Editor’s Note: The following excerpt is from an article originally published by the Observatory of University Ethics on October 1, 2025. The Observatory translated it from French into English. I have edited it, to the best of my ability, to align with Minding the Campus’s style guidelines. It is crossposted here with permission.
Never short of ideas to restart a slightly seized machine, Le Monde has just published yet another article defending wokeism. Does this mean that our valiant progressive academics are tired of their platforms, which all say the same thing and which ultimately give us good publicity? In any case, two journalists were entrusted with the task of putting coins into the slapping machine, just to keep their hand in.
The originality of this new paper is that it surprisingly reverses the roles of good and bad, executioner and victim, outraged and outraged. Because here’s the scoop: on campus, progressive academics are living a real ordeal. You thought that reactionaries and other conservatives had the greatest difficulty expressing themselves, that they were forced to monitor their words and even the content of their courses. to avoid the risk of being threatened or even chased by various categories of students and sometimes teachers who are followers of gender theory, the Palestinian cause and the great evening of racialized people? Well! No way: in reality, they are the ones who make the law, according to the Monde!
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So much bad faith in the presentation of the situation is laughable. We also laugh when we read that a man named Baudot, quoted in the article, considered that those who protest against the stranglehold of wokeism on the university are “academics in decline, in search of media recognition that they do not have in the academic field.” When the Baudot that Le Monde journalists have unearthed becomes as well-known and recognized in its academic discipline as the three coordinators and twenty contributors of “In the face of woke obscurantism,” we’ll discuss it again. Quick count on Amazon: Pierre-Nicolas Baudot, zero books; Pierre Vermeren: a good fifteen works; Xavier-Laurent Salvador: five; Emmanuelle Hénin: five also. The same goes for most of the contributors, like Nathalie Heinich, Guylain Chevrier, Nicolas Weill-Parot, Pierre-André Taguieff, and many others.
We still laugh, but with sad laughter, when we read in the article that Donald Trump set the tone for our actions. Clearly, the left still does not want to consider that, among the reasons for his election, there could be weariness with the excesses of a fringe of the Democrats on wokeness. Yet, every time Kamala Harris began a speech by stating her “pronouns,” she lost 500,000 votes. National Institutes of Health funded research on transgender mice by feeding them cross-hormones. The University of Michigan paid 1100 non-faculty employees to deal with “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI). It was easy to call on voters to witness the excesses to get elected, and any other Ubu would have been elected under these conditions.
The article from Monde is 14,000 characters long, including spaces. Each sentence deserves to be commented on, as the statements are so dishonest and biased. Here are a few…
Please find the complete article here. For insights on higher education worldwide, explore our Minding the World column, which offers news, op-eds, and analysis.
Image: “Paris – Siège social du Journal Le Monde” by Fred Romero on Wikimedia Commons
I am also reminded of what a professor once said about the Trial of Socrates — that it really was more about a society in which power was shifting from one group to another, that the former saw the tide washing out the sand beneath their feet, and that they executed Socrates not because of what he had done, but to show that they could.
The Danvers (not Salem) Witchcraft Hysteria of 1691-93 was largely similar, the Puritans had lost their charter, the King had eliminated church membership as a voting prerequisite for voting, and they were losing power.
There is a lot of that here….
“It was easy to call on voters to witness the excesses to get elected, and any other Ubu would have been elected under these conditions.”
It’s more than that — to understand Trump, study Andrew Jackson — to understand MAGA, study the Jacksonian Democracy.
Jackson was the first President not from suburban Boston or Tidewater Virginia.