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In recent months, there have been several instances of elite universities or their faculty members offering some kind of institutional pushback to a censorious progressivism. Prominent examples include Cornell's refusal to create a trigger warning requirement demanded by the undergraduate student assembly, the formation of a Harvard faculty group defending academic freedom and Stanford's official condemnation of the disruptions at a conservative judge's law school talk.

These developments dovetail with the argument made earlier this year by Musa al-Gharbi at Columbia, a perceptive observer of the culture war, that the Great Awokening as a period of intense moral fervor may be winding down — that after "10 straight years of heightened unrest in knowledge-economy institutions and knowledge-economy hubs" we're seeing a partial depoliticization, a diminishment of ideological policing and cancellation attempts. And they also dovetail, to some extent, with a recent essay from Matt Yglesias, the Vox co-founder turned Substacker, arguing that critics of wokeness risk creating a self-fulfilling prophecy if they constantly emphasize the obstacles to free speech and the professional penalties for heterodoxy, rather than simply encouraging journalists and academics to have courage and recognize that you can take a controversial position without being immediately professionally disappeared.

I agree with al-Gharbi that the recent intellectual trends within liberal institutions are somewhat more favorable to free debate, and I agree with Yglesias that intellectual courage is necessary and that the language of anti-wokeness sometimes encourages people to imagine a more Soviet situation than actually exists. But I also think that there are different ways that an era of "heightened unrest" and ideological revolution can give way to relative cultural peace.

In some situations, the revolution might be rolled back or resisted or collapse of its own accord. But in others, peace might arrive because the revolution feels confident in its path to ultimate victory and no longer feels an urgent need to make examples of its enemies; it can move comfortably to entrenchment, the institutional long march.

The latter scenario is suggested by Canadian academic Eric Kaufmann's response to the wokeness-has-peaked arguments. The current pendulum swing is real enough, he argues, but the ideological enforcers don't need to win every near-term battle to win the institutional war:

"… in the long run, liberalism is giving way to progressivism in elite spaces. The new cultural liberalism in the media reflects the views of senior staff members and is opposed by affinity groups and young employees. That's important, because surveys consistently find that 'woke' values are twice as prevalent among younger leftists than among older leftists. Over 8 in 10 undergraduates at 150 leading U.S. colleges say speakers who say [Black Lives Matter] is a hate group or transgenderism is a mental disorder should not be permitted to speak on campus. What's more, 7 in 10 think a professor who says something that students find offensive should be reported to their university. Young academics are twice as censorious as those over 50. These are the editorial teams and professoriate of tomorrow."

There's a lot to say about this subject, but I want to focus on that last sentence, because I think it conflates two experiences that reality may substantially divide: the intellectual climate within media and journalism on the one hand and in academia on the other.

Both of these professions are subject to the pressures and ideas and incentives that gave rise to woke progressivism, and both have experienced various forms of internal tumult in recent years. But my sense is that their ideological paths have already diverged a bit and are likely to diverge further as the generational turnover Kaufmann describes continues.

To be clear, I'm discussing the media outlets that traditionally think of themselves as mainstream enterprises — ideologically neutral or center-left or small-l liberal, not explicitly political in their formal missions, with some room for diversity, even though their staffs vote mostly for Democrats. These organizations seem less likely to become as ideologically bunkered as similarly situated academic institutions because of several forces that limit the full entrenchment of progressive ideology.

First, the media is, by definition, an outward-facing, audience-driven enterprise, dependent on some kind of mass market for its viability. Mass audiences can make their own ideological demands and effectively capture some of the journalists who serve them; you can certainly see versions of this happening in explicitly right-wing media in the Trump era. But wokeness has often been more of an elite-driven ideology, with special influence in academia and professionalized activist organizations, and its rules and shibboleths tend to spread from inner circles outward, rather than being demanded by a mass public first.

Which means there will always be a large potential audience that doesn't "get" the new ideological rules, or not yet, and for whom dissent or debate around the emergent order will seem much more normal and desirable than to true believers. And if normal debate seems poised to disappear from a given publication or broadcast channel, some readers, listeners and viewers will follow the argument elsewhere — to a rival, a startup, a Joe Rogan-esque alternative or a platform like Substack, if necessary. And some of the commentators and journalists whom they follow, who choose to work in this terrain, may even end up much more richly rewarded than they were before.

This doesn't create an outright veto on ideological uniformity, especially given the power of consolidation in, say, newspaper journalism, where the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post all loom much larger relative to the diminished daily-newspaper competition than they did when I started out as a writer. But it still creates market-based checks on certain internal mechanisms of ideological enforcement. To take a television example, it's not just up to internal opinion at Netflix or HBO whether to air a Dave Chappelle special or keep running Bill Maher's show; the mass audience gets a pretty important vote as well.

Relatedly, with Maher's longevity as a useful exemplar, there will also always be a certain audience for spectacle, combat and argument in media. Maybe not as large an audience as there should be — more people than one would hope just want their beliefs confirmed. But contrarianism and debate remain a resilient business model, which creates a certain professional advantage (ask me how I know) for taking unpopular positions, for being the guy whom other people argue with, the representative of the less fashionable view.

