The staging of Woke Cancer
UMass Boston as a case study
What is woke cancer?
Cancer develops when the normal processes that control cell division fail and a rogue cell becomes the progenitor of a group of cells that share its abnormal capabilities. It usually requires several processes to fail for cancer to occur. A cancerous tumor can grow into nearby organs, metastasize into other body parts, and eventually cause death.
Similarly, woke cancer develops when the normal processes that control the academic system fail and rogue faculty or administrators start to develop malignant ideas. These woke malignant ideas have a tendency to grow, spread, enshrine themselves into the core of the academic system and eventually metastasize into the world, causing the destruction of Western civilization.
The stage of a cancerous tumor is determined by the cancer’s characteristics, such as its size, aggressiveness and whether it has spread to the rest of the body. The stage of the cancer helps you and your doctor:
figure out your prognosis
decide on the best treatment options for you
determine if certain clinical trials may be a good option for you
Both physical and woke cancer stages are often expressed as a number on a scale of 0 through IV - with stage 0 describing non-invasive cancers that remain within their original location and stage IV describing metastatic cancers that have spread outside the original site to other parts of the body/world.
How does woke cancer start and how does it progress?
We sometimes ask ourselves: How does the cancer start? How does it spread from the administration (or above), through the DEI offices and into the faculty, students and beyond? What are the processes underlying this spread?
While, like for the most cancers, the answer may vary from one type of cancer to another, in what follows we will use our institution - UMass Boston, as a case study. Its descent into wacky wokery is an example of the initiation, and the rapid spread, of woke cancer. Keep in mind that being a public research university in Massachusetts, UMass Boston’s specific type of cancer may differ from other institutions, in particular private universities, liberal arts colleges, community colleges and institutions in red states or other countries. However, the overall course of events is eerily similar.
Stage 0 woke cancer
Stage 0 is used to describe non-invasive woke cancers, also known as carcinoma in situ. In stage 0, there is no evidence of DEI activity or abnormal wokeness breaking out of the confines of the whiteness/gender/fat studies department/Re-Education school in which they started. The malignant ideas include CRT, postmodernism and Queer Theory. In UMass Boston, for example, we offer a minor in Trans and Queer studies, and our luminaries publish work that calls terrorism “Queer resistance to empire”. Nothing too alarming.
No systemic treatment is needed at that stage, but watchful waiting or local excision of the source are required. Carcinoma in-situ may stay dormant for many years, but it may also become invasive. In the case of woke cancer, the invasiveness is inevitable.
Stage I-II woke cancer
Stage I describes early invasive woke cancer. At that stage, DEI activities and woke ideas break out of their home department and invade nearby departments and colleges, such as the humanities and the social sciences. At stage II, the wokeness has invaded the administration. This is a particularly critical time point, as the administration is the institutional lymph node system through which the cancer spreads to the entire university, destroying it from within. Just like with any type of cancer, a rogue cell becomes the progenitor of a group of cells that share its malignant ideas and behaviors. When it happens, the spread is rapid and often hard to stop, therefore early detection and swift action are so critical.
Due to the rapid process, it is hard to draw a line between the different invasive stages, since some processes are overlapping. In the later phases of Stage I the cancer already starts spreading to the institutional lymphatic system - i.e., the administration. In late Stage II, wokeness is starting to spread into the institution.
The process in which cancer becomes invasive does not take place over night. Just like other cancers, woke cancer becomes invasive as a result of long term planning that takes place behind closed doors at high levels, even beyond the university. Often it is hard to pinpoint the exact time the cancer becomes invasive, but due to a combination of several events that took place over a short period of time, the chain that started the woke invasion at UMass Boston was rather clear. George Floyd’s death and the moral panic that ensued, exacerbated by the isolation and confusion caused by the remote learning period, allowed the rogue woke cells to start their invasion with no physical presence and very little accountability from the faculty, who were still trying to figure out how to navigate the pandemic and remote work.
In 2020 and 2021 an almost exclusively Re-Education school upper administration was appointed - the Chancellor, the Provost, and much of their team. The process was accelerated by appointing an excessive number of like-minded people and semi-qualified former students as senior administrators and DEI commissars. Many of the appointments were allegedly done without a public search process and with no transparency. The few dissenting Deans or upper administrators remained isolated.
The newly minted Chancellor immediately declared the university a “leading anti-racist and health promoting institution”, without ever explaining what it meant1 (this is a recurring theme. Woke cancer works in unclear ways). The administration got straight to work. The invasion began.
Stage I included mostly lectures and local/performative initiatives that could still be ignored, or mocked, by the rest of the university. Examples of local, small scale woke cancer initiatives at UMass Boston include:
A lecture series about “decolonizing”, publicized by the administration.
A George Floyd honorary scholarship.
