In June 2023, the Conservatives created a new director of freedom of speech at the Office for Students. This innovation spoke to the success of a particularly widespread idea: that universities were hotbeds of ‘wokeism’ (defined, tiresomely, in vague gestures towards Marxism and identity politics) where controversial opinions were subject to censure. Since then, the notion of ‘woke universities’ biased against conservatism has been undermined by the legal and police action used against the encampments which were established across the country last summer in solidarity with the Palestinian cause. In a climate where students and administration are increasingly at odds, does the idea of ‘woke universities’ still hold? And, indeed, did it ever, or was it largely the construction of the right-wing press and politicians as a convenient enemy for the waging of their culture wars?
A cursory Google of ‘woke university’ will yield results mainly from 2020 to 2022. In the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests which followed George Floyd’s murder, universities initiated various inquests, programmes and research projects to uncover their colonial inheritances. The University of Bristol, for example, embarked on an inquiry which culminated last year in the reparative pledging of £10 million to address current inequalities. At the same moment, the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge held an exhibition detailing the institutions’ links to enslavement. These developments, echoed to varying degrees across the country, spoke to an increase in public awareness of Britain’s history of exploitation.
It was not, though, only these advances which gained universities their ‘woke’ status from the conservative crowd. Originally from African-American Vernacular English, ‘woke’ is literally a synonym for awake, used specifically in the context of being alert to social injustices. ‘Woke universities’, by this definition, should refer to any that are actively seeking to rectify their institutional wrongs and imbue a new generation of scholars with emphasis upon respect, equality and active allyship.
However, by 2022 a study by King’s College London found that more people understood the term as an insult than compliment. It was this derogatory sense invoked by conservatives like Braverman, who kept ‘woke’ ill-defined and ubiquitous enough to be a convenient descriptor for any and all potential scapegoats. The ‘woke universities’ of the press became 1984-esque caricatures of censorship, where academic freedom was suppressed and the brave individuals who dared speak out were ‘de-platformed’. In fact, university administrations continued to profess their commitment to open discourse, one that was clearly felt by students, given that 86% of those surveyed by the Office for Students in August 2023 said they felt free to express their opinion. To give a recent domestic example, Oxford’s Vice Chancellor Irene Tracey just announced a new ‘colloquium’ designed to foster conversation between polarised opinions.
There may have existed a broad consensus within students themselves and between undergraduates and executive bodies on this principle of open conversation, but a division in attitude towards action is observable. Take de-platforming, for example. Boycotts have typically been student-led decisions, not to censor hateful speech, but to prevent its promotion.These were rarely the life-altering acts of censorship they were made out to be, for this would have required administrative interference. The 2020 rejection of Selina Todd from the National Women’s Liberation Conference on the grounds of transphobia had no effect on her ongoing professorship at St Hilda’s, for example. These deplatformings were not a ‘left-wing’ only phenomenon, either. Conservative Science Minister Michelle Donelan, for instance, called for the cessation of all ties between UK Research and Innovation and Professor Kate Sang of Heriot Watt University in 2023 after Sang reposted a Guardian article Donelan took to be pro-Hamas. Examples like this involve far more tenuous evidence, and far more career-altering repercussions, than the action taken by progressive students above—precisely because they are made by administrative figures.
The gulf between administrative opinion and student activism evident in the two groups’ approach to no-platforming, so often ignored by the commentators who reduce universities to a monolith of opinion, was significantly widened by the war on Gaza. At the peak of encampment activity in May, there were 36 bases modelled off those in US Colleges, against which university administrations took increasingly antagonistic measures, including High Court appeals for permits to clear out those involved. The barriers adorning the outer Radcliffe Camera, and the pre-arrival mass emails which stressed the need to ‘express ourselves through civil debate, regardless of our views on events that are taking place’ clearly articulate this new tension within the university structure.
Does the last year mark the death of the university as a protector and outlet for calls against social injustice? There is room for optimism here. Administrative action is not always indicative of ideology; financial and practical pressures are ever-increasing, with consequences particularly for humanities degrees in which working class and BAME students are over-represented. And it is important here to remember that universities are not solely represented by their administration. The divide between executive bodies and students hampers any attempt to categorise whole institutions into woke or non-woke.
Given these complexities, it’s safe to say that the idea of ‘woke universities’ is largely a reactionist creation of the right wing. Problematised beyond easy deployment by the controversies surrounding Palestinian action, the label has largely faded from the current toolkit of commentators, and deserves to be relegated to the past entirely. Focus has instead shifted to specific university courses – particularly those ‘Mickey Mouse’ degrees – as if in tacit acknowledgement that it is now difficult to see universities as united bodies monopolised by a particular group and ideology. The potential for universities to be progressive sites, alive to social injustice and actively schooling staff and students towards its elimination remains. That hope, though, will require re-negotiation of the relationship between mainstream student opinion and university government.
