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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023

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I think your BAU and likely the particular department within the BAU is pretty unrepresentative. I'm a faculty member at a different BAU and it's really nothing like this at all.

I will second this comment. Comparing my actual personal experiences in what was supposed to be the most extreme possible environment to what I read on the internet is what made me completely distrust the "wokeness is taking over everything" narrative in the first place.

Same world, different screens? I don't know how to reconcile these two comments with my personal experience.

My spouse has been a tenured humanities faculty member at a BAU for 20 years, with several different stints across the country the decade before that. Between our own experience and that of dozens of friends in the academy, everything the OP wrote rang true to me, except the timeline at the conclusion (our institution is 5-10 years ahead of the OP's account).

I'd add that faculty social life is stultifying - it's not that you can't ever have real conversations with people about difficult topics, but it takes a long time to break through the suffocating blanket of conformity. Most social encounters start with progressive consensus-building about the issues of the day, and often can't move past that. It's worse if there are unfamiliar people in the group, or administrators.

These phenomena may not universal, but are, at a minimum, widespread. Above all, I'd love to know what your institutions are doing right that you don't see this.

Same world, different screens? I don't know how to reconcile these two comments with my personal experience.

Check the poster's username and history. They're a fish not noticing water.

This is not the kind of comment you can throw out without evidence. And if you do point it out with evidence, it should be done as lightly as possible in a non-antagonistic way.

You should know better.

That's unfair: atokenliberal's username is a wry commentary on the average orientation of The Motte, plus his/her posting history demonstrates both a solid degree of self-awareness and a reasonable theory of mind of his/her political opponents.