement of principles and a plan of action aimed at reintroducing intellectual diversity into academia,

00:00:53.840 defending heterodox social science, and possibly building a space for critical study of today's

00:01:01.280 dominant ideology. Woke! So surely the effort isn't going to be for the faint-hearted,

00:01:08.880 but it might be exactly what universities need. I'm Melanie Bennett. This is Disrupted.

00:01:14.320 Professor Eric Kaufman, welcome to the show.

00:01:25.680 Melanie, it's great to be here.

00:01:28.160 I have noticed multiple efforts going on recently within academia, but also involving journalists,

00:01:35.520 writers, many people interested in what's going on at universities. And you were part of that. You

00:01:43.520 have released, I suppose you could say, this Buckingham Manifesto. I was hoping that you could describe

00:01:51.120 what that is. Oh, but before you do that, I have one pressing question. Is Woke in fact dead?

00:02:02.560 Woke is not dead, despite Andrew Doyle's new book title, The End of Woke. It is, however,

00:02:11.360 at an inflection point where it's no longer rising. And I think that's important because there are some

00:02:19.280 measures that show it falling and some other measures that show it retaining support or retaining

00:02:26.640 support on some measures. So at best it's holding and, well, sorry, let me rephrase that.

00:02:34.480 It may be holding ground or it may be declining. It partly depends on what we're looking at.

00:02:41.200 My view is we're at an interesting point where the aura of inevitability that this was the path of

00:02:49.120 history and that you better be on this train or you're going to be left behind. I think that kind of

00:02:54.240 whole aura has been shattered, but there's a lot of zombies out there that are continuing to just

00:03:01.920 march on, right? So it is an interesting point. And this is something I want to return to. I will

00:03:09.440 talk a bit more about why I think these things. But I don't know if you want to say something or I

00:03:15.920 wanted to say something about the Buckingham Manifesto. Yes, absolutely.

00:03:19.200 Which fits into this. So really what happened is I got some money to organize a conference at the

00:03:28.480 University of Buckingham where I'm based, which is kind of the only free speech ethos university in

00:03:34.320 Britain. Even though a lot of the staff and students are not necessarily that way inclined,

00:03:39.680 but it's tradition and founding by Margaret Thatcher is in that direction. So we have this conference and

00:03:48.320 we managed to bring in a lot of big names from the U.S. in particular. We had about almost 45

00:03:55.760 speakers. And it really spanned quite a broad range within the tent of people who think there's a

00:04:02.320 problem within academia. So what this conference was really about were two things. One is about

00:04:09.360 heterodox social science. In other words, we're going to do social science across the red lines set by

00:04:15.520 progressive orthodoxy. So an example might be a progressive orthodoxy might be, well, racial inequality,

00:04:24.160 any disparity that's between say black and white can only be explained by discrimination. And if we

00:04:30.880 can't find it in individual level attitudes, it must be quote unquote systemic. So systemic racism is the

00:04:38.000 only way of explaining any sort of discrepancy in incarceration or admittance to Harvard or wealth

00:04:44.880 or whatever. So that's an example of heterodox social science. It would be to say, well, actually,

00:04:50.640 family structure might be really important if we want to explain the racial wealth gap. And so we have

00:04:55.120 to take that into account and take into account average age and a whole bunch of other factors,

00:04:59.840 primary school education. So that is just a way of saying that there are all these questions that

00:05:06.720 social science academics are not really allowed to investigate. There was a sociologist who tried to

00:05:13.360 say, well, actually, we don't find evidence of discrimination against Asians in the labor market.

00:05:20.160 He couldn't publish that paper and he would get nasty stares and cold shoulders at conferences.

