A friend who is a union carpenter once told me college is nothing more than very expensive networking. The 52 percent of college graduates now underemployed would probably agree. Higher ed’s dirty secret is that the “knowledge economy” has not produced enough well-paying jobs to compensate for the decline of industrial manufacturing, and the universities that act as pipelines into this economy have evolved their norms and customs to protect their traditional upper-middle class clientele against competition from potentially socially-mobile Americans.

When I enrolled at Ivy Tech Community College in 2018, I was 26, having bounced from one low-paying blue-collar job to another. I hailed from a mid-sized deindustrialized city, Terre Haute, located in an Indiana bellwether county that swung from Democratic to Republican in 2016. Lacking much exposure to elite culture, the “woke” concepts I encountered in college — particularly once I reached Indiana University in 2020 — were entirely foreign to me, and indeed would have struck most people from my hometown, even self-identifying leftists, as absurd. 

But such concepts are not presented on campus as controversial ideas to be examined and critiqued; rather, they are presented as concrete truths only backward and ignorant people could disagree with. That sentiment is subsequently used to justify keeping Americans of lower socioeconomic status out of universities and the broader professional sector.

Surveys consistently show conservative college students self-censor at much higher rates than liberals. And a survey by Eric Kaufmann showed that 4 out of 10 North American professors would not hire a known Trump supporter, suggesting they also would not write a letter of recommendation for one. Yet many of the students designated as conservative by virtue of being non-woke are in the lower socioeconomic classes, just the people who need successful college networking to secure access to opportunities.

Political discrimination is acting as a proxy for class discrimination. And the discrimination is justified on the grounds that “conservatives” are simply bigoted and therefore not deserving of the benefits conferred by a college education. Faux egalitarian sentiments about protecting the marginalized are being deployed to protect the interests of the privileged few in an increasingly inegalitarian society.