Duke University Press Stays Woke

I recently came across an alarming 2014 article on academic freedom in the Harvard Crimson. “Let’s give up on academic freedom in favor of justice” was the subtitle. The author was an obviously very bright female student.

Academic freedom exists to allow a university to be unimpeded in its search for truth. It has been known since the 18th-century philosopher David Hume, if not before, that justice depends on first getting the facts right. A just conviction depends on true evidence. Academic freedom is necessary to achieve real justice.

Why should any search for truth impede my quest for social justice? This is ideological activism loud and clear. But not according to then-Harvard student Sandra Korn, whose first target was the late Richard Herrnstein, author of a 1971 Atlantic article on meritocracy and IQ. Herrnstein told the Crimson: “The attacks on me have not bothered me personally. […] What bothers me is this: Something has happened at Harvard this year that makes it hazardous for a professor to teach certain kinds of views.”

Ms. Korn was rather scornful at the professor’s naïveté, responding:

Herrnstein seems not to have understood [that this] was precisely the goal of the SDS activists—they wanted to make the “certain kinds of views” they deemed racist and classist unwelcome on Harvard’s campus.

So some ideas, true or not, are unwelcome on Harvard’s campus.

How did Korn defend her attack on academic freedom? By a part-whole argument along these lines: “You want to be healthy, but no one is perfectly healthy, so why not drink, smoke, and take silly risks?” Korn again:

No academic question is ever “free” from political realities. If our university community opposes racism, sexism, and heterosexism, why should we put up with research that counters our goals simply in the name of “academic freedom”? (emphasis added)

Why indeed? Why should any search for truth impede my quest for social justice? This is ideological activism loud and clear: “Our goals” trump truth. More on Ms. Korn in a moment.

Duke University Press

I had occasion to look recently at Duke University Press (DUP), whose book list is dominated by feminism, queer theory, and other race- and gender-related topics. Seeking some relief, I looked under the “Science and Technology Studies” subhead. Skipping the first entry, “Feminist Science Studies,” I went to the next, “Philosophy of Science,” hoping to find something less political. What I found at the top was this: Virgin Mary and the Neutrino: Reality in Trouble, a translation of a French book by Isabelle Stengers, originally published in 2006. What exactly does the author mean? Well, just this:

Isabelle Stengers experiments with the possibility of addressing modern practices not as a block but through their divergence from each other. Drawing on thinkers ranging from John Dewey to Gilles Deleuze, she develops what she calls an “ecology of practices” into a capacious and heterogeneous perspective that is inclusive of cultural and political forces but not reducible to them. Stengers first advocates for an approach to sciences that would emphasize the way each should be situated by the kind of relationships demanded by what it attempts to address. This approach turns away from the disabling scientific/nonscientific binary—like the opposition between the neutrino and the Virgin Mary. An ecology of practices instead stimulates an appetite for thinking [of] reality not as an arbiter but as what we can relate to through the generation of diverging concerns and obligations.

This is neither English nor science. It is instead a sort of private language in which actual ideas are either absent or hidden in obscurity. The last sentence gives a flavor. Translated, it seems to question reality, which is “not an arbiter” but something “we can relate to.” Stuck in your car on a railroad crossing as a train approaches at high speed? Just relate to it, don’t let it be an “arbiter,” don’t step away, says Ms. Stengers. This is not science but nonsense.

How, I wondered, could mathematics be gendered and ecologized? In desperation, I finally clicked on “Mathematics.” How, I wondered, could mathematics be gendered and ecologized? Well, this is apparently a missed opportunity for Duke University Press, as it lists only one book under “Mathematics,” and the book is actually about math, math in economics by a Duke professor.

The abnormal and obscure over the normal and familiar. Perhaps Duke is following an elite trend? DUP also publishes the long-established and respected Philosophical Review. But essentially every other category in the DUP catalog is all about the weird and wonderful: LGBTQ rather than Adam and Eve, Queer Theory rather than Romeo and Juliet, African history rather than European history, the abnormal and obscure over the normal and familiar. Perhaps DUP is following an elite trend? Well, no: A glance at the Harvard UP site reveals a much wider repertoire.

