Today’s progressive elite broadcasts its virtue through devotion to causes such as Black Lives Matter; Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion; and anti-racist efforts in the classroom and in corporate culture. Popular culture has called the collective sum of these efforts “wokeness,” which is a neologism used to describe various efforts to sound progressive and hip on social and racial issues. Yet we now know the costs of woke policies, including racial preferences, anti-racist trainings, and defunding the police. Racial preferences cost the California taxpayer an estimated 10 percent increase in expenses for public-construction contracts because of requirements that minority-owned businesses be given a relative discount compared with non-minority-owned businesses. (When minority-owned businesses submit a bid for a contract, that price is read as 10 percent lower than it actually is, although the payout is the same.) Ethnic-studies trainings in public schools can cost taxpayers $1,500 an hour. Reducing police presence has a strong correlation to increased crime, property damage, and therefore increases costs and expends resources to bear these burdens.
With these costs, not many institutions can truly afford wokeness. But one can. Unsurprisingly, it is also the richest academic institution in the entire world (endowment: $42 billion): Harvard University.
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