Defenders of woke will always cloak their efforts to denounce and cancel their critics with claims of protecting freedoms of the vulnerable; opponents of woke see through this ruse, and must gird themselves for another long march if they are to reverse woke’s advance. As Williams reminds us forcefully, there is a great deal at stake. From schools that teach children to question their gender identity, to universities that provide students with ‘content warnings’ for classic works of literature; from local councils that remove statues of historical figures, to multinational corporations that sell virtue alongside their products; woke thinking has seeped into every aspect of our lives.

Popular disregard for academic freedom shows the extent to which the very purpose of higher education has changed. Rather than intellectual risk taking, we have a culture of conformity. Rather than dissent, we have consensus. Rather than challenging the status quo, we have adherence to predetermined values. And, as we have seen, so often nowadays, these values are woke. This is a really good book – with smart writing and (despite the polarizing seeming title) a truly inclusive (classically liberal) message about the current stage of the culture war where cultural distinctions and criticisms have gone way beyond concerns of preference and taste to moral evaluations and proclamations on the right to even exist (ie. The Cancel Culture). Universities are not the institutions they once were. They are no longer terribly bothered about educating students. At least, not if ‘educating’ means imparting knowledge; facilitating discussion and debate; or encouraging students to read widely, ask questions and engage in research by themselves. Education now plays second fiddle to a seemingly far more important project of training students in a woke worldview. Indoctrination is not antithetical to higher education: it is the whole point. Meanwhile, the lecturers’ union, UCU, fails to protect members who are targeted by woke mobs of academics and students. In response to the government’s proposed Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill, UCU said: ‘There are serious threats to freedom of speech and academic freedom from campus, but they come from the government and university managers, not staff and students.’ It would undoubtedly be better not to have academic freedom policed and enforced by a government that shows scant regard for the importance of free speech and, indeed, little understanding of what academic freedom actually entails. But when so many in our universities are intent on denying there is even a problem, we cannot underestimate the monumental scale of the cultural change that is needed. Welcome to the world of ‘woke’ anti-racism; just one manifestation of the phenomenon of wokeness that has swept across the West, transforming school curricula, workplace relations, competitive sports, policing, politics, history, free speech, and the administration of justice. British author Joanna Williams thinks this transformation is so complete that she is provoked to declare woke has triumphed in her important new book, How Woke Won: The Elitist Movement that Threatens Democracy, Tolerance and Reason.

They mean well, of course, but their politics – obsessed with identity, division and even tech utopianism – have more in common with those of Californian high society than the kind of people who voted in Hartlepool yesterday. The loudest voices in the Labour movement over the past year in particular have focused more on pulling down Churchill’s statue than they have on helping people pull themselves up in the world. By the following year, ‘woke’ had become so mainstream that the Oxford English Dictionary listed it as one of its ‘ new words of note ’. It was defined as: ‘originally: well-informed, up-to-date. Now chiefly: alert to racial or social discrimination and injustice’. The online Urban Dictionary of street slang had defined ‘woke’ two years earlier as, ‘being aware… knowing what’s going on in the community (related to racism and social injustice).’ Joanna Williams argues that woke’s moral righteousness and veneer of egalitarianism belies the intolerance and authoritarianism of its leading proponents. Woke values now extend far into established social and cultural institutions. This has happened not because of the strength of woke ideas, but because institutions have long since abandoned their founding principles. Schools, universities, museums and the media are no longer driven by an imperative to impart knowledge, to pursue truth, to preserve the past or to cultivate beauty. These important values were problematised and rejected a long time ago. Woke ideas have, far more recently, provided those in charge of national institutions with a new sense of purpose. The importance of language

Woke values aim to promote social justice through the foregrounding of identity politics. This entails categorising people according to immutable characteristics such as race or sex, before dividing and ranking them according to assumed hierarchies of oppression. A therapeutic ethos presents emotional safety and financial precarity as intrinsically linked; it assumes that people who are either traumatised or subjected to discrimination cannot compete as equals in the workplace. Shon Faye writes: ‘To be trans is an experience bound up with economic struggle.’ In this way, Faye and other woke activists redefine social class. There is a world of difference between someone with connections, wealth and education falling upon hard times and the structural, generational and geographical disadvantages that working-class people routinely encounter. Despite the instruction to #BeKind, advocates of woke can be ruthless in their treatment of those who fall short of total ideological purity. This month marks the 400th anniversary of the first printed edition of Shakespeare’s plays. Thanks to the First Folio , the Bard’s work continues to be performed all around the world and his words, that so often perfectly encapsulate the human condition, endure. At the time of writing, Lisa Keogh , a law student at Abertay University in Dundee, is facing formal disciplinary proceedings and possible expulsion from her course. Her crime? In a seminar discussion, Keogh made the outrageous claim that ‘women have vaginas’. This may be a simple biological fact. It may also be something almost every person over about eighteen-months of age knows to be true. But a central tenet of wokedom has it that sex is nothing more than a label arbitrarily assigned at birth and that self-declared gender is all important. Keogh transgressed. She told The Times : ‘I didn’t intend to be offensive but I did take part in a debate and outlined my sincerely held views. I was abused and called names by the other students, who told me I was a “typical white, cis girl”.’ For blaspheming in this way, Keogh’s ambition to become a lawyer may now lie in ruins. But How Woke Won also points to a way forward. The good news is that whenever woke thinking is subjected to free speech and democratic scrutiny, it falls short.These books are about politics, not literature. Read Woke is about promoting a way of thinking steeped in crass understandings of identity, victimhood and social justice, not introducing children to beautiful language, aspirational characters and morally complex situations. When such books are promoted by schools, as is the case in Scotland, this is indoctrination, not education. She concludes this podcast with a passionate call for free speech and democracy. Saying: “We need to challenge Woke. We need to have free speech to involve more and more people in our democratic institutions and put far more issues to the public to let them have their say rather than it being a protected realm of a small elite.” Racial divisions are rehabilitated in the name of anti-racism. Women’s rights are destroyed in the name of trans rights. Ordinary people are demonised as bigots, while virtue-signalling (but exploitative) corporations pose as radical. The woke university has a biologically diverse but values-aligned student body taught by politically homogeneous instructors. Why woke? Some argue woke values took off in universities with the dominance of critical theory. But this can make it seem as if postmodernism won out because of the strength of its ideas or that it achieved success through a Gramscian-inspired ‘long march through the institutions’. In reality, the ascendancy of woke has less to do with the intellectual authority of critical theorists and more to do with the abject failure of an intellectual elite to defend enlightenment values such as rationality, reason, liberty, progress and tolerance. Even in the 1960s, radical young scholars often found themselves pushing at an open door as an older generation of professors no longer had the confidence to maintain traditional scholarly principles they saw as tainted following the experience of war in general and the holocaust in particular. It was not long before they also struggled to defend the political gains of the civil rights movement and the cultural canon.