Religion

So how does Sandra Korn’s youthful polemic connect her to Duke? Well, she worked until 2022 as an editor at Duke University Press, which continues not to counter but in fact promote her social-justice goals, as I found by looking over the current list.

Ms. Korn was a “Religion” editor. So I thought it might be interesting to see DUP’s recent “Religious Studies” picks. Here are some of the recent books published under that heading at the press:

• Magic’s Translations: Reality Politics in Colonial Indonesia by Margaret J. Wiener
• Sanctuary Everywhere: The Fugitive Sacred in the Sonoran Desert by Barbara Andrea Sostaita
• The Inner Life of Race: Souls, Bodies, and the History of Racial Power by Leerom Medovoi
• The Gospel of John Marrant: Conjuring Christianity in the Black Atlantic by Alphonso F. Saville IV
• The Theological Metaphors of Marx by Enrique Dussel
• Deathlife: Hip Hop and Thanatological Narrations of Blackness by Anthony B. Pinn
• The Coloniality of the Secular: Race, Religion, and Poetics of World-Making by An Yountae
• Kingdom Come: The Politics of Faith and Freedom in Segregationist South Africa and Beyond by Tshepo Masango Chéry
• Black, Quare, and Then to Where: Theories of Justice and Black Sexual Ethics [sic] by Jennifer Susanne Leath
• Get Shown the Light: Improvisation and Transcendence in the Music of the Grateful Dead by Michael Kaler
• Medina by the Bay: Scenes of Muslim Study and Survival by Maryam Kashani
• The Anarchy of Black Religion: A Mystic Song by J. Kameron Carter
• El Monte: Notes on the Religions, Magic, and Folklore of the Black and Creole People of Cuba by Lydia Cabrera and David Font-Navarrete
• Capitalist Humanitarianism by Lucia Hulsether
• Circuits of the Sacred: A Faggotology in the Black Latinx Caribbean [sic] by Carlos Ulises Decena
• Hidden Histories: Faith and Black Lesbian Leadership by Monique Moultrie
• Unknowing and the Everyday: Sufism and Knowledge in Iran by Seema Golestaneh
• Black Life Matter: Blackness, Religion, and the Subject by Biko Mandela Gray
• In and Out of This World: Material and Extraterrestrial Bodies in the Nation of Islam by Stephen C. Finley
• Obeah, Orisa, and Religious Identity in Trinidad, Volume II, Orisa: Africana Nations and the Power of Black Sacred Imagination by Dianne M. Stewart

The third world is well-represented, so is the black race and LGBTQ. Western civilization, not so much (Karl Marx, hip-hop, and the Grateful Dead don’t really count).

How did DUP devolve into a mouthpiece for woke ideology? Perhaps the problem is their Editorial Advisory Board, which “was created in 1982 in order to bring the Press into a more active and meaningful relationship with the faculty.”

The board has 10 members and, as you can see, is notably deficient in science, employing no one from biology, physics, chemistry, mathematics, engineering, or even psychology. Theater studies, Native American studies, African and Middle-Eastern studies, and gender and sexuality studies are well represented, however:

Term Ending July 31, 2026

Christine Folch, Cultural Anthropology
Esther Gabara, Romance Studies
Douglas Jones, Theater Studies
Peter Sigal, History

Term Ending August 31, 2027

Wesley Hogan, Franklin Humanities Institute
Courtney Lewis, Anthropology, Native American Studies
Louise Meintjes, Music
Christopher Ouma, English, African Studies
Carlos Rojas, Asian and Middle Eastern Studies
Gabriel Rosenberg, Gender and Sexuality, History

This group hardly brings the press into a “meaningful relationship with the faculty.”

DUP publishes about 150 books a year, Harvard about 125. A university press is not a small enterprise, and it is certainly not cheap. It is time for Duke University to look at what it has wrought and right the sinking ship. Duke should remember that its motto is Eruditio et Religio, not “Stay Woke.”

John Staddon is James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and Professor of Biology Emeritus at Duke University. He was profiled in the Wall Street Journal in January 2021 as a commentator on the current problems of science. His book Science in an Age of Unreason (Regnery) came out in 2022, and Scientific Method: How Science Works, Fails to Work, and Pretends to Work (Taylor and Francis, 2nd Edition) came out in 2024.