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In Desire and Fate (2024), the writer David Rieff, an avowed leftist, favors a more sweeping view and highlights a less familiar narrative, one especially relevant at a time of ascendant illiberalism: “If the liberal university of today is collapsing — and it is — this is not because it has been undermined from within by cells of scheming Marcuseans in a long march through the institutions.” In fact, “It is all much more straightforward: The liberal university has collapsed because liberalism as the governing consensus of US … society has collapsed.” Wokeness came to dominate campus politics because liberals — guided, as Rieff observes, by the humanitarian sense that “where there is a need, there is a right” — enabled its rise by accepting the terms of its critique.
The German-born philosopher Hannah Arendt presciently recognized the transformation of liberal education as part of a larger story of the generalized decline of authority in Western societies, an account Rieff seems to endorse. As Arendt argued in “Authority in the Twentieth Century” (1956), liberals long ago conceded to radical critics the crucial point that social progress requires the diminishment of forms of authority that are not democratically sanctioned, such as the authority of parents or of teachers in the classroom. Arendt feared that well-intentioned progressive reforms to education would veer toward radical experimentation, “leading to a re-evaluation of the very concept of authority.” She foresaw that “education without authority” would undermine pedagogical outcomes while emboldening a neoconservative reaction.
In the decades since, activists have invoked progressive goals to press for the redefinition and expansion of rights for some groups and their restriction for others. For example, credible reports suggest that “free speech” on campus has often come to mean in practice an unrestricted license for left-wing protesters to disrupt activities and occupy common spaces while simultaneously preventing opposing viewpoints from being heard. In response, conservatives have pressed for a sweeping crackdown on what they see as leftist infiltration throughout academe.
The transformed culture of campus speech reflects a changed view of its status in liberal societies more broadly. Once seen as nearly absolute — especially in the U.S. — free expression is now curtailed by other normative considerations such as emotional sensitivity and historical injustice. Speech construed as offensive to marginalized groups and powerful vested interests has been punished and censored on and off campus. At the same time, its regulation has become politicized as activists look to carve out exceptions for preferred viewpoints. Yet few are happy with the current situation. Both supporters and opponents of Israel’s war in Gaza, for example, report feeling silenced and harassed.
The contemporary public square is less a marketplace of ideas than of competitive outrage and grievance. The erosion of the discursive premises on which the academy depends calls into question its very foundations. To quote the British philosopher and educational theorist Ronald Barnett, “The two pillars or axioms on which the idea of higher education has rested — those of objective knowledge and social independence — are both then under attack. The pillars are cracking. The ‘ivory tower’ they have seemed historically to support appears to be far from safe.” Barnett’s words, written in Thatcher’s Britain, ring true in Trump’s America.
Once seen as nearly absolute, free expression is now curtailed by other normative considerations such as emotional sensitivity and historical injustice.
As left- and right-wing illiberalism subvert higher education for their own ends, each serves as an alibi for the other. Rieff argues that the collapse of liberalism leaves capitalism unaffected: Progressive college graduates “continue to flock to Wall Street, corporate law, and other high-earning professions” in similar percentages to earlier generations. As the sociologist Musa al-Gharbi has observed, wokeness is partly an alibi for sheer self-interest, a masquerade that traffics in symbolic exchange. Its magic trick is to substitute a reallocation of cultural prestige and recognition for the transformation of material circumstances, thus incentivizing radical performances of virtue.
According to French theorist Jean Baudrillard, the process of symbolic exchange allows institutions to process and divert challenges to their legitimacy. It rewrites materially grounded social relations as a code of signifiers. Race, gender, and other markers of marginalization or privilege serve as nonfungible tokens in this new code. In a society where historical oppression was often based on race, wokeness is a “moral emollient” that allows for forms of symbolic remediation toward individuals to replace any broader program of redistribution. As the reactionary aristocrat Tancredi proclaims in Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard: “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” Wokeness ensures that substantive economic and political changes remain minimal. The CIA and Nike can speak the language of intersectionality as fluently as its academic avatars.
Wokeness has shown an undeniable entrepreneurial flair. As a cultural force, it disciplines and mobilizes resentment, creating forms of subversion that are compatible with capitalist incentives, allowing for the reconstitution of elite groups in the name of greater diversity while leaving underlying systems of power and privilege intact. (As the political scientist Adolph Reed Jr. remarked, “The real project of Woke was to diversify the ruling class.”) In recent years, a new architecture of virtue has arisen based on the moral elevation of claims to victimhood, with race and gender replacing class. A woke paragon like Ibram X. Kendi can strike lucrative deals with Netflix without compromising his radical bona fides.
On one level, therefore, wokeness effects a depoliticization of justice, converting political mobilization into an individualistic spiritual prerogative — that of finding one’s true, ineffable self in a world without obstacles to its expansion and development. Rieff calls this “a secular vision of the religious idea of redemption… [of] a society from which all human cares have disappeared.” When considered in these terms, the role of elite colleges in the new culture wars becomes clearer. They are the site where the promise of self-realization is offered most directly and unabashedly at exceedingly high prices to the young adults most susceptible to its lure. In the process, the tragic alterity of a world that never permanently bends to human wishes is effaced.