00:05:26.640 I mean, for saying something that's really not particularly explosive. But that's sort of an

00:05:33.360 example of the way in which progressivism narrows the scope of inquiry, makes us dumber in a way. It 0.96

00:05:44.800 shuts down lines of inquiry. So we're trying to say, well, we want to ski in the off-piste areas and we want

00:05:50.960 to actually correct and rebalance knowledge in the social sciences. That's kind of

00:05:56.400 mission one. Kind of related to that mission two is what I call critical woke studies, which is to

00:06:03.120 say there's this really important ideology. We can call it social justice. We can call it the cultural

00:06:09.840 left that's been going since the new left of the late 1960s. And it needs to be studied like any other

00:06:18.240 ideology, like nationalism or fascism or communism or liberalism, regardless of whether you like the

00:06:23.840 ideology or not. Normally these things spawn conferences and they spawn textbooks and courses

00:06:31.680 and graduate programs. Well, none of that's happening because this is just seen as no being a nice person

00:06:37.760 and everyone must believe in this. And so that those are kind of the twin aims, critical woke studies,

00:06:43.760 heterodox social science. And those are also the twin aims of the Buckingham Manifesto.

00:06:49.040 Correct me if this is incorrect, but you do actually teach a course on woke. I mean, it might not be

00:06:59.840 called critical woke studies or maybe it is, but so there is something. And if you're teaching that,

00:07:05.280 are you aware of any other courses that are similar to that? Well, exactly. So I'm teaching this standalone

00:07:11.200 online course on woke 15 weeks, which is open to anybody at low cost, but there aren't any others.

00:07:20.720 I mean, the only place where there's anything reasonably similar is Andrew Doyle's got a new

00:07:26.640 half year course, I think at University of Austin, you know, another kind of dissident university.

00:07:32.960 It's perhaps more from a literary and humanities and history of ideas perspective, which is part of what I

00:07:39.040 do. But, but I do a lot also on the social transmission and political impact of this.

00:07:46.400 But yeah, it's pretty much other than that, it's pretty much lacking entirely. And yet, if we look

00:07:51.760 at the major newspapers, we look at sort of social justice concepts, mention of woke, it's just exploded

00:07:59.280 since the mid 2010s. And there's crickets in university. And so that is remarkable.

00:08:09.680 Let's look at the Canadian element to this, because for the Buckingham Manifesto, I noticed that there

00:08:14.560 are a couple of Canadian signatories. There's Jordan Peterson and Gad Saad. And if there's more,

00:08:19.760 maybe you could let me know, but there's, and yourself, although maybe you could be considered

00:08:24.160 both British and Canadian as well. But it doesn't seem to be an awful lot of support coming from,

00:08:30.080 from Canada. And in a related Telegraph article that you wrote recently, you, I'm just going to

00:08:37.360 quote a statistic that you brought up that a Macdonald Laurier Institute report found that 9% of

00:08:42.640 academics back right wing parties in Canada, compared to 40% of the population. And so I guess

00:08:50.640 this is really a question of what's the situation here in Canada? Are you feeling that there are many

00:08:56.960 more academics that are on board with this and potentially not signing up for any particular

00:09:00.560 reason? Or just generally, what's your feeling about the situation for Canada?

00:09:06.960 Yeah, really, really good question. I mean, the first thing to note is, you know, the Buckingham

00:09:12.480 Manifesto, we might have just over 30 signatories, and maybe it's something similar for the Manhattan

00:09:18.640 statement. We're really talking about a very tiny number of the total number of academics, which

00:09:24.640 could be as high as a million in the US and 100,000 in Britain, in terms of people working at

00:09:29.760 teaching in some capacity in the higher ed sector. So I wouldn't take that as indicative of Canada

00:09:36.160 versus the US or Britain, very few British signatories on either one. I think in Canada, there's a pretty

00:09:43.760 vibrant, heterodox academic community or communities, and there are plenty of people. Society for Academic

00:09:52.800 Freedom, SAFS is one organization in Canada that has an annual conference, you've got the Heterodox Academy

00:10:01.120 chapters now at many places, Simon Fraser University would be one example. UBC would be another one. So

00:10:10.400 there are plenty of these chapters, there are plenty of academics, and I've given some talks in Ontario.

00:10:17.280 And so there is a very active dissident community in Canada. Now, what are the differences? So one

00:10:24.560 of the big questions is really, how do we position Canada vis-a-vis the US and Britain when it comes to,

00:10:30.400 first of all, woke policies, universities? I think that's interesting.

