Britain needs new, non-woke universities

Our academic institutions are rejecting free speech. Open-minded students deserve an alternative

Several universities in the UK now have what amount to mandatory “wokeness” tests, in which new students must give the “correct” answers to questions on progressive topics such as equality, diversity and sustainability.

The University of Kent puts all its students through a “white privilege” quiz, while at St Andrews, they must take a course and acknowledge their “personal guilt” before they can begin their studies. Freshers at Wolfson College, Cambridge, have been told to attend anti-racism seminars covering everything from “microaggressions” to how “whiteness is centric” in society.

At these and many other universities, students attempting to hold debates on supposedly contentious topics, such as feminism, abortion or Israel, may find their speakers intimidated away. On some courses, it is so widely believed that expressing non-woke opinions would mean poor grades (if not dismissal) that it seems likely that students who don’t agree either suppress their true opinions (presumably underperforming as a result) or else steer clear of these subjects altogether.

Admittedly, this progressive and censorious shift may well reflect the opinions of today’s young people. In a recent YouGov poll of those who took a view either way, 70 per cent of 18- to 24-year-olds thought being woke was more a good thing than a bad thing. But for the rest, there should be provision made so that they can pursue the subjects they are good at, enjoying freedom of conscience and expression.

Some have proposed new rules enshrining universities’ obligation to protect free expression on campus. But another path would be competition.

The government could broker and fund the creation of new “non-woke” or more tolerant progressive institutions, while still allowing the current core to conduct themselves as they think best. In the US, the University of Austin has been established for just this purpose.

Non-woke, or tolerant woke students who wished to engage with differing views, could then decide whether they valued the ability to study in an environment of freedom of conscience. Maybe they actually don’t care. Or perhaps a progressive university environment creates a disciplined setting, with wellestablished ground rules that facilitate study, just as a school with rules that may seem excessively strict to outsiders might actually work better than a more liberal institution. The competitive process and outcomes (such as the university experience, exam results and how students turn out afterwards) will tell. Different methods could be assessed on a range of metrics.

Woke people often find proposals of this kind incomprehensible. They don’t regard their beliefs as matters of political opinion or debatable in any way, viewing them as merely facts or the unquestionable moral consensus. As they see it, principles such as the idea that treating people of all races the same is the best route to a harmonious society, or that only women can have a cervix, are simply factually wrong. To have a university for people who believed such things would, to them, be like having a university for people who think the earth is flat.

Perhaps most university study is indeed best conducted in an environment of disciplined purity, with students and lecturers protected from encountering opinions and behaviours they might find offensive or otherwise distracting. But for a minority, the freedom to hold and express opinions that the majority of the adult population consider commonplace will be key to a flourishing university life, not to mention success in the real world.

The government should support universities that wish to do that, without feeling it needs to crush the core woke approach in the process. Let a thousand flowers bloom, and time and competition will tell us which type of university soil is most fecund.