Woke

Without freedom of speech, you do not have a university. More than any other value, it is freedom of speech that most defines the university, that makes it a special place in society set aside for debate and inquiry in which speech and thought should be freer than in practically any other workplace or institution. And yet an alarming proportion of students seem not to have got the memo. A new study by the Policy Institute at King’s College London confirms what has been clear for some time: that today’s students, far from being rebellious free-thinkers, are if anything more supportive of censorship than the general population. The numbers are pretty

I’m going to do something that will likely annoy you, dear reader: I am going to make an argument about a certain class of people without naming names. If I do name names, any response will devolve into a debate over whether I am unfairly tarring the individuals in question. That’s beside the point, because the phenomenon in question is undoubtedly real. That phenomenon is anti-wokeness curdling into reactionary crankery. Don’t get me wrong: as I’ve previously written, I think there’s a moral panic afoot in many liberal institutions. Whether you want to call it ‘wokeness’ or something else, it seems undeniably the case that a culture of illiberalism has corroded

This week, Sam Leith spoke to Francis Fukuyama – the author of ‘The End of History and the Last Man’ and the newly released ‘Liberalism and its Discontents’ on the latest episode of The Book Club. You can watch their conversation below, listen to it here or read this transcript. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.   Sam Leith: Liberal is a word that means something very different in Tennessee than it does in Muswell Hill. What exactly are the parameters of what you call classical liberalism? Francis Fukuyama: It does have a very different meaning in the United States than it does in Europe. My definition of it is closer

Have you heard about ‘Woke Coke’ – ‘Wokaine’, if you will? Apparently drug dealers are now targeting the WaWs (Woke And Wealthy) with gear at £200 a gram (when I quit six years ago, £70 was the going price) and a promise that your particular little bindel of joy is ‘environmentally friendly’ and ‘ethically sourced’ from ‘well-paid farmers.’  Reading about it this week, I didn’t know whether to laugh, cry or call the police and report myself for historical crimes against humanity. I don’t regret much in my long, louche life. But if I could go back in time and undo one thing, I’d return to 1985 when I started taking

There is a belief in some quarters of the Anglosphere that the French are too wise to succumb to what is known across the Channel as ‘wokisme’. It’s true that in recent weeks Emmanuel Macron and his education minister, Jean-Michel Blanquer, have expressed their concern about what the latter described as a battle against ‘an intellectual matrix from American universities’. But the battle has already been won by the far-left in France who are largely in control of all forms of education.  The front cover of this week’s edition of the conservative magazine, Valeurs Actuelles, says it all: ‘Universities: laboratory of the lunatics’ Inside, the magazine describes how radical feminism,

Is Boris Johnson woke? That’s a question the Prime Minister’s spokesperson struggled to answer today in a lobby briefing. Instead of a ‘yes’ or ‘no’, they responded by saying Johnson was committed to levelling up all communities. The reason for the question in the first place relates to an interview shadow foreign secretary Lisa Nandy gave to the Guardian in which she asserted that new US president Joe Biden was ‘woke’ (that may come as news to him, given he was confused what the term meant during his presidential campaign).   This, in turn, led to the Prime Minister being asked whether he agreed that Biden was woke – to which Johnson looked lost for words. Eventually he embarked