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I guess this is a question for anyone on The Motte familiar with such things. What is the current state of university reform? Are any universities in the western world simultaneously non-woke and somewhat respected? BYU maybe? I know there are various micro "based" colleges like New Saint Andrews but my impression is these are tremendously expensive for a completely disrespected degree. Are there even any of these types that aren't explicitly religious?
I'm not sure if I'm qualified to answer as I'm not familiar, but I'd say that being "Respected" is about social ranking, and that leaning "woke" is basically about valuing social reality higher than actual reality. The very way that "woke" operates is by attacking the reputation of the un-woke and making them out to be immoral. Notice this is about how "good" something is, and barely about how "true" it is. In other words, people who care more about truth than signaling and social hierarchies tend to be closer to the truth, but less respected by society. Here, I belive that the assumption "Respected = Good" is dangerous and misleading, since you'd be buying into political manipulation of reality (that sounds a bit dramatic, but I'm not sure how else to phrase it)
By definition, "non-woke" and "respected" seem separate
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I don't know about "based" in the sense users here use the term, but there are some notoriously conservative/un-woke schools out there. UNC, Florida State, Georgia Tech, Mississippi State, Texas A&M, Stanford, St Johns, Claremont McKenna, all come to mind.
Uh, how exactly is Stanford un-woke? They have the full slate of grievance studies departments, plus a DEI commissariate installed in all the real departments (read: the School of Engineering, basically) providing mandatory political reeducation and enforcing the party line. Perhaps they’re un-woke in comparison to their rivals across the Bay, but the same could be said of virtually every university in the Western world.
You're not going to find a school in the state of California that doesn't have the"the full slate of grievance studies" and a "DEI commissariate"
Stanford is on the list for the same reason Claremont is. They're notoriously conservative relative to thier bretheren, get ranked highly on free speech by FIRE and other such groups, and project an all around ruthless disposition towards disruption.
According to the FIRE 2025 ranking (page number 44), Stanford University is 218., while Claremont McKenna College is 6. best out of 251 universities evaluated. These two institutions could hardly be more different, with regard to how FIRE regards them.
That's news to me. I remember them being ranked much higher than that and catching a lot of hate from the media for cracking down on disruptive activists back in 2020 but i also haven't paying close attention the last couple years.
Shit happens i guess.
If you check out Stanford's rankings, it's an odd mix. High "openness" ranking combined with bottom of the barrel "disruptive conduct" after a bunch of attacks on meetings.
Looking at the incident reports, Stanford was prosecuting students through an anonymous "protected identity harm reporting system" for being photographed reading Mein Kampf. Of course, this seems pretty typical for colleges these days
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UNC is not un-woke, lol.
University of North Carolina?
UNC is pretty woke, they were one of the colleges that got sue for DEI-flavored affirmative action along with Harvard.
https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/students-for-fair-admissions-inc-v-university-of-north-carolina/
I don't think that Certiorari proves as much as you think.
SFFA argues that UNC is discriminating against SouthEast Asians by privileging minorities born within the state over minorities born outside the state (not many SE-Asians in NC). I feel thats a bit different in kind, and the court seems to have agreed by splitting the case, and ultimately ruling against Harvard but in favor of UNC.
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There are some fairly highly ranked red state public schools that are probably less-left-leaning than most given the leverage state elected officials have over the institutions: Texas and Florida have both explicitly banned school-sponsored DEI initiatives. At least Texas A&M has a bit of a reputation for conservativism, and at least in the past when I've talked to lefties from Colorado they treat Colorado Springs as a very red part of the state because of the Air Force Academy there, but that may be a bit out of date at that point.
I'd bet any heavily-Greek school is "conservative" in at least a change-averse, slightly-social-conservative fashion that might not map to politica, but I don't have direct experience there. And this isn't to say that these schools are necessarily right-of-center, but more right-leaning than most universities.
University of Texas is not a conservative school, but it’s very willing to tolerate conservatism compared to similarly-liberal schools for straight forwards reasons that benefit itself(enjoying very high rankings and donations in Law and geology, most prominently). Notre Dame has been trending more conservative and was never as liberal you’d have expected, and it’s very highly ranked. Texas A&M is known for conservatism and tbf, it has creationists as a percent of faculty equivalent to BYU, which is indicative of at least allowing a certain type of conservatism.
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