Social justice writing competitions.
Changing “academic support services” to “Equity, access and success”.
Incessant, borderline deranged updates from the Provost about equity, social justice and inclusive excellence. At that stage the Provost talked about Everything in DEI, nothing outside DEI, nothing against DEI, to paraphrase Mussolini. The updates may have disappeared from UMass Boston’s new and dreadful website, but they live forever in our hearts and our mailboxes.
By extension, woke language was inserted into every communication, emails, speeches, documents. Never with an explanation or a definition.
At Stage II, malignant ideas are still inculcated through mostly localized efforts, and they still go under most people’s radar, but they are now larger and use institutional resources that clearly reflect the admin’s priorities. For example:
Allocating money to anti-racism grants instead of research and teaching.
Starting a “Racial justice” institute amid “attacks on Critical Race Theory”, the one theory that is not to be attacked.
Stage II is still considered early stage, and cure is possible. Systemic treatment is often required in addition to local excision, to reduce the risk of recurrence. However, since the DEI efforts are still small scale and do not affect large institutional resources or policies, the clinical signs of the woke cancer are still quite subtle and go unnoticed. Most academics and students are too busy with their work to read the mass emails, so they often don’t pay attention until the cancer becomes advanced.
At this point let us pause and ask: How do these things go unnoticed by most people for so long? A dangerous and insidious way in which woke cancerous ideas spread to the campus community is through malignant cells disguising as benign cells to trick the immune system - i.e., the sophisticated manipulation of language. Words that have a common, acceptable meaning are redefined with the deliberate aim of misleading. Equity is not the same as equality. Anti-racism is no longer just “against racism”, and “white supremacy” is no longer your friendly neighborhood KKK, to name just a few. The new terminology is used constantly, matter-of-factually and with no introduction, as if it is the way it’s always been. UMass Boston is no exception.
A particularly vicious aspect of this manipulation is that it builds on most people’s willingness to do the right thing. This is why it is very hard to push back: if you say you’re against “anti-racism”, what does it make you? A racist? Most people don’t want to be perceived as racist and definitely not as “white supremacists”.
Be Cognizant of the Inherent Whiteness
Do not miss this absolute gem from our Fall 2021 convocation speech by the Provost. If there is one thing you take home from this article, let it be this piece. It should reach a larger audience. (Audio only. Thumbnail image by Justine Lecrivain). We challenge the readers to count - how many times can a person use the word “equity” in less than three minutes?
We should add that two years later, the “stunning quad” is still under construction, and that we’re still wondering why, with all that inherent “whiteness” he talked about in such disgust, our white male Provost still holds on to his power.
Stage III woke cancer
This stage is considered locally advanced. The woke ideological cancer has taken over the entire administration. Now that the institutional lymph node system is filled with DEI commissars, Re-Education school graduates, ideologues/political opportunists and racial opportunists, and with the full backing of the higher ups in the government, it is time to launch a full on institutional attack of the entire university, including the STEM departments.
The clinical signs of the UMass Boston locally advanced, institutional level woke cancer include enshrining wokeness into institutional policies:
Initially (Fall 2021) Launch a strategic planning committee to define the institutional direction and focus in the next decade, make it as if the committee members are selected through a transparent process, but really appoint only your friends and allies. Say you’re open to feedback, but direct the online feedback form automatically to trash. Within this framework:
Change the university’s mission statement into something that no longer resembles a university. Try to disguise your efforts by not publishing any drafts until late in the process and hoping no one would notice (unfortunately for them, people did).
Design a university level strategic plan, whose initial draft (written, undoubtedly, by a secret fan of Judith Butler), talks about social justice being the institutional top priority, and about the need to get rid of “Eurocentric viewpoints.” The final result tones it down somewhat, but still puts equity and anti-racism at the forefront (without ever defining those terms).
Force all colleges to follow suite and devise their own strategic plan, which has to “closely align” with the university’s strategic plan, lest the rebels from Science and Math get any funny ideas (this process started in Spring 2023 and is still ongoing).
Establish a much praised and omnipresent Restorative Justice commission and give it what seems to be unlimited, unchecked power to force its will on the entire campus in every aspect of academic life. It could mandate/encourage/kindly ask for anti-racism training, redistribute the budget to reflect our commitment to restorative justice (inevitably, this money has to come from somewhere; probably somewhere that is not so focused on restorative justice), restructure the curriculum to better indoctrinate students to become efficient malignant cells, hire and promote faculty based on their commitment to DEI, control our teaching and pedagogy and more. Who are they accountable to? No one knows. Here is their plan from the Spring 2022 campus update:
Embed materials from Critical Social Justice in faculty training programs.
Declare university level “restorative justice in academic dishonesty” initiatives to help students cheat more easily.
