The parade of articles lamenting the dire state of free speech on college campuses can seem unending. Every week, it seems, there’s some exploration of how students attempted to constrain an important conversation or how a heavy-handed professor tried to proscribe particular subjects or how administrators made some reprehensible decision poisoning the well of academic inquiry. There were 3 million staff and 19 million students at degree-granting colleges and universities in 2020, so there’s a vast field from which anecdotes can be harvested. You’re going to get a one-in-a-million occurrence at least 22 times a year, if you will.
But this pattern is not new. Before the scourge of college campuses was threats to free speech broadly or “woke” reappraisals of vernacular more specifically, the purported threat was “political correctness.” When I went to college in the early 1990s, this was already something of a punchline, the idea that garbagemen needed to be referred to as “sanitation engineers” and so on. Even without the amplification of the internet, there were still laments about what the college kids were doing to discourse.
“At Stanford University, the Student Conduct Legislative Council is proposing to amend the university’s fundamental guarantee of free speech,” one essay read. “The new rule would punish speech that directly insults and stigmatizes individuals on the basis of race, sex, national origin or sexual preference.” The author lamented that “the ‘politically correct’ view on campus these days seems to favor curtailment of speech,” a complaint that could be plucked from Twitter today instead of its actual point of origination: the New York Times in 1989.
The broader pattern of pointing to colleges as corrupt or corrupting goes back even further, really. In 1951, William F. Buckley became a celebrity largely on the strength of his excoriation of his recent alma mater, “God and Man at Yale.” Any angle predicated on what the still-heavily-teenaged population of colleges is doing is not a novel angle.
What’s new in the moment, instead, is the way in which the broader complaints about corrective language intertwine with insecurity about race and class that guide much of the current political conversation. “Politically correct” has been replaced with the much more evocative “woke,” for the simple reason that the latter term incorporates a far broader range of implications that are more effective at creating frustration that can be directed at the desired target.
This replacement is new. When Donald Trump announced his candidacy for the presidency back in 2015, part of his pitch was that he would reject the perceived political correctness of the elites. When Megyn Kelly, then of Fox News, challenged his past misogynistic commentary during the first Republican nominating debate that year, Trump waved the question away.
“I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct,” Trump said. “I’ve been challenged by so many people, and I don’t frankly have time for total political correctness.”
In 2015 and 2016, Fox News began talking about “political correctness” more than it had been. Then 2021 arrived and, with it, the network’s focus on “critical race theory” — the right’s vaguely defined descriptor for efforts to introduce students to issues of systemic racism. Eventually that, too, was subsumed into “woke.”
Woke is the perfect pejorative. At times, it refers to misguided overreactions to concerns about the presentation of identity. In common usage, though, it often means little more than “raising issues that I would prefer not be raised.” It is a distillation of “politically correct” to the hot-button, triggering issues of race, gender and sexuality.
As Trump’s 2015 comments foretold, “woke” is intertwined with “cancellation,” the former being the purported reason the latter happens. The idea of “cancellation” as an overreactive punishment for those who crossed woke culture warriors evolved in large part from the backlash to the MeToo movement, the push early in Trump’s administration to identify and hold accountable men who’d abused or assaulted women. That movement overlapped with the Black Lives Matter movement, which was drawing attention to issues of systemic racism.
And both overlapped with and stoked a sense among White Americans, particularly conservative White men, that they were particularly embattled. White Republican men see their race and their gender as being targets of discrimination as regularly as Black or Hispanic Americans are targeted. Then arrived this explicit embrace of “canceling” individuals who’d crossed social lines, including some that were once considered normal or acceptable. Part of this is certainly generational: A younger, more diverse group of people was challenging an older, whiter one.
This frustration fostered the opportunity to oppose “wokeism.” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) has made this his 2024 presidential campaign slogan, even before he has a formal presidential campaign: He’s the guy battling the “woke.” That has meant his own encroachments on speech, ones actually driven by the government, including limiting the ability of teachers to discuss same-sex relationships and policing state educational systems for signs that racial inequality might be broached. One of the first acts of incoming Arkansas Gov. Sarah Sanders (R), former Trump press secretary, was to ban the use of “Latinx” by the state government, a change she presented as an effort to “eliminat[e] culturally insensitive words.”
In an essay at Substack, Matt Yglesias identified an important subtext to these efforts. It’s not simply about reactions to drawing attention to race and sexuality in ways that many on the right (and occasionally the left) find frustrating. It’s also about opposition to perceived elites. Language policing in particular, Yglesias argues, leads to an often justified sense that representatives of rarefied institutions are seeking to impose new restrictions that help define group boundaries. Use of proper terms is a form of class identification, even if only because it’s downstream from education.
This isn’t incorrect. But it also helps explain another aspect of the “woke” backlash: It bolsters and feeds on the right’s hostility to academia and the ostentatiously educated. Objecting to terms like “Latinx” as overwrought and unnecessary is a way of demonstrating that you’re not a liberal egghead but a Real American.
Both Gallup and Pew Research Center tracked shifts that support this idea. In the early years of the Trump presidency, Republican views of college education went from being a bit lower than Democrats to being reversed. In 2015, Republicans were 17 points more likely to say that higher education had a positive effect on the country than a negative effect. Democrats were 48 points more likely to say it had a positive effect. But by 2017, while Democratic views remained the same, Republicans were 22 points more likely to say that higher education had a negative effect.
An interesting poll conducted by YouGov for Yahoo News in December found that Republicans weren’t more likely than Democrats to view those with college degrees — even from fancy colleges — as elites. Instead, they were more likely to associate “elite” with being rich and liberal, showing how “elite” is intermingled with ideology. They were also nearly three times as likely as Democrats to say those who work in academia were elite.
Here we note that there have of course been examples of overreach and overreaction in considering how language is used and how systems are structured. There have been situations at colleges that are dumb or lamentable, including some that have been corrected. It is also the case that such incidents are far more likely to generate outrage on the right than things like DeSantis’s effort to control what is taught at the state university system or in high schools.
For decades, the American political conversation has found it useful to elevate instances in which people have reconsidered social boundaries or language. There’s always something interesting to be wrung from such changes; nearly any deviation from the status quo will spur a defender to outrage. The emergence of the “politically correct” fight three decades ago was a good example of this sort of rhetorical fuel.
Then came a moment in which such reconsiderations overlapped with existing racial and gender insecurities and a long-standing effort to target “elites” as a danger to the republic. “Woke” emerged, was seized by the right as a pejorative — and thrived.