Wokeness is not merely a grassroots or social‑media phenomenon but was institutionalized when activists from the 1960s entered the professoriate in the 1970s–80s, especially in humanities and social sciences that allow politics to shape curricula and hiring. This created a lasting, performative culture of policing language and purity that later re‑surged in the 2010s and peaked after 2020.
— If true, it reframes debates about campus culture and broad social movements as problems of institutional incumbency and hiring, not only of individual behavior or online dynamics.
2026.04.04
100% relevant
Graham explicitly traces political correctness' origin to the early 1970s onward as 1960s student protestors completed PhDs and were hired into humanities departments, producing an aggressive, performative focus on social justice by the 1980s.
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