00:10:34.960 The proportion of Canadian academics who are on the left in my studies that I've seen would suggest

00:10:43.760 that it's pretty much in line with the US and Britain. There's not much difference in the three

00:10:48.640 countries. It's overwhelmingly on the left. Probably the ratio is, let's say, roughly 10 on the left for

00:10:56.720 everyone on the right. Now, if we get into top universities, top research universities in the

00:11:03.200 social sciences and humanities, that's probably moving up into like the 15 to 1 territory. Conservatives

00:11:10.320 are in and around 5% of the total, maybe nudging towards 10% in Britain. It's very small. Far left is

00:11:19.360 is a significant 25% to a third of the staff in the social sciences in all countries. I don't think

00:11:27.280 the Canadian academic, the academics in Canada are further left than they are anywhere else.

00:11:33.520 They're not to the right, but they're not different. That's not the difference. The difference is also

00:11:39.200 not in the publics. In my McDonnell Laurier Institute survey of the Canadian public, I did the same survey in

00:11:46.240 Britain and in the US. I basically found that essentially, in all three countries,

00:11:51.520 the public is about two to one against the woke position. A good question might be,

00:11:56.800 is Canada a racist country? For those who have an answer in Canada, 70% no, 30% yes. In the US and

00:12:04.800 Britain, the share who say their country is racist is higher than 30 on that question. Canada is actually

00:12:12.160 less woke on that question. In this survey, there's going to be a certain amount of noise. Perhaps on

00:12:18.160 some other questions, it may be the other way around. But basically, the public isn't woke. The

00:12:24.800 academics are similar. What is the difference? The difference is not necessarily in that opinion

00:12:30.000 segment. It is very much in the power of what we might call politically correct norms or woke

00:12:38.320 public culture in Canada, which is stronger. And it extends to the right of the political spectrum

00:12:46.320 more, which used to be the case in the US. It used to be the case in the Republican Party that you

00:12:52.480 didn't want to really talk about immigration. You didn't really want to talk about affirmative action

00:12:57.280 too much. That was seen as something that you shouldn't do by the Republican National Committee,

00:13:03.760 the establishment. That's all shifted since the Tea Party, since Trump. And those taboos have come down

00:13:10.800 on the right side of the spectrum. I think that's much less true in Canada. And also in Britain,

00:13:17.680 it's perhaps a little in between. But in Canada, you know, if you look at Paulia, for example,

00:13:23.920 he was for a long time very reluctant to get involved in the gender debate, in the immigration debate,

00:13:29.280 in critical race theory debate. You see that with Doug Ford, you see that you saw that with

00:13:35.280 Danielle Smith in Alberta as well, by the way, who was all in on the trans stuff. So I think that

00:13:41.680 that was and it is changed a little bit to some degree. It's just starting. And really, I'd say

00:13:47.920 Blaine Higgs in New Brunswick really has to be seen as the pioneer, the first one to say, actually,

00:13:54.800 I'm going to stick my neck out. And that's led to some imitating, but it hasn't led yet to a

00:14:01.200 situation where you've got a rapid shift. Yeah, well, even some of my reporting where

00:14:07.360 Nova Scotia progressive conservative in Houston, Premier Houston approved or his cabinet approved

00:14:16.400 trans bottom surgeries for minors. And so that's certainly another example of, I guess, the right 1.00

00:14:23.680 being more more woke. But the real question for me that I'd like to know is how do we deal with it

00:14:29.360 in Canada? Because it seems to me that the woke is embedded within so many of our provincial and

00:14:36.960 federal policies demanding that these things take place. And Lisa Shepard, sorry, not Lisa Shepard, 0.98

00:14:43.680 Lindsay Shepard came up with some suggestions on how to deal with them. And I'd be curious to see

00:14:48.400 your feeling on whether or not Canada can actually do these things. She listed in MLI that enforcing

00:14:55.200 free speech laws, public funding reforms, alternative and parallel institutions,

00:15:02.240 intra-university centers, strategic takeovers of institutions like New College Florida,

00:15:08.240 for example, by Ron DeSantis. Are these things even possible in Canada?

00:15:12.960 I think these are all good ideas. And I think they are possible with the political will.

