Academic freedom has far more than just rhetorical significance. It is crucial to what should be the fundamental justification of a university: the unfettered pursuit of knowledge. Put simply, academics need to be able to ask questions that challenge the consensus in their disciplines, and in the public sphere beyond the university, without fear of disapprobation from their own institution. Without such safeguards, academics are limited to researching and teaching only that which confirms currently received ideas. Everywhere you look today, people are fashioning a victim identity from the suffering of their ancestors. Well-off students say they bear the scars of the colonial exploitation of their forefathers. Commentators of colour write of how hard it is to ‘endure [the] historical inhumanity’ of slavery. Unable to find a convincing case for victimhood in their own comfortable, learned lives, they plunder the agony of their ancestors instead. Biden’s doing something similar. A gushing CNN piece on his visit to Ireland says his ancestors’ pain left an ‘indelible impression’ on him. He is seemingly haunted by the image of the Famine-era ‘coffin ships’ that left Ireland for America, so called because so many of the passengers died en route. In his memoir he even refers to life’s difficulties as ‘the Irishness of life’. Dr Joanna Williams is a columnist for spiked as well as a regular contributor to The Spectator, The Telegraph and The Times. An academic she is the founder and director of Cieo, which provides a platform for research and debates that universities today dare not touch. Joanna has written numerous academic journal articles and book chapters as well as being a frequent contributor to national and international debates on education, feminism and gender politics.

Defenders of woke will always cloak their efforts to denounce and cancel their critics with claims of protecting freedoms of the vulnerable; opponents of woke see through this ruse, and must gird themselves for another long march if they are to reverse woke’s advance. As Williams reminds us forcefully, there is a great deal at stake. To be woke, then, is less about identifying with a label and more about holding a particular ideological outlook. As we have seen, to be woke requires far more than simply being aware of racism or being against racism. It is not woke to insist that people should be judged by their character rather than the colour of their skin. To be woke is to hold a very particular position, one that insists upon seeing both race and racism everywhere. Complaints that this view may rehabilitate racial thinking and racist practices such as segregation can be safely ignored: it’s far more important for the woke set that race is discussed using the correct language. To be woke is to police the language and behaviour of others, calling out not just those who are racist but those who hold the wrong form of opposition to racism and have not kept up with the latest vocabulary. Welcome to the world of ‘woke’ anti-racism; just one manifestation of the phenomenon of wokeness that has swept across the West, transforming school curricula, workplace relations, competitive sports, policing, politics, history, free speech, and the administration of justice. British author Joanna Williams thinks this transformation is so complete that she is provoked to declare woke has triumphed in her important new book, How Woke Won: The Elitist Movement that Threatens Democracy, Tolerance and Reason. But while the cultural elite has rejected the label of woke, the values associated with being woke are more influential than ever. They have moved from the fringes of political life to the mainstream and now influence the actions of public institutions, national governments and private businesses. In the process, the meaning of these values has morphed and stretched. Some, such as ‘diversity’, have always been vacuous concepts, while others, such as inclusion, have been so expanded beyond their original application as to be rendered hollow.

Has woke “won”, as Williams claims? Her extensive survey of the spread of woke, taking in developments in the UK, the USA, and Australia — remember Yassmin Abdel-Magied stomping out of the Brisbane Writers’ Festival in 2016? — certainly indicates that woke is ascendant and that its influence is pernicious. But Williams concedes rather too much in declaring that woke has already clinched victory. “Ultimately,” she argues, “woke is a defensive stance from an elite that has lost its authority.” And this is where we find ourselves today. The woke university has a biologically diverse but values-aligned student body taught by politically homogeneous instructors. Induction and ongoing training sessions reinforce the importance of holding the correct views and teach the correct terminology for expressing such views. Dissent is squashed, consensus insisted upon. The decolonised curriculum struggles with Newton, Darwin and Hume but embraces unconscious bias training and diversity workshops. Education can still be found but both academics and students have to search long and hard for it. Nonetheless, grades keep rising and certificates keep on coming. Woke has adopted this ambiguity about truth which allows words — such as ‘racism’ and ‘hate speech’ — to take on whatever meaning the user intends without regard to the possibility of countervailing evidence. As Williams remarks:

In September 2020, the University of Edinburgh renamed David Hume Tower ‘40 George Square’ after the philosopher was accused of racism. The university said: Hume’s comments on race, ‘though not uncommon at the time, rightly cause distress today.’ Clearly, staff do not see it as their role to explain to students, calmly and rationally, that if they cannot cope with mere mention of a globally and historically renowned philosopher then perhaps university is not for them. Far from it. Instead, the author of the statement accepts that students are ‘rightly’ distressed. This suggests that – in the face of Hume’s alleged sins – distress is the ‘correct’ emotional response. This begs the question: are the many people not distressed by the existence of David Hume Tower racist? Emotions seem to be as important as words in the woke university. To be woke, then, is less about identifying with a label and more about holding a particular set of values and adopting a particular stance – one that appears radically egalitarian but often runs entirely counter to previous movements for equality. To be woke is to see gender as multiple and fluid and to employ a complex vocabulary that begins with transgender and cisgender and branches out into nonbinary, agender, pangender, genderqueer, demigirl and so on. Yet to be woke is also to believe that demonstrating masculine behaviour makes someone a man (whatever their sex), while to be a woman is to look and to act feminine.Woke values now extend far into established social and cultural institutions. This has happened not because of the strength of woke ideas, but because institutions have long since abandoned their founding principles. Schools, universities, museums and the media are no longer driven by an imperative to impart knowledge, to pursue truth, to preserve the past or to cultivate beauty. These important values were problematised and rejected a long time ago. Woke ideas have, far more recently, provided those in charge of national institutions with a new sense of purpose. The importance of language Associated with an emergent elite that is socially and geographically mobile, highly educated and social-media savvy”. Far from being progressive, woke twists older ideas of racial and sexual equality beyond all recognition. It leaves us unable to defend women’s rights and pushes us to judge people according to the colour of their skin. Woke thinking benefits only a small minority at the very top of society.

It’s hardly surprising so few of us encounter racism on a daily basis. According to the latest report from one of the most reliable barometers of Australian society, the Scanlon Foundation’s Mapping Social Cohesion survey, that segment of the population with racist or xenophobic views is shrinking rapidly. Even during the long months of the pandemic — when Mr Tan insists that instances of race hate spiked — the Scanlon survey reported high levels of harmony in the community. But there was a puzzling spike of 20 per cent in the number of those who did think racism was a problem; a finding that baffled report author, Andrew Markus, seeing as how it conflicted with Scanlon’s findings in all previous years. While the ways ‘wokeness’ makes itself known today are not obscure, its evolution from an aspirational concern with racial justice to a zealous obsession with overcoming all forms of social injustice is more hazy.Dr Joanna Williams is Head of Education and Culture at Policy Exchange. She is an author, commentator and the associate editor of Spiked.