FIX EXCLUSIVES
Document comes from international group of scholars frustrated with progressive takeover of academia
Dozens of scholars from across the world have created a new manifesto calling for the end of “progressivist overreach” in the social sciences and humanities.
Political science Professor Eric Kaufmann told The College Fix the document came “out of a growing frustration” among academics “that social research is hemmed in by many progressive red lines.”
“This peer-pressure on academic freedom has constricted and warped the production of knowledge,” he said in a recent email. “It has made us dumber about the social world, not smarter.”
“The Buckingham Manifesto for a Post-Progressive Social Science” was originally published in The Chronicle of Higher Education as an open letter led by Kaufmann, a professor of politics at the University of Buckingham in England, on July 22.
The document was born out of a Heterodox Social Science conference that he organized at the University of Buckingham in June, according to Kaufmann’s personal substack.
The conference brought together scholars who are concerned about “forbidden topics or viewpoints (such as the negative economic effects of immigration, or whether differences in family structure help to explain racial inequality” and about the “cultural left ideology, which has achieved a position of institutional hegemony in western societies,” Kaufmann wrote.
He told The Fix the movement is “about advancing the frontiers of knowledge beyond the limits of progressivism.”
“In signing this manifesto, we are trying to define the new social science and theories that will guide knowledge production in the post-progressive era.”
Kaufmann said support for the manifesto comes from across the political spectrum, mentioning conservative Chris Rufo, director of the initiative on critical race theory at the Manhattan Institute, and liberal Steven Pinker, professor of psychology at Harvard.
“They disagree on how to reform higher education, but agree that we need this new, positive, research agenda,” he said.
The signatories also span multiple countries, including Canada, Italy, the United Kingdom, Turkey, and Argentina.
One signatory on the manifesto, Sarah Braasch, a Yale University PhD candidate, called Kaufmann “the hero we need to save not just the social sciences, but all of Western higher education” in an email to The Fix.
“I concur that we need a new social science re-committed to the telos of truth and knowledge production, rather than Woke ideology,” she said.
Braasch detailed her struggles at Yale, including the calls for her expulsion in 2018 after she called the police on a black student who was sleeping in a common area of a residential building. She was branded racist for the incident, which she describes now as the “Napping While Black Hate Crime Hoax.”
“This was a big part of the reason … to justify implementing their vast, new Woke DEI and CRT Industry Bureaucracy,” she said.
Of the manifesto, she told The Fix, “We desperately need this, in order to try to save Academia.”
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The manifesto itself opens with, “A growing recognition of the excesses of the cultural left has created an opening in contemporary intellectual life.”
“This moment requires a new research agenda, a post-progressive movement in the social sciences and humanities,” it states.
It maintains that progressivism “had noble origins,” but has largely shifted “from equality of opportunity to equality of outcomes, from greater inclusiveness to a hypersensitivity to ever-more-elusive forms of emotional harm, from the opening of new perspectives to the enforcement of rigid orthodoxies.”
It goes on to say that these “shifts became institutionalized in policies such as racial and sexual preferences, mandatory diversity training, speech codes, and editorial policies that privilege the avoidance of perceived harm over scholarly and scientific rigour.”
“And they were accompanied by a change in the norms of academic discourse,” it says, “from vigorous debate to censorship, deplatforming, mobbing, and moralistic denunciation.”
The result, the manifesto says, “has been a decline of trust in cultural and academic institutions and growing political polarization, including a populist backlash.”
The manifesto calls for a two pronged approach to solve the “progressivist overreach”: “Heterodox Social Science” and “Critical Woke Studies.”
The first part, “Heterodox Social Science,” says that, “Progressive dogmas have increasingly constricted the social sciences, including an obsession with race, gender, sexual orientation and identity, and an insistence that bias and oppression are the only acceptable explanations.”
It calls for “a new social science to free up inquiry, fill in blind spots, and render a richer and more accurate account of our social world.”
The second point, “Critical Woke Studies,” says that “wokeness” should be treated as a “historical episode that needs to be studied, just as scholars have sought to explain the rise of nationalism, communism, neoliberalism, and populism.”
To help achieve these goals, Kaufmann plans to announce a new Buckingham Research Award of up to £100,000 ($134,000) for “post-progressive social science research” in the near future, along with a new book, “Post-Progressivism: Toward a New Social Science,” according to his substack.
The manifesto currently has more than 110 signatories, which include “conservatives, classical leftists and liberals, and eclectic pragmatists.” Signatures from graduate students and academics are still being accepted online.
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IMAGE CAPTION AND CREDIT: An image of the Buckingham Manifesto appears behind its author, Professor Eric Kaufmann; Eric Kaufmann/X