00:15:21.360 And, you know, one of the questions is, you know, I know there's some loose talk about a

00:15:26.800 Lethbridge University of Lethbridge possibly having the first such center for civic thought,

00:15:33.600 which would be a kind of non progressive center. Now, one of the questions I would have is whether

00:15:39.520 Alberta, my everything I hear is that, in fact, the Alberta cabinet is some of it is squishy. And

00:15:46.400 so it's not by it is a very far cry from MAGA from even, you know, some of the populist conservatism

00:15:54.320 you see in parts of the British electoral landscape now with reform. There doesn't seem to be that

00:16:01.440 yet. We're not yet at that point. Now, what however, we what seems to be occurring is

00:16:06.800 that the grassroots in the provincial conservative parties, whether it be in Ontario, whether it be in

00:16:12.640 Alberta, Saskatchewan, are in touch with what's going on on the internet in the United States and

00:16:18.800 perhaps in Europe. It's really going to be up to them at convention time to be pressuring their leaders

00:16:27.360 and calling their leaders to account. I think this is where if there is any pressure, I think it's coming

00:16:31.760 from that quarter and from the National Post and some of the right of center press, which is

00:16:38.720 smaller, not as powerful in Canada as it would be in Britain, for example. So can't put as much

00:16:44.160 pressure on the politicians. But that's really where it has to start. And then once the politicians

00:16:50.480 are feeling the heat, if they're being essentially if they're being sort of squishy on these issues and

00:16:57.040 trying to avoid cultural issues because they don't want to be accused of being a transphobe or a racist

00:17:02.240 or something, it takes populist pressure or grassroots pressure in order to force careerist

00:17:09.360 politicians to not to stop playing it safe. And once they stop playing it safe, if they decide they're

00:17:15.520 going to be populist, that opens the door then to say anything becomes possible. You can then say,

00:17:21.680 yeah, we're going to have centers that are funded from the government. We are going to have free

00:17:28.080 speech laws, not like Ontario and Alberta. You have to have a set of principles. That's not enough. You

00:17:36.160 actually have to have like they have now in Britain with the Office for Students Academic Freedom

00:17:42.720 Directorate, which comes out of the legislation, which I was involved in to some degree. And what that

00:17:48.960 means is you have to have real time monitoring and enforcement and penalties in terms of fines

00:17:58.240 universities have to promote. They don't have to just, you know, defensively protect free speech.

00:18:03.920 And all of that, we'll see if it's going to be interesting because what date are we now? We are the

00:18:09.040 29th of July. On the 1st of August, the provisions of the Academic Higher Education Freedom of Speech Act

00:18:16.080 come into force in Britain. And we're going to see activity by pressure groups. If universities

00:18:23.120 think they can just do business as usual, those pressure groups are going to be exposing them,

00:18:27.440 registering these complaints with the directorate. So you need to have something that is

00:18:32.560 proactive, not just reactive. And so if Alberta was serious, they would push all this stuff and they

00:18:39.120 could push all this stuff on their universities. Now, it may be that it may be that something in I

00:18:46.080 don't know if it's the charter, but maybe there are some legal frameworks around equality law that need

00:18:52.400 to be may need to be changed. I actually don't know if you even need to change the laws. I think you could

00:18:57.520 probably get away with issuing guidelines as to how to interpret the law. It's this kind of legalese,

00:19:04.000 but you have to have trained lawyers who can when the civil servants say, oh, we can't do that because

00:19:08.240 of direction 425. You have to have some lawyers who say, no, actually, that doesn't that's not in

00:19:14.400 force here or the threshold is wrong. Someone who can just answer back quickly to those civil servants

00:19:20.000 who are generally not always, but will tend to be cautious or sympathetic to the progressive agenda.

00:19:25.440 So you need to be able to overcome civil servants resistance and push through this. And you're

00:19:30.320 seeing that in the US, in the red states and also federally.

