Study casts doubt on ‘wokeness’ of US university courses

Fewer than one in 1,000 US university courses include references to critical race theory or other so-called “woke” topics that have become flashpoints in the country’s culture wars, according to the most detailed analysis of syllabuses.

A study of 5.6mn courses at nearly 4,000 higher education institutions by Open Syllabus, a non-profit group, shows just 0.08 per cent mention critical race theory (CRT), structural racism, systemic racism or diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). The share is also very low for other sensitive topics including transgender issues, as well as for related textbooks.

The figures cast doubt on the intensifying “anti-woke” criticism of US education by right-wing Republicans and high-profile business people, including most recently Ken Griffin, founder of the hedge fund Citadel, who paused donations to his alma mater Harvard in January.

He told the FT last week that “the narrative on some of our college campuses has devolved to the level that the system is rigged and unfair, and that America is plagued by systemic racism and systemic injustice”.

However, Open Syllabus data suggests even on more elite four-year bachelor’s and master’s degrees, only 0.12 per cent of courses mention DEI or systematic racism. Among publicly available Harvard syllabuses, just 0.37 per cent mentioned structural racism and 0.32 per cent at Columbia.  

Joe Karaganis, founder of Open Syllabus, said that most university curriculums evolved very slowly and “our data suggests that it is, over the short and medium term at least, pretty insensitive to political and cultural change”.

The top 10 most frequently cited works on US university reading lists are books on mathematics, anatomy and writing, along with Plato, Karl Marx and Shakespeare.

Kant and Foucault, the social theorist, also feature frequently among four-year colleges, and Freud among the leading research universities. Richard Delgado, a seminal author on CRT, is referenced just 126 times.

The Open Syllabus analysis is not comprehensive, but it collects details of all publicly available information from US universities, offering an extensive snapshot of courses and books assigned on reading lists to the country’s 19mn college students.

Its calculations suggest only a small fraction of courses reference the terms that have come under recent political scrutiny, and may overestimate their role because they count courses that may be critically examining the ideas.

CRT is mentioned more frequently in some individual courses across US universities, rising to 0.9 per cent in sociology. However, the vast majority of US undergraduates major in other topics. Of the 3.1mn who received degrees in 2020-2021, business, health and engineering dominated, with just 8 per cent taking sociology.

Donors and a number of US politicians have focused their recent criticism on elite US universities, exploiting frustration among many middle-class families over the rising costs of tuition.

Their criticisms have not been limited to course content. They also question the growth of a DEI bureaucracy of officials and administrators, compliance rules and faculty appointments and promotions, which they suggest have not always been based on merit.

The controversy over free speech on campuses has been inflamed by pro-Palestinian protests at universities in recent weeks, which have led administrators to take disciplinary action and call in police to break up demonstrations.