Why Universities are Woke: Profit and Profile

Professor Moeller on "Academic Industry".
#JordanPeterson #Wokeism #Woke
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D-I-E must DIE:

Jordan Peterson: Why I am no longer a tenured professor at the University of Toronto:
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Commodification of Philosophy: Professors vs Influencers:

Reply to Jordan Peterson: Individualism, Wokeism, and Civil Religion:

Jordan Peterson: The Mirror of Wokeism:

Wokeism:
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Outro Music:
Carsick Cars - You Can Listen You Can Talk:
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Hans-Georg Moeller is a professor at the Philosophy and Religious Studies Department at the University of Macau, and, with Paul D'Ambrosio, author of the recently published You and Your Profile: Identity After Authenticity" .
(If you buy this book, or any other by Hans-Georg Moeller, from the Columbia University Press website, please use the promo code CUP20 and you should get a 20% discount.)

[lethalbee]

This reminds me of Zizek's rant against Starbuck's Ethos water programme, a water bottle where when you buy it, part goes to helping thirsty children all around the world. This programme is of course not about helping children, but selling 'good conscience'. A good moral conscience has become part of the profile that companies use to sell products.

As universities become corporatized, as you correctly point out, 'being progressive' becomes another part of the profile a university must sell. I think you could have added that universities especially must chose this particular branding, because their targeted demographic are young and progressive - if your target demographic are rural, non-educated and older, your profiling must of course be different.

[origaminomicon]

this analysis nails it. i've been looking for a good breakdown of how "wokeness" - in academia as well as culture and media - is less what peterson calls an insurgent leftism and more "rainbow capitalism", or as you say corporate neoliberalism simply responding to market forces. well done and thank you sir 🙏

[aFoxyFox.]

I'm always extremely pleased to see more activity on this channel and wish you all the very best! For whatever reason, even though you might seem to keep a bit of reserved distance from the audience, you are one of the most "close" and "real" seeming YouTube presenters and content creators around, and I appreciate so much all the effort made to make you and your work and expression available online and accessible worldwide, it is a tremendous gift! I like to check in on here to see how you are doing!

[applejohnnyseed]

Couldn't you also say that corporate capitalists have a stake in distracting their workers by having them focus on things like sensitivity training instead of giving them better material resources for living? I don't think it's a phenomenon seen only in academia. In the United States, Starbucks workers had to undergo racial sensitivity training years before they were even able to unionize. Good video

[sixtusthesixth]

Jordan Peterson-related content might get more engagement, but I would prefer to see your online brand gain more independence from his. Also, not that it particularly matters, but my favorite content of yours is the Philosophy in
Motion channel, and I’d love to see more of that

[peterbedford]

As someone who recently toyed with getting into the academic industry with a lot of post graduate study, the more and more I experienced it the more abysmal it became. The professor is right, universities aren't really about teaching anyone anymore, they are about selling products (degrees). Whether anybody learns anything along the way is secondary to the neoliberal university. If the product is purchased, they are really happy. Also the general appreciation of research by university administrators has declined so greatly over the last 30 years. Working in a university is about output output output. It is not about taking a lot of time to find great outcomes in your relevant field or pursuit. Plus new academic staff can expect to be only casually employed for year after year, with their contracts only being renewed for each teaching period, with no long term job stability at all. In some universities (in Australia), a lot more courses are being pushed online (with the initial pandemic being used as an excuse), with no return to face to face, with no lecturers being used for the course, just people who write the course and casual markers used. Of course, someone can still enjoy a good academic career amongst all of this, but it is becoming harder and harder to enjoy an academic career for learning and academias sake itself. Desperately need to bring back reform to view learning as a public good. Also trust Peterson to observe phenomena and radically misattribute the cause. It's basically his hallmark. But yeah, I wouldn't totally recommend a career in the academic industry at this stage.

[jeffhogue]

If students are paying customers. I want my money back. The service was horrible lol

[kevinsteffler]

When I went to high school, we had a somewhat novel track team. Anybody who wanted to join could join, and they could participate in any event they wanted to. The result was an ongoing spring fitness party where everyone got together and trained after school. There were many great achievers on that team, but everyone got to become a better athlete.

This is the vision we need to fix our education systems, everyone can learn and grow, and a good educational system is one that provides as much education as it can to everyone it can.

No need to convince the world you are worthy, just show up and do your best.

