Democrat professor breaks ranks to challenge wokeness dominating American universities

Fox News

4 days ago

A Democrat-leaning professor is calling for reforms in the social sciences that have been "captured" by a progressive agenda after joining a coalition of scholars from both sides of the political aisle dedicated to ending wokeness in higher education.
"The idea is that really, one would think that when we're talking about science, whether it's social science or medical science or anything like that, political opinion shouldn't matter. It shouldn't cloud the pursuit of truth," Wayne State University professor Jukka Savolainen told Fox News Digital.
"And we are doing this because we are convinced with good evidence that this mission has been, this plot has been lost over the years, over the decades, and we want to restore these traditional values of objective inquiry and truth."
Savolainen teaches criminal justice and "Sociology of Sport" at Wayne State University in Detroit.
While Florida was considering cutting sociology as a core general education requirement in 2023, Savolainen wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal arguing that he saw the discipline "morph from a scientific study of social reality into academic advocacy for left-wing causes."
His comments bucked the majority of his academic counterparts who were pushing to "Save Sociology." He added that there are other sociology professors who "silently" agree with him.
Now, Savolainen is the point person of the sociology community of the Heterodox Academy.
"Eric Kaufman is the director of the Institute for Heterodox Social Science, and heterodoxy, of course, means the opposite of orthodoxy, the opposite of groupthink. We are all joined in our displeasure with groupthink and monoculture in academia, and we are interested in viewpoint diversity and those types of things," he said.
Savolainen signed "The Buckingham Manifesto for a Post-Progressive Social Science" that was published by The Chronicle of Higher Education in July.
The manifesto, led by political science professor Eric Kaufmann, 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."
Savolainen said that Kaufmann is seeking a coalition between people from all political backgrounds that care about the truth. He added that critics of the manifesto may consider all of the signatories conservative because they do not subscribe to the "sort of left-wing social justice type of narrative."
"I guess we're all 'conservative' in a sense that science is conservative, that we are conservative about truth. We have to be careful. We have be tolerant of different viewpoints. We have to be open, to be challenged about our perspectives and we have to be very rigorous about what counts as evidence, not just something that you want to believe is true, but there has to be a scientific method we need to respect," Kaufmann said.
Among the signers were conservative activist Christopher Rufo and liberal scholars like Steven Pinker from Harvard.
Academics from other countries, including Canada, Italy, the United Kingdom, Turkey, and Argentina, signed the manifesto as well.
"What I hope to happen is that this is just an affirming [of] something," Savolainen said.
"It's also signaling to politicians that not all social scientists are captured, that there is a healthy group of social science people, academics who agree with the problems of ideological bias and maybe to the extent that there's political effort to build and reform universities along these lines, here we are, we're ready to participate in that effort," Savolainen said.
Savolainen described himself as a "classical liberal" and a Democrat who has never voted for a Republican.
"I'm not leftist in this sort of identitarian-social justice perspective that I think is harmful in the long run when it comes to these goals, because it divides people by race and identity and those types of things. I'm not in favor of the gender ideology that pushes unscientific or biologically incorrect agendas about sex differences, for example," he said.
He went on to say, "The problem that these signatories, people like me who agree with this statement, is that the social science part of academia, a lot of humanities as well, has been captured, as the term goes, by kind of illiberal – f that makes sense – illiberal, leftist, quote unquote, woke folk, so illiberal progressive people."
"What we mean by that is that folks who do not respect open inquiry, these sorts of classical liberal perspectives of freedom of speech, are more comfortable censoring and suppressing points of view because they are 'harmful' or they disturb… the woke or the progressive agenda."