How to Defeat Wokeness Properly
A talk on how to reform the university, abolish ideological exemptions, and make Critical Social Justice defend itself
(This is a transcript of a talk given at the 2026 Heterodox Social Sciences Conference at the University of Buckingham)
Nearly everybody in this room agrees that Critical Social Justice—or “woke”—has become a serious problem within the academy: one hostile to objective truth, academic freedom, individual liberty and scholarly standards. The disagreement is not over the diagnosis but the cure: should disciplines shaped by Critical Social Justice be abolished or reformed?
That disagreement was neatly illustrated in a recent exchange between Nicole Barbaro Simovski of Heterodox Academy and J. D. Haltigan, Professor of Developmental and Evolutionary Psychopathology. Writing in defence of reform, Simovski argued that the real question is not whether ideologically homogeneous departments should be preserved or abolished, but whether universities will do the harder work of reopening them to genuine inquiry. Viewpoint diversity, she argued, is not a token gesture but a necessary condition for knowledge production.
Haltigan’s response was blunt:
“You don’t introduce viewpoint diversity into something like Gender Studies. You abolish it. It is not science. It is not knowledge. It has no place in the university.”
At first glance, these positions appear irreconcilable. I don’t think they are. Once we distinguish between what universities study and how they study it, much of the disagreement dissolves. Sex, gender, race, ethnicity, culture and identity are all legitimate subjects of inquiry. The problem is not the subjects. It is the epistemological framework through which they are increasingly being studied.
This distinction is reinforced by the recent Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences. The report recognises that excellent scholarship exists in every field it examined, but says:
“The most straightforward form of distortion arises when otherwise traditional scholarship is constrained by disciplinary norms to yield results that have been determined in advance to be required by a political or social project.”
If we want to preserve the humanities, this is the problem to solve. Crucially, it is not merely the conclusion of outside critics but one reached by many scholars within these disciplines.
It is also what my colleagues and I set out to test in the Grievance Studies project. We deliberately wrote papers around political conclusions chosen in advance, supported them with impossible or implausible claims, stretched theory to fit, and abandoned ordinary scholarly standards. Rather than rejecting this, reviewers urged us to push further.
One reviewer expressed a wish to make our argument that queer astrology is as valid as astronomy a reality in physics classrooms. The leading feminist philosophy journal accepted, in nine days, an argument that criticism of Critical Social Justice should itself be treated as oppression and punished by universities. A paper claiming that nightclubs are inherently rape-condoning spaces and that men should be trained like dogs based on implausible observations of thousands of incidents of “dog humping” won an award from a feminist geography journal.
The absurdity is obvious. The real tragedy is what this does to rigorous scholarship within these fields.
That was brought home to me by two emails I received after our award-winning geography paper was exposed. One came from a group of empirical feminist geographers studying sex discrimination in the allocation of medical resources in South Asia, deeply concerned that the publication of work just like ours was undermining theirs. The other came from a scholar who blamed me for damaging the journal’s reputation because she had a paper due to appear in it. When I suggested that the real damage was being done by scholars publishing papers like ours in complete seriousness, she concluded that this merely demonstrated my racism and misogyny.
Those two responses captured the divide. Some scholars wanted higher standards. Others defended the framework that had allowed obvious nonsense to pass as scholarship.
The abolitionists’ objection is almost never aimed at scholars doing rigorous research on sex, race, identity or culture. It is aimed, quite rightly, at the critical-theoretical framework that has come to dominate large parts of Identity Studies. The reformers’ proposal is not to preserve that framework, but to subject it to rigorous scholarly standards and competition, requiring it to justify itself or fail.
Reform is often cast as the cautious option, and abolishing departments called things like “Gender Studies” as the radical one. The opposite is true. The source of the problem is not departments or course titles, but an epistemology, coupled with an authoritarian certainty, that has spread far beyond them. Abolishing a handful of departments is a cosmetic fix; it cannot address the way of thinking now running through much of the university.
Critical Social Justice rests on a distinctive postmodern understanding of knowledge, power and language. It treats knowledge as something constructed through relations of power and perpetuated in language. Those who embrace this framework regard themselves as uniquely able to perceive these hidden structures, while dissent is read as ignorance or complicity. There is nothing new in this: religious zealots and conspiracy theorists have been doing it for centuries.