But displays of wokeness — like the forms of kitsch they closely resemble — also demand collective expression. Kitsch, as the Czech novelist Milan Kundera remarked, “causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass.” Like kitsch, wokeness imposes moral transparency and universal assent. This universalizing zeal also gives it a quasi-religious fervor reminiscent of revolutionary politics. It represents the latest attempt to “spread over the whole face of the earth the holy fire of universal fraternity,” in the words of the French revolutionary firebrand Claude Fauchet.
Here the influence of his father’s second book is also resonant. The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud criticized the expansionist tendencies of the psychiatric profession under the influence of Freud’s disciples, arguing that figures like Carl Jung and Wilhelm Reich had reconfigured the psychoanalytic method as a secular substitute for religious redemption. In Desire and Fate, Rieff acknowledges that he initially resisted his father’s ideas and those of other cultural critics of a conservative bent but, faced with the ideological transformation of the academy in what he refers to as the anglosphere, eventually found their conclusions undeniable.
Rieff fils accuses the American academy of a hubris similar to the one his father found in the psychiatric profession: Both offer salves for the soul and the ills of society. Colleges promise a secular equivalent of salvation in the form of expected future income and social status. The implicit compact of elite institutions is that those who gain access must be celebrated as extraordinary and denied nothing. College admission is “now understood as the beginning of a transaction, almost as if one were placing an order on Amazon, with just as firm an expectation that one’s order will be fulfilled.” Yet in a peculiar ritualistic inversion, the future valued customer needs to petition for entry based in part on her status as a victim (someone who has suffered “trauma”) or as an acolyte who will join hands with similarly anointed others on the march to a paradise of global justice. At the same time, elite colleges have become bespoke luxury brands with lucrative international franchises.
It is encouraging that some colleges, faced with attacks from the right, have rediscovered a sense of purpose and a renewed focus on their core values. But it remains worrying that they fumbled when defending those values.
The hypocrisy suggests, as Rieff writes, “the old Babbittry … of small town White Protestant America” but globalized; students are encouraged to present themselves as good citizens working in the service of “emancipation and redemption” but really seeking unchecked personal advantage. The absurd skyrocketing of tuition at U.S. colleges in comparison to peer institutions elsewhere supports this claim. Some elite colleges, as Rieff points out, are nearly as rich as Gulf oil states on a per-capita basis; yet their campuses are in cities or neighborhoods where much of the (often nonwhite) population lives in poverty. Something’s got to give. One solution is to turn college into a humanitarian enterprise by relabeling ever-finer gradations of experience as oppression. On American campuses, this dishonest moral jujitsu serves as the basis for a burgeoning and costly administrative infrastructure focused on student wellness, regulatory compliance, and the moral rearmament of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Echoing an essay in these pages by Amna Khalid and Jeffrey Aaron Snyder, Rieff argues that a reckoning with DEI as often incompatible with academic inquiry is long overdue. Rieff, however, considers it naïve to think that “the university can resist the transformation of the culture at large” and its preference for more convenient and frictionless transactions. Reflexive acquiescence to student demands for emotional comfort and safety is not just a symptom of institutional cowardice but a broader societal problem: “A society in moral free fall,” he contends, “will eventually go into intellectual free fall.” Here Rieff alludes to the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, who observes that moral reasoning enshrines a social consensus that education helps to foster and promote but cannot instigate on its own. Social progress is downstream of education in foundational subjects like the liberal arts. Because, as Appiah argues, consensus should ideally form through discussion and debate, it cannot begin by presupposing its own telos. Making emancipation or redress the focus of education subverts the process of learning.
It is encouraging that some colleges, faced with attacks from the right, have rediscovered a sense of purpose and a renewed focus on their core values. But it remains worrying that they fumbled when defending those values put them at odds with the left — witness the disastrous testimony in congressional hearings on antisemitism of multiple college presidents, whom many saw as more frightened of campus activists than of government inquisitors. Colleges today face challenges from various directions. The Trump administration’s assault has been underway for just a few months and has made halting progress. So far, the administration’s barrage of threats and executive actions might be likened to a violent thunderstorm that for all its fury may pass relatively quickly. (The specter of legislation targeting university endowments looks a lot more dangerous because it is less easily evaded or rescinded.) Pressure by the left, meanwhile, involves a subtle but persistent demoralization of higher education that erodes its cultural foundations. The undermining efforts of woke activists have been going on for years, if not decades, and in general they have been embraced rather than resisted.
The recent infusion of campus life with a callow radicalism detached from reality — emotive idealism that throws tantrums and settles for ice cream — compounds both threats. To effectively counter the incursions of both the Trump administration and the woke, colleges need to recover a sense of balance and proportion. They cannot continue to function simultaneously as academies of radical activism and expensive finishing schools. Resilience calls for much less “irate fragility” — Rieff’s phrase — and much more of his tragic realism. Recovering from a long era of hubris and overreach requires exposing some cherished pieties as fraudulent.
