I can’t say I spilled my breakfast coffee on encountering this recent headline in the Opinion section of The Wall Street Journal: “‘Woke’ Isn’t Dead, or Even Resting.” The focus, pegged to America’s spring college graduation rites, was on all those “aspiring Jacobins” on the nation’s far-flung campuses. You don’t say? I’ve read this sort of thing from the Journal countless times over the years. And I’m not sure what The Free Press would have to gripe about if it wasn’t the scourge of the Woke Campus and that apparent menace seeping into the wider culture. As is said in the journalism biz, the topic is an Evergreen. Clearly, there are lots of readers who can’t get enough.
However. I happened to see the Journal piece a few days after returning from a…college graduation. That would be the ceremony at Bryn Mawr College, a small, all-women, liberal-arts college in a lush suburb of Philadelphia, its campus shown at the very bottom of this piece. Love the castles!
Anyway, I came back armed, you bet, with this impressive document, see below. Sorry about my hand scrawls. But looks authentic, right?
The beautiful thing is that the program sorts, by major, each member of the graduating class of 2026, all 319 of them. So I started doing some counting. Just what fields did this cadre of “aspiring Jacobins” choose to concentrate in? Political Science? At a total of 20 in that category, not small, but still, not even close to the top major.* Which we’ll get to. Sociology? Nah. Only 16. Economics: 7. Gender and Sexuality Studies—that must be a Woke-ish favorite, right? One person. Geology, by contrast, the study of rocks, garnered 7 majors.
The go-away winner is Mathematics: The field of concentration for 35 Bryn Mawr B.A. degree recipients. In second place, Biology: 25. Neuroscience: 18. Biology + Biochemistry + Neuroscience + Chemistry + Physics: 74. Which is close to one quarter of degrees earned by the graduating class.
So, yeah, you catch the drift. Now, I get this is a sample size of one campus, but I can’t think of a good reason why Bryn Mawr would be an outlier. I also get that a Math major quite possibly could have an engaged political life that the monitors over at the Journal would brand as Woke.
But c’mon. If the ripe fear is that today’s Woke college student is tomorrow’s Robespierre—is a major in math or biochemistry the likely path that this future radical would choose? (Robespierre, by the way, won a college prize for rhetoric and went on to study law at the Sorbonne. On his way towards authorizing some 17,000 executions of enemies of the people before getting his own head lopped off, to the cheers of the Parisian mob.)
I dislike the phrase “moral panic” as overused but it’s hard to produce a better substitute in this instance. When I—sorry—queried ChatGPT as to what U.S. college students were majoring in, the answer was “Business” as the top major and “by a pretty wide margin”—with nearly 20 percent of all bachelor’s degrees bestowed in business-related fields like marketing, finance and accounting. In second place, the Health Professions, followed by Social Sciences and History, Biological and Biomedical Sciences, and Psychology. ChatGPT told me its answer was based on U.S. Department of Education/National Center for Education Statistics data.
I doubt this small rejoinder of mine will change ingrained editorial habits in the Opinion Dept. at the Journal. A good story is a good story. Feed ‘em what they want. But, you know, a little Reality Grounding can’t hurt.
I almost forget to mention. I attended the Bryn Mawr graduation ceremony to celebrate the B.A. degree awarded to my daughter, Deora Rachael Starobin, featured at the very top of this piece, flowers in hand. A Magna cum Laude and a History of Art Major (with 12 others in that field). Go Deora!
*In my tabulations, I included double majors. So a major in, say, Political Science & Psychology, counts as a Political Science major and also a Psychology major. I realize that takes the total number of majors beyond the graduating class size of 319 but there aren’t so many double majors.
My fervent hope is that this generations newly minted graduates are smart enough to matriculate with degrees they both love and that will ameliorate the exorbitant cost of education while carrying their radical humanist agendas just below the surface.