The Humanities Report identifies exactly this problem, describing:
“A long-standing and deeply rooted current in contemporary humanistic scholarship that regards the idea of scholarly objectivity with profound suspicion.”
This is not the uncontroversial observation that scholars are fallible or influenced by their social context. It is the far more radical claim that truth, objectivity and reason are themselves expressions of power. As the report continues:
“A scholar who repudiates the language of truth and evidential support will see the political standards she brings to bear in assessing scholarly proposals as no less legitimate than any other standard...”
Once that premise is accepted, political commitments become not merely legitimate criteria for evaluating scholarship but the only valid ones. The report calls this a ‘catastrophe’ for the humanities. I think that is the right word.
If the problem is ultimately epistemological, authoritarian and widespread, it becomes clear why abolishing departments or courses cannot solve it. That approach removes wokeness in conveniently identifiable chunks while leaving intact the conditions that allowed it to spread. It has two problems.
First, it risks destroying legitimate scholarship along with the ideological excesses. We saw this last March, when the Trump administration proposed measures targeting courses and research that used terms such as race, gender, class or equity, referenced transgender ideology, or were deemed anti-Israel. Universities hurriedly removed anything that might attract scrutiny. Sociologists and economists studying social mobility, historians and legal scholars researching America’s racial history, and international relations scholars analysing the Israel–Hamas conflict were all caught in the net. Biomedical datasets went too, affecting, to my knowledge, researchers studying HIV in the United States and even those opposing puberty-blocker trials in England.
Second, it mistakes the symptoms for the disease. Critical Social Justice has spread far beyond Identity Studies. Remember that our most notorious paper was published in geography, and our flagship paper in philosophy, a discipline the report identifies as containing both outstanding scholarship and serious problems. The fields in which I was penalised for referring to evolutionary biology were history and literature. The academics and students who contact me now most often come from teacher training, social work, clinical psychology, nursing and medicine.
Trying to cure universities of wokeness by targeting its most visible manifestations is like lancing the boils of a systemic infection while leaving the bacteria in the bloodstream. You remove the obvious symptoms, but the disease remains alive and well.
Meanwhile, academics genuinely committed to Critical Social Justice can simply change their terminology while leaving their epistemology and their hostility to free inquiry entirely intact. This is a central theme of Cynthia Burack’s excellent forthcoming book, How Gender Studies Broke the University. Burack, a gender studies professor, describes how her colleagues responded to external pressure not by abandoning their assumptions, but by changing their language, reorganising institutional structures and creating hidden processes that continued to privilege affirming scholarship while excluding dissent. As she concludes:
“This is how I know a piecemeal, guerrilla warfare approach to respect for free speech and debate is bound to fail. Free inquiry requires institutional infrastructure.”
I suspect everyone here agrees with the second sentence. The real question is what that infrastructure looks like. Burack argues that free inquiry cannot be sustained by reacting to bias or censorship whenever it appears. Those interventions are necessary, but reactive. Instead, free inquiry must be built into the university itself, modelled by academics and administrators, reflected in policy, taught explicitly to students, and upheld whenever disputes arise.
For her, this is fundamentally an epistemological commitment. Universities should cultivate the critical thinking that makes knowledge possible: evaluating arguments, weighing evidence, engaging seriously with criticism, and recognising logical fallacies and cognitive distortions. Students should encounter serious arguments from competing perspectives, learn when questions can be answered empirically and when they turn on values or interpretation, and see academics modelling intellectual humility by acknowledging uncertainty and engaging fairly with those who disagree.
That is why I do not think we should simply aim to abolish departments because they use language or concepts we now recognise as “woke”, as some abolitionists recommend. What we need instead is something much more ambitious: a renewed commitment to the purpose of the university itself. It means rigorous methods grounded in the assumption that knowledge is obtainable; an uncompromising commitment to individual liberty and free inquiry; and the restoration of reason, evidence, coherence, viewpoint diversity and responsiveness to criticism as the common currency of scholarship.
That is reform—not of subjects, but of epistemology.
Some scholar-activists argue that insisting on evidence, reason and viewpoint diversity simply imposes another worldview. It does not.
