The Samizdata quote of the day on 1 December 2021 from Perry de Havillland is from a website I have not encountered before: Eugyppius. Here's the quote:
People tend to believe things that further their personal interests, and universities are no exception. Wokification succeeded largely because it gave a lot of different people a lot of different things that they wanted. It gave the increasingly powerful university administration a reason to hire more administrators to manage diversity and ensure its forward march. Self-propagation is the highest goal of administrators everywhere. Wokeness also became a useful tool in ongoing turf wars between administrators and faculty. Diversity is a simple metric via which the administration can interfere with faculty hiring and academic operations; new diversity hires know who is buttering their bread and remain loyal to the administrators whose policies brought them in. For the increasingly mediocre and incapable faculty who now teach at even the most august American schools, the woke circus has its own attractions. It provides distraction from the unrelenting demands of objectivity and originality, and permits a pleasing, self-righteous indulgence in moral scolding. In Woke Studies, the answers are always predetermined and it is very easy to get anything published, provided you say the right things. For students, Wokeness has still other attractions—as a font of easy coursework, as an opportunity for social networking, and as a locus for the periodic ritual entertainment of false moral outrages and protests.
It's very well put and scarily plausible. Eugyppius goes on to conclude in this post:
I am arguing merely that the locus of evil is not condensed in any single actor, but rather distributed, like a foul-smelling gas, throughout the entire system.
So it may be that it is all but impossible to resist this Woke scourge. Wokeness is now an uncontrollable worldwide pandemic of moral superficiality, exhibitionism and exclusion that is systematically undermining the hard won civilizing values of thoughtful skepticism, curiosity and tolerance in our illusive search for truth.
Dare we put our heads above the parapet and fight back?
If so, how?.
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