The insidious Woke Revolution that culminated in the “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI) agenda insinuated itself into every nook and cranny of the university in the late 2010s and early 2020s. Wokeness was…a pseudo-religious movement, and everyone had to bend the knee.

Education wars are now all around us, with woke and leftist ideology running most schools and education departments. Students are getting dumbed down in all the basics, while coming out as dedicated leftists and haters of the West.

In recent articles I have examined two books on how Western education is going down the tubes, and what can be done about it. Both books are brand-new releases; both look at the woke takedown of our educational system; both offer numerous examples of this; and both trace the ways in which the education wars have come about.

The differences are that Elise Stefanik looks just at the American situation, with special reference to how antisemitism has flourished in our top universities, while Bella d’Abrera looks at things more broadly. And being based here in Australia, she looks at the nation in some detail, along with what is happening in America and the UK.

Here I offer a few choice quotes from each as they seek to explain why and how our school and education policies have gotten so bad.

Stefanik, Elise, Poisoned Ivies: The Inside Account of the Academic and Moral Rot at America’s Elite Universities
(Threshold Editions, 2026)

In just six short paragraphs the American Congresswoman nicely lays out the main reasons why our prestige universities have been in serious decline over recent decades. She writes:

Over the last several chapters we’ve related the stories of American Jewish students and faculty on our college campuses since October 7, 2023. What they have been through has in many cases been harrowing and horrifying. In every case, it has been disgusting and un-American. But the rise of antisemitism on college campuses was the culmination of a much broader moral and academic rot in American higher education. It was a symptom of a deep-seated decay that has been happening at elite universities for decades.

These schools were once important institutions for invention, inquiry, research, development, scientific exploration, artistic achievements, and societal advancement. An elite American college education was the envy of the world and a near guarantor of the American Dream. Yet today, American higher education has fundamentally lost its way. The most important questions are Why? and How? Why did our country’s campuses become cesspools of antisemitism? How did this happen? What went wrong?

First, radical left-wing political ideology is now synonymous with higher education. Universities are monocultures, where faculty, staff, and administrators operate like a herd. Where there’s division in the ranks, it’s almost always very Far Left faculty fighting with slightly less Far Left faculty. This problem only grows worse over time, because ideology is fiercely policed through the tenure system, which enables radical senior faculty to hire even-more-radical junior faculty. It also manifests in the batty curricula that can be found in classrooms across American universities. What is actually being taught in our schools has shifted away from academically rigorous coursework toward political and social indoctrination, filled with endless buzzwords and moral relativism. Training in “the best that has been thought and said” has given way to endless electives, where English majors can graduate without having read Shakespeare or Chaucer (as is now the case at Harvard), or history majors can avoid ever having to study the Middle Ages or the Reformation (also Harvard).

Second, the insidious Woke Revolution that culminated in the “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI) agenda insinuated itself into every nook and cranny of the university in the late 2010s and early 2020s. Wokeness was not just another notch in the left-wing ratchet. It was a pseudo-religious movement, and everyone had to bend the knee. DEI reshaped admissions, hiring, the classroom, student life—nothing was allowed to go untouched. “Cancel culture” came not just for the rebels who actively resisted the DEI regime but for innocent professors and students who simply ran afoul of the new dogma of the Woke Left. The purpose of DEI was not to advance racial equality; it was to put a new, radical class in power and establish a culture of fear and racism that would keep dissenters in line.

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