00:19:33.680 It'd be interesting to see if people within the bureaucracies or within the professions

00:19:39.520 might also rise up with a populist move. I mean, that's always a possibility. But one area that we

00:19:44.160 haven't discussed is the media. The media definitely ignore a lot of, I guess, counter woke issues in

00:19:54.320 Canada. And that's something that I'm familiar with. And I was, I found it curious recently,

00:20:00.880 I'm going to quote you again, you said in Substack, is one thing for podcasters or content creators to

00:20:09.200 say that the establishment has been wrong. But without academic bona fides rooted in scholarship,

00:20:14.720 based on having read the literature and used rigorous methods, progressive policymakers and

00:20:19.600 journalists can readily dismiss their critics as simple and uninformed. I agree with this,

00:20:26.240 because it seems to me that it wouldn't matter how well crafted an argument that I would make for

00:20:32.320 some of the dangers of these things going on. And other people as well, that's so easily dismissed.

00:20:38.240 Just recently, I published an article about the Canadian Nurses Association code of ethics,

00:20:45.120 which I can only describe as gone full woke, now deciding that nurses must apply a planetary health 0.96

00:20:52.240 lens to the clinical care, taking into account the interconnectedness of living and non living entities

00:20:59.360 in things like perhaps your next blood test appointment. And I say this without exaggeration,

00:21:03.600 it comes with a whole policy statement. And, you know, there's a lot going on in this so called

00:21:07.600 planetary health lens in nursing. And I noticed that some of the pushback from this article,

00:21:15.280 from, I guess, the left or activists on the left was throwing all of these studies that these nurses,

00:21:22.800 or the groups of nurses, the activist nurses were, were using for this. So this rely on things like

00:21:28.320 disparity studies, which have maybe questionable statistics within them. But also, you know,

00:21:35.520 a lot of this is done on qualitative data, right? So we know, so there's, there isn't much that is

00:21:40.960 countering in the literature, it's just overwhelmed. And we know there's a replication crisis at

00:21:45.360 university. And I'm just wondering, do you do you see that making a big difference? Because that's quite

00:21:51.280 a mountain to face being able to not only publish the information, but then people then taking it seriously.

00:21:58.080 Yeah, I mean, there are so many, a couple of key issues you identify. I mean, one is that the cultural left has been very adept

00:22:06.000 at inhabiting, taking over institutions, using credentials as a shield for bad arguments.

00:22:18.960 Now, of course, there have been a number of hoax papers, like James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose and

00:22:25.040 Peter Boghossian that have shown how easy it is to unmask the pretensions to expertise and knowledge

00:22:31.600 of some of these radical, particularly these softer social sciences, essentially doesn't rest on any hard

00:22:38.720 objective data, or anything rigorous. It's just that they're citing each other, they're saying,

00:22:44.000 look, I've cited 50 people, of course, they're all people who have the same ideological bent, and

00:22:50.320 who are not rooted in anything real. So it has this appearance of knowledge. And that's why it's so easy to

00:22:56.240 unmask in a hoax paper, of which there have been a number, where people just say, well, as long as you just

00:23:02.480 essentially tip your hat to the right ideological registers, you'll get published, and you'll become

00:23:07.360 another paper that can be cited by somebody else. So yeah, this citation mafia, I mean, it's a matter of really

00:23:14.240 sort of pulling at the strings and unwinding it. But there is a degree to which the average member

00:23:20.400 of the public, and particularly, you know, people like judges, you know, they will accept at face

00:23:25.680 value someone who has a PhD and is an academic, they'll just think, oh, they must be the expert.

00:23:30.560 You know, I've done a number of, I've given a number of witness statements in a number of court cases.

00:23:36.160 And the point I always have to make is we're dealing with the sort of furthest,

00:23:39.520 furthest left part of the public opinion spectrum here, people who reject objective truth,

00:23:46.560 and the scientific method, you cannot think of these people as experts, like people who know

00:23:52.160 how to build a bridge or do cardiac surgery. And so, but of course, they kind of launder

00:23:58.080 their ideology through the PhD, through the institution, and make it seem as though, no,

00:24:04.560 they're just dispassionate experts. But actually, they're ideologues, but they've laundered that,

00:24:09.040 and they're through the credential. And so they appear as kind of neutral. And that's one of the

00:24:14.560 big problems is convincing a lot of ordinary people who really give a lot of credence to

00:24:22.480 people who come along with a credential and think, oh, they must know something.

