—https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/my-university-sacrificed-ideas-for
The commentators on this article refer to the "Woke" as a "religion." And I heave a great sigh, wishing that people might read a little more broadly than they do, and that includes the professor in question -- though he is clearly heroic in his daring to send up the absurdities of the academy and of his own field. An ideology is NOT a religion. It is an ersatz religion: it bears to religion roughly the same relation as astrology does to astronomy. Ideology by its very nature is reductive and simplistic, and it is so even when, or especially when, it is clotted with jargon or a geyser of ill-sorted statistics. How to put it? There is no Book of Job in an ideology. There is no King Lear in an ideology. There is no "dark night of the soul" in an ideology. There is no divinum mysterium in an ideology; no experience of Isaiah, crying, "Woe is me, I am a dead man, because I have beheld the face of God!"
Ideology knows no wonder, no mystery, no divine madness, no love that bursts the boundaries of the everyday world. Ideology produces no work of enduring beauty, because beauty also refuses to be pinned to the political obsessions of ideology.
Any one of the offenses against this man should have been punished by suspension or expulsion, as destructive of the very foundations of a genuine college, not to mention as actual criminal behavior.
Many people have been arguing that the college degree has become worthless. In some ways, it is becoming worse than worthless: at a place like this one, it is becoming a sign that you are likely to be a treacherous, intolerant, vindictive, selfish coward.