[francojosemuertes]

I many times find myself in a tricky position in these debates. Because on one hand i see many of the issues symbolic "wokeness" in academia causes, how it manifests itself in classes, structures debates and publications, on the other hand most of the critique that comes from namely figures like Peterson completely ignores many of the actual issues and historical structural wrong doings that are addressed and tackeled by "wokeism". I don't want to be in a position where I find myself defending superficial neoliberal social media ideology, (especially since european racism is a lot more complex and multilayered than it's american counterpart that drives the western discourse) but neither should modern christian capitalist conservatism ala Peterson be the driving force in any public institution or academia.

I think "wokeness" is a arbitrary symptom of neoliberalism. Just like outlined in the video the underlying problems are profiling, brand building, faux-moralism, the job market, established industries and people actually buying into things like "nike being the good guys" because they have a POC as a spokesperson. "Wokeism" is indirectly reproducing the economic system with it's superficial symbolism but Peterson style conservatism just openly doesn't want it to change anyways, he just doesn't like it being diverse, inclusive or even attempting to be critical, because of 'brilliant' arguments like "that's against human nature and western values". Why not focus on the bigger picture without letting yourself get radicalised by conservatives?

[edhiepitz]

how come you are the only person who correctly diagnose wokism as symptom of Neo-Liberalism? great job professor

[jootsing]

I remember being astonished by the culture in cognitive science at my university. Older professors were fantastic teachers, delivering their lectures with passion, but seemed distraught by the students fighting for higher grades but less work. If you asked questions about the material itself, if you were curious to understand, they seemed thrilled. I was almost put off by their shock and excitement.

As an older and engaged student, this seemed insane to me. Not only was it easy to get good grades, but it was extremely enriching so it was very easy to dedicate time to these papers and projects. Many of the younger professors seemed put off by these same questions. Many seemed intellectually unqualified to me. It was hard to take them seriously. Some clearly got by with BS, copying slides or simply indulging politics in classes that allowed for that sort of flexibility (a minority of the philosophy classes I took). Something was very very strange.

It seemed like there were 2 worlds. The old school which is now dealing with the new dynamics, the administration and the student culture, and clearly frustrated. And then the new school, which seemed intellectually inadequate and generally underinformed, but fit to be good controllable workers. I remember a professor giving me advice when I asked her what to do if I'm writing an essay in philosophy but would like to say what I believe, and what I believe is that her own understanding of the concepts being taught was faulty... and she told me straight up, "you're very smart and educated on these topics, but you need to take the scientist hat off and put the salesman cap on"... there were social standards she seemed to imply had to be met to make it.

Years after leaving academia, I maintained my own studies of philosophy of mind on my own, and continued writing in private. I attended a free weekly seminar during the pandemic, one organized by a professor and some graduate students (one being an old friend). She invited me knowing my background, having gone out of my way to study all theories of consciousness in depth. My experience was again quite shocking. Graduate students who were working under these particular paradigms, presumably writing papers pushing the theories of their advisors, did not know much at all about their own ideas. They were mathematically inept, and seemingly incapable of engaging on their own subjects of interest. It seemed like I had interrupted an organized meeting where different people took turns reading the slides they had prepared. People would simply give compliments "very interesting, thank you" and clap. It was very strange and honestly shamefully useless.

For those who play music, you might understand this analogy. The students today, and presumably the professors, have a product to sell, themselves. And so, what I think we have is a commodifiction of intellectual work, but this ends up giving us "instagram guitarists" instead of actual guitarists. They give you something seemingly impressive to non-musicians, a quick 1 minute lick with a bunch of bells and whistles (guitar tricks, fast playing, sweeping, tapping, etc) but might never be able to play productively with other musicians, or take the time to write something more substantive. The social/economic incentives have changed the game. Academic philosophy struck me as a show. It had become theatrical. Many of the participants, and the one's getting positions, didn't seem to think about the subjects they studied on their freetime.

My hope is that this is a problem contained to the Humanities. It would make a lot of sense. But surely there must be bleed over into the STEM fields via social/cultural osmosis.

[nilshanebeck]

Sometimes just one thumb up is not enough. I was a student of philosophy in Berlin in when this hostile takeover of European academic culture took place, and it was absolutely disgusting. Some professors rebelled, some became depressed, but most of them just adapted and tried to find out how they could improve their market value as fast as possible. But all felt clearly that this secluded garden where free thought could grow for centuries was being bulldozed and turned into some parking lot.