Make admission test-optional, in preparation for a hypermatrix lottery-based or identity based admission system.
Make the ALEKS math placement test unproctored, because of… equity? The fact that the administration is knowingly and deliberately setting students up for failure by rendering the test useless is besides the point.
Redefine and wokeify the university’s strategic priorities (and as a result, allocation of institutional resources) following a “deep and broad participation” of the entire campus community, which really means - “we looked deeply into the grievance studies scholarly challenges, while broadly ignoring the sciences”. Indeed, those grand scholarly challenges were determined with little input from the College of Science and Math and include only climate justice, health equity and educational equity.
As of AY 2023-2024, all departments are now required to state, in their annual report to the Provost, how their activities are aligned with the new strategic priorities outlined in the strategic plan linked above. These include “ensuring equitable academic outcomes” and investing in the above mentioned grand scholarly challenges, even if no one in the department works on educational equity or climate justice.
Launch “student success” initiatives with the goal of creating “innovative pedagogies” and try to pressure faculty to adopt them, often by approaching the most vulnerable faculty - non-tenure track or pre-tenure assistant professors. Cancer tends to attack the weakest cells first. These efforts are often disguised under great sounding names, or as a part of legitimate academic support efforts. Academic freedom? Departmental autonomy? What is it!?
Require faculty candidates to provide a statement of faith… sorry, a statement of DEI commitment.
In parallel, launch an expensive “rebranding” campaign to get everyone’s mind off the ongoing construction, the terrible infrastructure and the constant, scandal plagued fights with the union and with academic units.
Throughout the entire process it is absolutely essential to not communicate directly with anyone. Info sessions were initially held on zoom and questions were solicited in advance. (Following intense backlash, the updates became face-to-face. The admins still don’t like to engage with the faculty, though).
Let’s pause again and ask: Can they really force all of this on us? The biggest antidotes to invasive woke cancer are academic freedom and faculty autonomy, not to mention those pesky anti-discrimination laws that forbid discrimination on the basis of (any) race or sex. The administration never explicitly attacks academic freedom in public, and they dismiss any concerns with vague promises to uphold faculty autonomy. In reality, though, they behave as if academic freedom and faculty autonomy simply do not exist. According to our Provost (see audio above), we are all committed to equity and anti-racism as the core of our work; it is self evident that we all choose to dedicate ourselves to social justice first and foremost; that we all strive to practice “inclusive excellence” and “restorative justice” in our teaching, and that everyone knows what all of the above even means.
The Cancer is often only detected in Stage III which is no longer considered early detection. While it is still considered curable, there is a great cost. Aggressive treatment is needed, and even then cure is not guaranteed.
Stage IV woke cancer
This is the stage we are currently in as a society. At this stage the woke cancer has metastasized outside of academia, and spread into the wide world through its most effective agents: Freshly indoctrinated college graduates.
Examples includes:
Coca cola tells its employees to “be less white.”
Healthline refers to vaginas as “front holes”, and the UK green party refers to women as “non-men,” as did John’s Hopkins university for a short while.
New York exercises race-based preferential treatment in distributing Covid vaccines.
By now, the entire medical field.
While the above examples did not originate at UMass Boston, we have our fair share of community outreach and more. Our colleagues co-wrote an ethnic studies program for the highly failing Boston public school system. An introductory course is already being offered. We have to get them when they’re young!
Unfortunately, at this point, complete cure is usually no longer an option. The most one can hope for is to control the disease for as long as possible while preserving quality of life.
With that said, at UMass Boston the cancer seems to be spreading more slowly. Is it our administration’s utter incompetence that saves us, or is it intense scrutiny? Hard to say, but at least we’re doing better than other institutions such as UC Berkeley, where faculty candidates are being evaluated by their commitment to DEI first and foremost, colleges that make DEI a part of their tenure and promotion evaluation to intimidate the faculty into silence, and in particular the California Community College system, that is totally eaten up by woke cancer.
Treatment options
Treatment varies by stage but unfortunately, due to the aggressive and parasitic nature of woke cancer, it tends to spread quickly to remote parts of academia and outside of it while shutting down the immune system of accountability, debate and integrity. Therefore, aggressive treatment and long-term followup are required even at an early stage. Here are some selected options:
Non-invasive therapy
Unfortunately, woke cancer is notoriously unresponsive to most types of non-invasive methods such as debate, discussion or reason. When tried, the initiators are either completely ignored or marked as “right wing, dangerous extremists”, regardless of their actual political affiliation, or even as “white supremacists” regardless of their actual racial identity or their KKK membership status. In some cases they may lose their jobs and reputation, quit in disgust (even if they have tenure) or be subject to public attacks and vile smear campaigns. Many still hold on and even make a nice career out of it, but at a great cost. At UMass Boston, our Provost likes to threaten dissenting departments with pulling resources and is known across campus for his refusal to engage with faculty at any level.
