At the University of Manchester , staff have been advised not to use terms like ‘mother’ or ‘father’ but instead to use more inclusive and gender neutral words like ‘parent’ or ‘guardian’. Likewise, ‘men’ and ‘women’ should be replaced by ‘individuals’ while ‘manpower’, ‘mankind’ and ‘chairman’, and should be replaced with ‘workforce’, ‘humankind’ and ‘chair’. The University of Edinburgh provides a list of transphobic phrases that academics and students must not say. It includes ‘all women hate their periods’ and ‘you’re either a man or a woman’. In the US, Northwestern University advises that rather than greeting friends with ‘Hey, guys’, people instead say ‘Hey, everyone’. It also issues guidance for ‘socio economic language’ recommending ‘under-resourced’ rather than ‘inner city’ and ‘working hard to make ends meet’ rather than ‘working poor’. Survey after survey suggests that most people do not identify as woke, yet woke thinking now dominates advertising, publishing, the media, civil service and our education system. Even our police and prisons are woke. Language plays an important role in demarcating the woke from the non-woke. Knowing to say people of colour rather than coloured people; transgender rather than transsexual; Latinx rather than Hispanic; and sex assigned at birth rather than simply ‘male’ or ‘female’ serves to differentiate people who are woke from those who are not. This acts much the same way as saying lavatory or toilet, napkin or serviette, sofa or settee signified social class in decades past. One important role for universities is to induct students into this woke language either through immersion or through formal training in mandatory antiracism workshops or consent classes. In turn, young graduates carry this vocabulary and its associated ideas with them into the workplace. The more woke language and principles are adopted by a social and cultural elite, the more they are assumed to be mainstream and the more those who use outdated terminology stand out. It may seem absurd to afford a tabloid buzzword like Woke with any degree of intellectual seriousness, but Williams’ arguments – peppered with persuasive evidence and delivered in a scholarly and detached tone – somehow manage to elevate this tired term to the academic plane.

Has woke “won”, as Williams claims? Her extensive survey of the spread of woke, taking in developments in the UK, the USA, and Australia — remember Yassmin Abdel-Magied stomping out of the Brisbane Writers’ Festival in 2016? — certainly indicates that woke is ascendant and that its influence is pernicious. But Williams concedes rather too much in declaring that woke has already clinched victory. “Ultimately,” she argues, “woke is a defensive stance from an elite that has lost its authority.” 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.With its moral righteousness and veneer of egalitarianism, woke ideology lends authority to the demands made by activists and those in positions of power. 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. Rather than posing a challenge to institutions, the decolonise movement simply confirms mainstream academic thought. In the woke university, both staff and students share the same intention: to decentralise the western intellectual tradition in favour of teaching content that can be shown to represent biological, rather than intellectual, diversity. Woke politics has extended far into established social and cultural institutions. This has happened not off the strength of woke ideology alone, but because such institutions have long since abandoned their founding principles. Schools and universities, museums and art galleries, even the media and legal system 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 first; then proponents of woke ideology saw an opportunity and readily filled the moral vacuum. Woke thinking provides those who run national institutions with a moral mission and a sense of purpose underpinned by a commitment to social justice. This shift in values represents a broader cultural change and not just a short term political fad. Joanna’s writing has been published widely in the UK and the US including The Sun, The Daily Mail, The Telegraph, The Spectator, The Guardian, The New York Post and American Conservative.

Abertay University hit the headlines, but in silencing and investigating student Lisa Keogh, it is simply enacting what higher education institutions everywhere now view as their primary role: preparing young adults for the woke workplace. Students might leave university having read little, discussed less and unable to formulate a critical thought. They may have become illiberal, intolerant and ignorant. But they will be fluent in an ever-shifting woke vocabulary and know the exact phrases required to have transgressors cancelled. A century ago, universities trained up young men to work in the colonies, managing and civilising natives. Today, universities play a similar role: only now, the natives are at home. Few self-identify as woke. No political party stands on a self-declared woke manifesto. Yet, over the course of several decades, a particular set of values has become embedded within our institutions, government and businesses. This movement resists a label and has few self-identified advocates. Still, its proponents are easy enough to spot. They insist on purity. They cast out those who might be sympathetic to their cause but are not au fait with the latest woke vocabulary, at the very same time as they refuse to engage in debate. Woke’s advocates are critical of older arguments for equality. And, by focusing on identity, they overlook material concerns and see working-class people as requiring re-education. Woke is intolerant of national pride and is particularly scathing of national heritage and tradition. It is also anti-democratic – woke activists try to impose change from the top down, while denying that woke even exists. This is why naming and pinning down this movement is so important. While it might occasionally be overused, the word ‘woke’ names one side of the culture war. And having named it, we can identify, expose and challenge it.

