Why Wokesters Hate Merit

It's because when you don't have much, it's difficult to compete with those who do.

The Diamond on the East Face of Longs Peak. I spent a week there one day.

Though I'm of the opinion that we have reached “peak woke,” I'm less sure that we'll be rid of woke anytime soon. I read an op-ed a few days ago that speculated on a coming period of “plateau woke.” That might be just about right.

“Woke,” as you know, is a term used to describe a veritable cornucopia of progressive chicanery: overreaching diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, disregard for public safety, reparations, “decolonizing” various academic fields, environmental hysteria and support for various ”identity” movements.

As with most things, there happens to exist a glimmer of reason in some of this. But just a glimmer. A half-watt incandescent bulb operating on a California power grid level of glimmer.

Having said that, the only thing worse than wokeism are conservative efforts to erase it via government fiat. I'm not for any of that. I want every wokester out there to feel completely free to say what's on their mind. Then the rest of us, whom I dare say constitute a majority, can enjoy telling them why they are full of crap.

This week Sam Brinton, a recently fired DOE official, was arrested and charged with several felonies. Brinton, who earned a MS in Nuclear Science and Engineering from MIT, has a very colorful history that precedes his career as the official in charge of our nation's nuclear waste disposal program. It's all out there on the Internet for anybody with a computer and a browser to examine. How Brinton ever obtained a security clearance is a mystery to me.

Brinton's particularly over the top claims concerning personal experiences with conversion therapy have been challenged by gay activists - who have a lot to lose with a person like Brinton claiming to be in the vanguard of the LGBTQ movement.

Brinton's involvement in crafting policies advising schools to withhold information from “non-affirming” parents concerning their children makes him the poster child for why school is choice popular everywhere. I don't think it will be more than another decade before public schools are little more than underperforming day care facilities for families with no options.

Yet, with all of that, I don't give a hoot that that Brinton identifies as non-binary, I don't actually care very much about his personal life. I do care that he's an alleged felon and was far from the most qualified for his government job. He was picked for his position to semaphore virtue, by idiots. There is not enough ridicule in the world for whoever selected Brinton for the job.

I came across an article this week about a group of scholars at Concordia University who are bent on “Decolonizing Light.” Their work focuses on “tracing and countering colonialism in contemporary physics.” While this group is funded by the Canadian government, they are following the lead of groups at universities in our country.

Physics, engineering and math are the last frontiers to conquer for the postmodern crowd. If they can succeed in co-opting the most empirical of disciplines, their takeover of higher education will be complete. That's why there's such a push among the woke to show that math is racist and that things like modern astronomy are just “ways of knowing” that are not intrinsically more instructive than indigenous ideas about the heavens.

When you remove merit as a criterion for evaluating ideas, you're not left with much. It does level the playing field simply because the bar is set at zero. That's the reason wokesters hate merit. When one's achievements are not based in any tangible merit, one is unlikely to be being taken seriously in fields where merit is required. That won't do.

So how did we get into this sorry state? It's been decades in the making – and I observed much of it up close.

Universities have skewed liberal since the 1960s, but it wasn't until those who came of age under the tutelage of liberal dogma from the 60's and 70's started teaching that liberal morphed into crazy. There were three principal factors that fueled the transition from education to inculcation: government guaranteed student loans, an exponential rise in the number of college administrators and the reluctance, among a lot of faculty, to stand up to any of this.

Government-backed student loans meant that students could borrow money to pursue degrees in fields with less-than-great earning potential. Universities where more than happy to comply since they got their money whether the students were ultimately successful or not. It was, in fact, in their interest to create fields of study that didn't require a lot or work, discipline or scholarship to keep students in seats and the tuition spigot flowing.

The abundance of student loan money begat the rise of administrators. While the number of faculty and students have grown at colleges and universities over the decades, the number of administrators has grown exponentially. Since administrative workloads have not grown exponentially, many administrators have had to invent new things to do in order to perpetuate their existence. This has lead to all sorts of mischief.

I once had an administrator with no background in science insist that his knowledge of the requirements for an experimental setup I was putting together exceeded my own. When hundreds of students from the Middle East brazenly cheated in classes, insulted, demeaned and threatened female teaching assistants and tried to intimidate other students, the administrative response was that those of us who objected must be anti-Muslim.

That, by the way, is a go to tactic for the left. Objecting to poor behavior is tantamount to objecting to the unchallengeable. No matter the circumstances, you can't win.

I asked many of the students that we caught red-handed why they did it. “It's just the way that things are done where we come from.” That was probably true. Too bad that no one in administration cared get to the bottom of it. The reason for that lack of interest was that they got paid the same whether they sucked at their jobs or not.

I saw terrible, bordering on fraudulent, scholarship promoted over actual scholarship because it gave administrators a tingle in the leg. Bigfoot, magic energy crystals, cold fusion - an idea almost could not be bad enough if there was some chance to make a splash.

None of this would have worked, of course, without faculty acquiescence. In higher education I met some of the brightest, hardest working and most fearless people in the world. But there were not enough of them to make up for the fools who'd do anything for a pat on the head.

Overall, college faculty express boldness only when talking down to students. When it comes to standing up to peers or administrators, many are quite meek. The wokeness wave rolled faculty before they could even yell for help.

Matriculate enough individuals into public life through a system that requires little actual exposure to the amazing body of knowledge that human beings have accumulated, or any controversial thought, and you end up with decision-makers who think that a bizarre individual who can't be blackmailed only because he's already put everything out on the Internet is a great fit for running a Federal agency.

I see few signs that any cavalry is coming. I wouldn't hold my breath for things to get a lot better anytime soon.

Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time with family, riding bicycles and motorcycles, arranging and playing music. His writing on Substack, “Howlin' at the Moon in ii-V-I” may be found at martinhackworth.substack.com. Follow him on Twitter @MartinHackworth