Invasive therapy
Several invasive treatment options are in use. They each have their advantages and disadvantages, and they are implemented at various levels of success. Below are some of them.
Radiation therapy
Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and shining a ray of light on your administration in the form of local push-back from faculty is useful to some extent. It does not cure the cancer, but it can delay its spread and bring much needed sunlight into the institutional darkness. At UMass Boston:
An open letter that pushed back against our outlandish mission statement got enough publicity to make the admins tone down the initial mission statement. After all, they may not care much about the faculty , and certainly not about student success, but they care a lot about their public image, and when the Boston Globe gets the word out, you’d better do something. We will always have this delightful moment of pure cringe and a distinct “my captors are treating me well” vibe during the Spring 2022 campus update (although we are still trying to wrap our heads around how exactly woke DEI makes research and teaching better. He never explained, as usual. But that look on his face. Oh, that look.).
Another effort is currently underway to stop the university from requiring a DEI statement from faculty candidates.
Last but not least, let us not forget the wonderful satirical websites, operated by faculty and alumni, and expose the ridiculousness (also here) in all its glory.
Surgery + Chemotherapy
The good old slash, burn and poison. Cut the tumor at its source and provide powerful systemic therapy to eliminate cancerous cells in the body. This largest scale treatment was recently performed by Gov. Ron DeSantis and the New College of Florida’s new board of trustees. They cut the main source of woke cancer - the Women and Gender studies program, and abolished the entire DEI mechanism as part of a plan to defund all DEI in all public universities in Florida. Texas implemented a similar, albeit less radical measure. While undoubtedly swift and effective at eliminating the cancer at the source, such systemic therapy is known to have profound and long term side effects and should be administered with extra care. Side effects include the possible harm to legitimate inclusion efforts, such as access for students with disabilities, the inability to establish humanistic and dialog based approaches for diversity and inclusion, and possible danger to academic freedom. Proponents, on the other hand, say it is a necessary self defense measure, since we can’t afford to risk even one rogue cell remaining on the loose.
No such efforts are currently taking place at UMass Boston. Massachusetts is a deep blue state, and while complaining to the board of trustees or the department of higher education sounds like a reasonable course of action, we may find out that it’s them who are behind the whole process and that no one’s coming to save us.
Targeted therapy
Unlike chemotherapy, which destroys healthy cells as well, targeted therapy helps treat the cancer by interfering with specific mechanisms that help tumors grow and spread, sometimes using the immune system. This way the system can be changed and healed from within. Examples of targeted therapy to treat woke cancer include restructuring DEI to become more dialog-based and human-centered. Dr. Tabia Lee, a founder of Free Black Thought, is one of the proponents of such an approach. A complementary approach is for based faculty to serve on governance bodies such as the College Senates (college bodies) and the Faculty Council. These bodies have limited power, but they can sometimes stop the dangerous spreading of ideas, and their meetings are on record, which provides necessary sunlight.
Just kill it already
Some claim that academia is beyond cure at this point, and we should just let it die in its current form. The woke cancerous process is antithetical to the core ideas of liberal education: The free exchange of ideas, intellectual freedom, debate and the search for truth. The woke cancer cells are already embedded so deeply in all levels of academia and beyond, that it is simply impossible to get rid of them, especially given their tendency to spread and invade every aspect of academic life and beyond - it is just part and parcel of their ideology. What should be built instead? It is hard to tell, but the University at Austin is an interesting proposed solution. Additionally, some colleges - such as St. John’s college, which has always been about true liberal arts, were never afflicted.
In summary, woke cancer is aggressive and sneaky, and frankly, many of us fell asleep at the wheel and woke up only when the cancer reached our doorsteps. Is it too late? Can academia still be salvaged? Should STEM save itself and divorce from the other departments or is STEM itself too far gone already? What do you all think?
Frank and Louie is a faculty member at UMass Boston, and one of the writers behind The Flickering Beacon satirical site. Follow us on X/Twitter at theflickering_b.
One theory is presented here.
Brilliant! The cancer metaphor is right on the money. I hope this piece will help to raise awareness of a deadly nature of woke cancer. It is not a "pendulum", it is not going to "swing back", unless we forcefully root it out.
Fantastic article.
I worked in industrial research for 20+ years and spent the last decade at a non-western university before re-patriating to the insane 'west' and getting out of academia. I tried my best over that time to do some half-decent theoretical physics. Fortunately, I managed to avoid almost of all of this nonsense.
You inspired me to write my own snarky and decidedly non-professional piece
https://rudolphrigger.substack.com/p/blongleflipping-in-nardle-throbbleswitch
(sorry for the self-promotion).