00:24:27.200 The problem is, what I would say is, okay, well, given that that's the case to some degree,

00:24:31.840 I mean, obviously, we have to try and unmask those pretensions. I think it's really important for

00:24:36.800 people like you to do what you're doing to get the message out and say it in concrete,

00:24:42.240 normal language that people understand. So you are contributing to knowledge. I don't think,

00:24:47.200 however, it is also worth building up dissident academia so that we have

00:24:52.000 also the credentialed dissenters that can say, no, these people are just talking nonsense.

00:24:58.560 One of the things that, you know, coming out of the Buckingham Manifesto are a number of follow-on

00:25:03.440 activities. I mean, one of which is going to be an edited book on post-progressivism

00:25:08.640 in the social sciences, which I'm going to be putting forward. But another is we're trying to

00:25:13.920 set up a digital hub for countercultural dissenting social science with an AI that will allow you to

00:25:21.680 query. We're trying to collect a repository of countervailing social science, which people then

00:25:28.720 can come along and query. Someone like yourself could do a query, and it would search the literature

00:25:34.240 and give you an answer, and you would have the references and the citations. The point there being,

00:25:39.680 we need to rebalance knowledge. Now, you might say it's a huge hill to climb, and it is when you've got

00:25:44.560 20 of their side for everyone on the other side. But what I'd say is this, is that is that

00:25:51.280 the vast majority of academic papers are never cited, never read. They may contribute almost nothing to the

00:25:57.520 sum total of human knowledge. And so we don't have to replicate everything that's being done.

00:26:04.400 We just have to have a small number of very effective papers that get a lot of amplification.

00:26:11.280 So at the level of knowledge production and influence, we need to be equal. We don't have to

00:26:18.640 be equal in terms of numbers. What that means is we need to work in a more coordinated, smarter way,

00:26:24.480 where we can get all the work that's done on the dissenting side needs to be amplified and read

00:26:31.360 at a much higher rate than the work that's done on the progressive side. And so that's really the

00:26:36.320 challenge is to say, well, can we devise this system where what is at present only a small number of,

00:26:43.280 you know, dissenting voices can really start to change the conversation at the policy level,

00:26:48.560 government level. So that's kind of one of the goals of this movement for countercultural social

00:26:54.960 science, of which, which I'm quite heartened by, you know, the response, the conference, the energy was

00:26:59.920 amazing. And now with a manifesto, we've got pretty good pickup, I think we're going to continue where,

00:27:06.640 you know, video from the conference, we're going to have grants and publications. And so yeah,

00:27:12.240 I'm hoping that this can be the start of trying to turn it around at the high cultural level,

00:27:18.160 because we've got effective people now, you know, podcasts like yours, some media where I'd say in

00:27:25.200 the media space and the podcast space, particularly new media and online, it's more balanced. The

00:27:32.160 problem is really in the institutions. How do we kind of balance out those institutions?

00:27:36.000 Well, that's exciting. Quality over quantity, for sure. On the progressive left, there's a lot of

00:27:42.400 quantity. A lot of it is questionable. So that would be exciting to see what's coming up next on that.

00:27:48.000 Listen, we're out of time. And I appreciate very much that you appeared on my show. And good luck.

00:27:53.920 Thanks, Melanie. And keep up the great work. Canada needs you.

00:27:58.160 Thank you. All right, take care. That's all for today. The culturally left bias in universities

00:28:05.040 isn't going to disappear anytime soon. And efforts like the Buckingham manifesto show that there's a

00:28:10.240 serious pushback starting to take shape. Whether it gains ground will depend on whether people inside

00:28:16.960 and outside academia, possibly even brave politicians might be willing to support open inquiry. I just want

00:28:23.840 to thank Professor Kaufman for joining me today. And thank you for listening. If you found this conversation

00:28:29.520 helpful or useful, maybe consider liking and subscribing and sharing it amongst friends. I'm

00:28:35.760 Melanie Bennett. This is Disrupted.

Juno News - July 31, 2025

Ending the Woke Takeover of Universities

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