As extensively documented, our universities have been swept up into a new cultural movement, the so-called "social justice" movement, a key component of wokeness.
"Social justice" ideology is based on the Marxist vision that the world is divided into oppressor classes and oppressed classes as noted in the Minding the Campus article "What Happened to Our Universities?" by Philip Carl Salzman, in October 2018 and is from their Free Speech in Peril collection.
Unlike classical Marxism that divides the world into a bourgeois oppressor class and a proletarian oppressed class - that is capitalists oppressing workers - neo-Marxist "social justice" theory divides the world into gender, racial, sexual, and religious classes: male oppressors and female victims; white oppressors and people of color victims; heterosexual oppressors and gay, lesbian, transsexual, etc. etc. victims; Christian and Jewish oppressors and Muslim victims.
"Social justice" ideology leads to the rejection of oppressive institutions such as capitalism and Western Civilization. Universalistic criteria such as merit, achievement, and excellence are rejected today in universities and beyond because they allegedly disadvantage members of victim categories.
Preferential measures on behalf of victims have been adopted as the overriding and primary purpose of universities today. Course topics, course substance, course references, recruitment of students, provision of special facilities and events for "victim" categories, hiring of academic and administrative staff, all are aimed to benefit members of "victim" categories and to exclude and marginalize members of "oppressor" categories.
Sociology, anthropology, political science, English, history, women's and gender studies, black studies, social work, education, and law have all jettisoned their traditional fields of study to become "social justice" subjects, vilifying men, whites, heterosexuals, the West, capitalism, and advocating for women, people of color, gays etc., and Muslims.
Now there is a full-throttle attack on the natural sciences and on STEM fields to infuse them with "victims," whatever these "victim" preferences and abilities might be, and to turn STEM into "social justice" fields, so that there would no longer be "science," but "feminist science" that is "socially just."
How did all of this happen? What brought about this almost universal change in institutions of "higher learning"? Find out in this provocative campus guidebook Woke Free Campus Guide for Students, Faculty & Alumni: Establishing a "Woke Free" Environment on Campus by Abolishing DEI Bureaucracies and Restoring Equality (NOT Equity) in America's Universities.