Sign up now to finish reading

And this is where we find ourselves today. The woke university has a biologically diverse but values-aligned student body taught by politically homogeneous instructors. Induction and ongoing training sessions reinforce the importance of holding the correct views and teach the correct terminology for expressing such views. Dissent is squashed, consensus insisted upon. The decolonised curriculum struggles with Newton, Darwin and Hume but embraces unconscious bias training and diversity workshops. Education can still be found but both academics and students have to search long and hard for it. Nonetheless, grades keep rising and certificates keep on coming.

Even ostensibly anti-imperialist voices have welcomed the irony of a descendant of the Irish Famine now having the authority to reprimand the nation that ruled Ireland during that Famine – ‘the Brits’. In 2020, when Biden was bristling at the prospect of a ‘Hard Brexit’, Emma Dabiri, the Irish author of What White People Can Do Next, celebrated ‘the circularity’ of the fact that a son of the Famine now has ‘the authority to thwart Britain’s Brexit ambitions’ and its ‘continued disregard for Ireland’s fate’. There you have it: imperial interference ain’t so bad when it comes dressed in the finery of identity. America’s arrogant urge to meddle in the affairs of smaller nations – in this case, Brexit Britain – is forgivable, it seems, when it’s underwritten by the cult of the victim rather than the realpolitik of power. The book is a comprehensive and detailed survey of the ways in which woke thought and practice have corrupted so many of the institutions comprising civil society. It has done this by adopting the intellectual architecture of Critical Theory which holds that imbalances of power in society are hidden from view by dominant cultural structures, such as language and the way knowledge is imparted. Only by exposing these structures is it possible to reveal the extent to which the ‘oppressed’ are held in subjugation by the ‘oppressors’. Dr Joanna Williams is Head of Education and Culture at Policy Exchange. She is an author, commentator and the associate editor of Spiked. The woke elite accuses critics of ‘starting a culture war’, despite the fact that those raising questions about changed policies and practices are often commenting after the event, on actions that have already been set in motion – it is their values that are being called into question.”These same woke practices – the adoption of a particular stance that appears radically egalitarian but often runs entirely counter to previous movements that shared the same goals; the creation of new vocabulary; the policing of language and behaviour – are replicated across a range of issues. To be woke is to see gender as multiple and fluid and to employ a complex vocabulary that begins with trans- and cis-gender and branches out into nonbinary, agender, pangender, genderqueer, demigirl and so on. Yet to be woke is also to believe that demonstrating masculine behaviour makes someone a man (whatever their sex) while to be a woman is to look and act feminine. There is a woke stance on sexuality, feminism, race, disability, the environment, the police, what to eat and drink, where to shop and what to buy. US universities began to use affirmative action programmes to increase representation of groups historically excluded from educational opportunities because of their race or sex as the Civil Rights movement took off in the 1960s. Many agreed this was a necessary corrective to decades of legal discrimination and its lasting legacy of social and economic disadvantage. More controversially, at some institutions, affirmative action included the use of ‘racial quotas’ to ensure recruitment of a certain proportion of students from different ethnic groups. But, this being 2023, it is not the end of the matter. The Times also featured a piece on Read Woke , drawing heavily upon the Telegraph ’s coverage, including its comment from Dr Sehgal Cuthbert. But, according to the Times , the story is not that education – and children – are being exploited at the behest of a small number of activists. No, for the Times , the real story here is that this is being challenged: ‘Call for ‘woke’ books to be withdrawn from South Ayrshire schools’ is the headline the paper runs with.