The gist is that 1) actually admin is the stupid kind of woke, not the faculty and 2) when the game is utilitarian, playing is a losing move.
He doesn't ask whether not playing the utilitarian game results in losing any slower though.
- It is often faculty who are trying to safeguard their fields from the progressive machinations of their bureaucratic overlords. But faced with a choice between watching their departments shrink or agreeing to hire in areas that help realize the personnel-engineering schemes of their bosses, departments tend to choose the latter.
Outside observers mock job ads looking for scholars working on “anti-racist Shakespeare,” and these listings are frequently tortured and ridiculous. However, such ads do not always reflect the scholarly priorities of the professors on the hiring committees. Rather, they’re often a product of the plotting of superiors who care more about their university’s public-facing diversity data than they do the intellectual needs of the English department, the interests of its students, or the health of the discipline more broadly.