Especially because journalism seeking a large audience has to engage every day with some version of reality, it has to describe and react to national events and social trends and all the arguments, even disreputable or demagogic-seeming ones, that influence the democratic process. So unless everything is always going progressivism's way, this creates constant points of potential tension between ideological coverage and effective coverage, and a permanent incentive to give not just your audience but actual reality a vote in how you write about or talk about the world.

The elite academic environment, on the other hand, faces a substantially different set of pressures and incentives. It isn't just stereotyped as out of touch with commercial and practical political realities; it's somewhat out of touch with these forces by design. In the best case, the ideal case, this can have a freeing effect upon the intellect; you don't care about currying favor with readers or advertisers, you don't need to worry about the current partisan alignment, you can just tell the honest-to-regression-analysis truth.

But in an atmosphere of ideological entrenchment and growing political uniformity, this protected setup can effectively shrink the intellectual world that the typical academic inhabits: Professional advancement depends on small networks of potential patrons and allies; becoming ideologically uncongenial to even a small number of key decisionmakers can redirect or torpedo a promising career; and with extremely rare celebrity exceptions, there is no outside force, no nonacademic audience, whose support or favor can rescue your vocation if the inside game goes against you.

Tenure, in theory, should provide a counterbalance, enabling academics who survive the initial gauntlet to enjoy more freedom than the more precariously employed journalist. And there are certainly academics who use this freedom to the fullest. But tenure is probably most effective at protecting faculty members from external pressures, not internal ones. And what it takes to get tenure in an atmosphere of ideological uniformity — the social and interpersonal work involved and the deep embedding in a specific university culture — creates extremely powerful incentives not to be reckless in using the freedom and security that you've won.

As Sarah Haider writes in a thoughtful post on the limits of tenure as a guarantor of diversity and debate, in many cases "tenure might simply make more room for social pressures to pull with fewer impediments." Because "if keeping your job is no longer a concern, you will not be 'concern-free.' Your mind will be more occupied instead by luxury concerns, like winning and maintaining the esteem of your peers."

And these won't feel like luxuries if your peers are the people you have to work with every day, your neighbors and your social circle, the fellow parents at your kids' school, etc. If those relationships fall apart because you've strayed too far ideologically, then your tenure is suddenly worth a lot less than it would be if you just keep within certain lines.

I've known a couple of academics who were tenured but whose views or statements made them pariahs in their departments or their fields. Their experience was not one of liberation but of being trapped, in jobs that made them socially miserable and with no ready means of professional escape.

Obviously, these same dynamics can affect journalists as well. We, too, have neighbors, colleagues and peers whose affection and respect we would prefer not to lose. But along with the social-professional world we also have the world where we're selling our work — selling our product, if you want to be crass — and there is some balance between those pressures, some ways in which contrarianism reaps benefits in the market that compensate for its potential social costs.

Consider this personal passage in Yglesias' piece, describing his own experience of leaving Vox amid the ideological unrest and cancellations of 2020:

"… I also had moments when I felt like the world had gone mad and got into hot water at work for saying so. But the result is I now also make way more money than I used to, I have a good side gig as a columnist for a reputable news organization, and contrary to my fears when I first struck out as a Substacker, I still generally have my emails answered by people in politics and government."

That is basically everything I'm talking about distilled: Yglesias absorbed a set of personal and professional costs by being somewhat unwoke, but he then found compensations elsewhere in the media ecosystem, while also retaining his connection to the world of practical liberal politics — precisely because politicians have to be practical to win. Crucially, he did not cease to be a journalist in this process; he merely changed his journalistic identity, and his position within the profession changed but didn't fall apart.

But if you told an academic who feared cancellation — a young sociologist, let's say, with views one tick to Yglesias' right — that if she were to lose her chance at tenure or dramatically shrink the range of colleagues eager to work with her or lose various research and publication opportunities, "Well, you could always start a Substack," you would be telling her that she could continue expressing her opinions while ceasing to be an academic. And while I am all for demanding courage and intellectual honesty and related virtues, people calling for those things need to recognize that they're asking for bigger professional sacrifices and risks from some groups than from others.

This also suggests that university leaders who want to encourage those virtues need to do more than just refuse the formal modes of progressive ideological enforcement (trigger warnings, DEI loyalty oaths) and try to discourage student mobs. They would need to offer some sort of reward structure for intellectual heterodoxy (centrist heterodoxy at least if not, God forbid, conservative), so that young academics especially feel like there are some obvious compensations to go along with the social and professional risks.

Of course, many other forces besides professional peer pressure are at work in academia today, from conflicts with Republican politicians in red states to the potential effects of the SAT's diminishment and the loss of confidence in meritocracy to the enrollment decline that's already begun and may accelerate in a low-birthrate America. In the long run, some combination of these forces will probably radically change the ideological climate for academics in ways that are impossible to predict.

But in the near term, for the universities most protected by wealth and stature from outside influences, the incentives seem lined up to make academia more stifled-feeling, less intellectually diverse and more ideologically conformist than the world of professional journalism is likely to become.

Ross Douthat joined the New York Times as an Opinion columnist in April 2009. Previously, he was a senior editor at the Atlantic and a blogger on its website. He is the author of several books and the film critic for National Review.