Universities should not impose a single worldview or require historians, philosophers or political scientists to reach particular conclusions. Different disciplines ask different questions and use different methods. Not all of them even seek empirical truths. Literature can be interpreted and aesthetically evaluated. Philosophers must be free to challenge evidence, reason or freedom itself. Political scientists must be able to hold political views and argue from them. What universities should demand is not neutrality, but something harder to evade: intellectual honesty, openness to criticism, and scholarship demonstrably fit for purpose. This does not enforce agreement on conclusions, only standards for reaching them.
Interpret a poem, and you owe no one evidence. Make a claim about the world, or impose a policy on other people’s lives, and you owe them coherence and, where the claim is empirical, evidence.
Critical Social Justice does not confine itself to interpretation. It makes claims about the world and prescribes policies for it, and to prescribe a policy is to claim that it will work—a truth claim answerable to evidence. Its advocates must therefore choose. Either they want their claims warranted, and have already accepted the standards they profess to reject, or they do not, in which case they give us no reason to believe them, fund them or act on them. A framework that denies that objective knowledge is obtainable cannot coherently demand to be believed.
This is where woke claims have struggled. Unconscious-bias training, rolled out across universities, corporations and public institutions, has repeatedly failed to produce its promised effects, and where effects appear, they often run in the wrong direction. One large study of over 800 US firms found that the share of black women in management fell by 9 per cent on average after five years of mandatory diversity training. Compulsion provoked the very resentment it was meant to dissolve.
Universities already refuse certain grounds for knowledge: a researcher cannot appeal to divine revelation or diagnose criticism as demonic possession. We call this not persecution of the devout, but the price of admission—an expectation that claims must be supported by evidence and defended against criticism. Critical Social Justice has been exempted from that price, and I see no reason to keep exempting it.
As activists like to say, “When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.” They’re right. Subjecting Critical Social Justice to the same standards as every other scholarly tradition is not oppression. It is equality.
And none of this bans a single idea. Perhaps we are all wrong, and queer theory, the critical theories of race and the rest have more to offer than they appear to. If so, there is a way to find out: let them compete on an even playing field, defending their claims according to the standards required of any rigorous scholarship and engaging seriously with competing hypotheses, not dismissing critics as unenlightened or declaring topics ‘not up for debate’.
Imagine what a genuinely reformed Gender Studies department might look like: an open debate in which gender conservatives, who see gender roles as a natural and good expression of sex differences, weigh their ideas against those of gender-critical feminists, who see those roles as socially constructed and harmful to women; queer theorists, for whom an internal sense of gender is more fundamental than biological sex; and evolutionary psychologists, who draw on biology and psychology to understand psychological sex differences.
Does anyone really think queer theory would emerge from that process strengthened?
My suspicion is that, if required to submit their ideas to such critique, many advocates would simply leave the academy. But they would not have been banned, no-platformed or silenced. They would not acquire the glamour of forbidden knowledge and retreat while crying persecution and gaining support on those grounds. They would simply have conceded that their methods do not meet a university’s standards. Those who stayed to argue would only demonstrate the poverty of their arguments.
This is where reform and abolition turn out not to be so different. Bad ideas are not defeated by prohibition. They are defeated properly and lastingly by being exposed to rigorous criticism and shown to be false, incoherent or indefensible. There is no better place than a university for that to happen.
This approach also plays the long game. We do not establish the precedent that governments, managers or prevailing orthodoxies may decide what can be researched or taught. Nor do we risk those ideas returning, or other equally bad ones replacing them, whenever political fortunes shift. Instead, we restore the conditions that transcend politics and make scholarship possible.
Serious scholarship exists across these disciplines; serious epistemological corruption exists alongside it. The university exists to produce knowledge, and that requires evidence, criticism, humility and openness to revision. Those who accept those conditions should be free to participate, whatever their politics. Those who reject them reject the purpose of the university itself.
I don’t think the choice is between reform and abolition. I think we should reform the epistemic conditions of scholarship in order to abolish the ideological exemptions that have corrupted it. My argument is not that epistemic reform offers an easy path, but simply that, if the problem is epistemological, only epistemological reform addresses it at its source.
If we can preserve the subjects but restore academic rigour, Critical Social Justice will not need to be banned. It will simply need to defend itself against competition.
I do not believe it will survive.
What happens in the Universities has real world consequences. When David Gillborn starts answering to the damage he did is pounds and pence terms, then the argument will die via financial strangulation and prosecutions. John Cotton can try to explain his attempt to run Birmingham based on Intersectionality at his trial.