As the culture war has raged across the West, one of the most significant battles has been in universities. In the United Kingdom, where the woke takeover of campus life is increasingly undeniable, cancellation campaigns are frequent, whole departments are in hock to radical leftist ideologies, and faculty and students alike—especially conservatives and gender-critical feminists—are ‘self-censoring’ their views for fear of a backlash. The stifling intellectual atmosphere fostered by today’s ruling orthodoxy surely has Milton, Locke, and Mill turning in their graves.
On the front lines of this has been Eric Kaufmann, a professor of politics at Birkbeck University, London, and that rarest of beasts in British higher education: an outspoken conservative academic. Readers may know Professor Kaufmann as the author of Whiteshift: Populism Immigration and the Future of White Majorities (2018); as a perceptive analyst of religion, demographics, and the culture war; and for his appearance at this year’s NatCon in London, where he gave a speech entitled “In Defence of Particularistic Nationalism.” In recent years, Kaufmann has also emerged as a discerning critic of woke ideology, which he defines, usefully, in a single sentence: “The sacralisation of historically marginalised race, gender and sexual identity groups.”
In Britain, Kaufmann has helped to quantify the censorious climate on campus and to design the UK government’s pushback in its Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023. This became law in June, and establishes a statutory “free speech champion” to ensure that universities protect academic freedom. As if to prove why such measures are needed, Kaufmann himself, has been the target of numerous denunciations from Birkbeck students and faculty over the past five years as he has become more politically active.
Now Kaufmann is leaving Birkbeck for the two-hour drive out of the capital to the University of Buckingham. Buckingham is one of Britain’s few not-for-profit private universities and a notable up-and-comer: it is currently the UK’s top ranked university for freedom of expression, according to this year’s National Student Survey. From January, Kaufmann will be teaching a new course at Buckingham, open to students worldwide, titled “Woke: the Origins, Dynamics, and Implications of an Elite Ideology.” A master’s course on “The Politics of Culture” will follow in September 2024. Both are the first of their kind in the world and will form part of a new Centre for Heterodox Social Science, of which Kaufmann will be director.
I spoke to Professor Kaufmann to learn more about this new front in Britain’s higher education culture war.
You’ve been at Birkbeck for 20 years, in what you’ve described elsewhere as a “fireproof job for life, a tenured professorship, gold-plated with a nice pension.” Why did you feel the need to leave?
It was a combination of factors. During 2018-22 I experienced a steady drip of attempts by radical staff and students to cancel my reputation and job: an online petition, several Twitter mobbings instigated from Student Union radicals, and a radical staff member who left and wrote a long blog piece claiming that my writing was the reason. In addition, radicals initiated several internal investigations. I also feared that my ability to conduct research would be cut off if activists could gain seats on the research ethics committee. Then the university experienced an economic crisis, so this was the last straw.
By establishing a heterodox course at a free-speech university, what you’re doing at Buckingham is a bold new venture. How do you view its prospects? How does it sit in the wider context of UK academia?
Buckingham is one of the UK’s only private universities, established by Margaret Thatcher in 1976, and with conservative or classical liberal leadership. Though staff and students lean left, the tilt in the social sciences is not so extreme as elsewhere in the UK, where Left outnumbers Right nine to one. I aim to achieve three major things at Buckingham. First, set up a course on woke, open to a global public from January, and non-credit bearing. Nothing of this kind exists in the world as far as I am aware.
Second, establish a new Centre for Heterodox Social Science to conduct research in areas that, while not extremely controversial, are difficult or impossible to tackle in regular UK universities: for instance, to argue against decolonisation of the curriculum, or to question the idea that disparities of outcome are evidence of structural discrimination. There are some 150 of these non-left centres in America but none in Britain.
Third, to launch a new M.A. programme in the Politics of Culture next year, providing a space where there is viewpoint diversity and an ethos of complete freedom to contest ideas. It is one thing to have sound institutional policies, but a politically balanced peer group is also essential, and is quite difficult to achieve when left-wing students outnumber those on the Right six to one at the undergraduate level, and higher at postgraduate level.
Let’s turn to your new course, which aims to “assess woke in an empirical and analytical manner.” Scanning the reading list, one is struck by its interdisciplinary nature. There are intellectual genealogies of woke, like Cynical Theories (2020) by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, Yascha Mounk’s The Identity Trap, and Christopher Rufo’s America’s Cultural Revolution. Alongside these sit institutional histories, like Christopher Caldwell’s The Age of Entitlement (2020) and Richard Hanania’s The Origins of Woke, both of which focus on U.S. civil rights law. Other sections, like “The Rise of the Therapeutic: From Freud to Fragility” offer a psycho-social diagnosis for woke, culminating in works like Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s The Coddling of the American Mind (2018). Why is it important to study woke with academic rigour?
Woke is one of the most important cultural developments of our age. It is a form of the cultural Left’s ideological challenge to a liberal order that has persisted for several centuries. It is upending culture and institutions, and remaking politics. It is astounding that it is going unstudied because the progressive majority in academia wants to pretend it is merely about safety, ‘politeness,’ or some other therapeutic consensus. It is crucial to open up this hegemonic discourse to the usual academic methods of measurement, testing, and falsification. Academic rigour also means that one cannot simply substitute another favoured ideology for that of the progressives.
More broadly, conservatives have to understand that the culture war is no sideshow. It is a fight for Western civilisation: for reason, for liberty, for the nation.
Finally, you’re not the first leading conservative academic to make the move from Birkbeck to Buckingham. What do you make of the comparison with the late Sir Roger Scruton?
There are a lot of similarities: we both spent around twenty years at Birkbeck and sought out Buckingham as a refuge. We are also similar inasmuch as intolerance from our peers and an ideological monoculture made life difficult as a conservative dissenting from the consensus opinion. The difference lies in the rise of a more intense victimhood culture among radical staff and students in the 2010s as compared to the ’80s (Scruton lectured in Philosophy at Birkbeck from 1971-1992). Activists now try to weaponise therapeutic language to bring the weight of the university’s punishment apparatus to bear on heretics, so as to force them out. Social media and the internet also can now act as force multipliers for reputation-shaming in a way that wasn’t true in Roger’s day.
For the new online course starting in January, expressions of interest are open here.