[jorgeyarza]

i live in a third world country and we are living this process between old university and new university. Very good insight in how commodification permeates everything

[Anatolij]

This all intersects with the students' internalisation of themselves as commodities (you need to "sell yourself", don't ya?), pursuing degrees solely for the purpose of boosting their own marketability, with no desire for intellectual development, no awareness of the value of critical thinking. Their only goal is to pass exams, there's minimal participation (and the teachers don't encourage it, lectures are top-down practices, and they never alternate with engagement-oriented symposiums). Outside of the class, one hears nothing but juvenile frivolities, the subject of study is only ever raised when confirming what is needed to learn to pass the next exam. Homogeneity is near-absolute, no one dares to take risks, to challenge professors out of conceptual curiosity, all too disaffected, shallow, and subconsciously afraid they'll compromise their chances to get a job in an ever more precarious world. Fear, hopelesness and habituation are behind this sham. Oh, and greed, of course. Greed started it all.

[roastmaster]

There is no such thing as reverse discrimination. Only discrimination.

[__august__]

I think that with regards to the development of compliance, there is an element of risk management for universities as well. There are genuinely bigots and those who abuse their power over students within academia, and they pose a risk to the brand of the university. The recent case of sexual harassment and its fallout at harvard come to mind, but there are numerous cases of professors creating environments hostile to certain students where bildung cannot take place. What's more, the ubiquity of social media means that cases of bigotry or harassment are far more likely to go viral, thus hurting the university's profile within the aesthetic economy.

Here in the US, the legacy of segregation is still poignant. The (neo)liberal integrationist ethos in the wake of the civil rights era means that schools must plaster their landing pages and pamphlets with non-white skin in order to present the façade of this ethos. Here, an increasing demand for higher education coincides with both the industrialization of the university with the increasing necessity for a degree in the job market, as well as a further democratization of the types of people welcomed to the university. The top-down enforcement of the egalitarian aesthetic through things such as DIE statements often clashes with the human reality of professors causing conflict through their position of power over students. Any perceived fracture in the façade means resources have to be spent on damage control, because in the end, it's hard to believe that universities as institutions really care about bigotry outside of how it affects the bottom line.

There is a pernicious double-action at play here. There are people within universities who truly care about combatting our social ills, and may really believe in developing an inclusive pedagogy. A lot of these people would have no issue with openly committing as such, at least at face value. It also seems reasonable to screen professors for views which may prevent them from treating students equally and thus preventing them from being a good teacher. You wouldn't want a transphobic professor at an institution which allows trans students to attend. However, the way by which modern universities realize this is through more bureaucratic hoops to jump through on the part of the professors. Any passion that a professor may have for social change is parasitized by the profit motive and marketing. So at once, the real energy and care that people have for the ideals of education is used by the ambivalent university as a selling point, while the risks and work are off-loaded onto the faculty, not all of whom actually care about such pursuits.

While I mentioned the power that professors have in the classroom, it must be said that that environment is no longer as insular in the era of social media. Students increasingly function in a role of surveillance, much in the same way a customer surveils a retail worker. I've definitely seen viral posts of students with misplaced indignation, leading to the unfair targeting of professors for innocuous or institutional decisions. The real neoliberal rub is the blurring of the lines between a good product and a rewarding education. A petulant consumer and a marginalized student are formally identical within this paradigm. This allows for intractable argumentation about which of these moralized categories is correct in any given situation, and a PR strategy by institutions to wipe away both cases with the exact same procedure for each. No real justice for those who deserve it, and plenty of ammunition for conservatives to lambast the shallowness of university branding strategies.

Though I bemoan the nihilism and superficiality of "woke" discourse, I appreciate this channel's approach to searching for the materiality of this discourse. Cheers!

[nicanornunez]

Professor Moeller as usual, brilliantly explaining the nightmare zeitgeist that we live. It is not that we can't see this BS but the transparent and simple way he explains in the way even a child can understand.

[addammadd]

In Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher pointed all this out over a decade ago. Peterson’s experiencing how neoliberalism will subsume anything it can in pursuit of profits. He can’t find it in himself to lament the process, he’s just angry that Wokeism is more profitable than neoconservativism. Too bad, so sad, get back on pills, Peterson.

[AgorizTribe]

This is so accurated!!!. Im a teacher in a private university here in Bolivia and all that was expoused happens. The idea of "commodification of education/instruction" is so brillant and terrible at the same time. Thaks for the video l..l, !!!

[silvertube]

The university doesn't just sell the diploma, it also sells the experience of college. If it only sold the diploma it could save a lot on those buildings, gyms, sports teams, and soda machines.