Conservative and liberal scholars unite in manifesto against wokeness

Conservative and liberal scholars have published a manifesto calling for an end to “wokeness” in the humanities, the College Fix reported.

“This peer pressure on academic freedom has constricted and warped the production of knowledge,” political science professor Eric Kaufmann said in an email, according to The Fix. 

“It has made us dumber about the social world, not smarter,” Kaufmann said.

“The Buckingham Manifesto for a Post-Progressive Social Science”, first published by The Chronicle of Higher Education in July, calls for a “post-progressive social science” to be “pursued in new universities and centers, among dissident scholars in the academic mainstream, in think tanks, or, best of all, in a future academe rededicated to open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and civil discourse.”

Harvard and other Ivy League institutions are among the signatories of the “The Buckingham Manifesto for a Post-Progressive Social Science.”  (Sophie Park/Bloomberg)

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“In the second two decades of the 21st century, academic and cultural institutions were suddenly seized by a radical ideology known as Critical Social Justice, Intersectionality, the Identity Synthesis, the Successor Ideology, or most commonly, Wokeness,” Kaufmann said.

“This takeover took many by surprise and remains unexplained. We hold that the wokeness revolution was not compelled by new discoveries or moral imperatives but is a contingent historical episode that needs to be studied, just as scholars have sought to explain the rise of nationalism, communism, neoliberalism, and populism.”

Kaufmann organized the manifesto at a Heterodox Social Science conference at the University of Buckingham in June. According to Kaufmann’s Substack detailing the conference, scholars assembled at the conference shared concerns about “forbidden topics or viewpoints,” such as “the negative economic effects of immigration, or whether differences in family structure help to explain racial inequality.”

Conservative activist Christopher Rufo. (Photo by Thomas Simonetti for The Washington Post via Getty Images)

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He explained further that “cultural left ideology” achieved a position of “institutional hegemony.”

Several scholars signed on from America’s prestigious institutions, like the Ivy League, as well as prominent conservative activist Christopher Rufo, and liberal scholars including Steven Pinker from Harvard. Academics from other countries, including Canada, Italy, the United Kingdom, Turkey, and Argentina, signed the manifesto as well.

“In signing this manifesto, we are trying to define the new social science and theories that will guide knowledge production in the post-progressive era,” Kaufmann told The College Fix.

Conservative and liberal scholars published a manifesto calling for an end to “wokeness” in the humanities, the College Fix reported.

“They disagree on how to reform higher education, but agree that we need this new, positive, research agenda,” he added.

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Kaufmann also announced a Buckingham Research Award of up to $100,000 for “post-progressive social science research” in the near future and a new book, “Post-Progressivism: Toward a New Social Science.”