Several years ago, I quit my post as a professor at a respected state university to join the US federal workforce. This was a painful decision. I thoroughly enjoyed academia. I loved mentoring students, exploring novel ideas, and engaging with different perspectives. Few things brought me greater joy than hearing from brilliant colleagues across disciplines, challenging or refining my assumptions. Naturally, the job came with a decent measure of financial security and a good quality of life.
Then it all went downhill precipitously, as the stifling conformity and outright thought control associated with “wokeness” gripped my campus. Strange as this may sound amid the Trump administration’s crusade to extirpate DEI from the executive branch, I have found a relative refuge from these practices and ideologies at — yes — my federal workplace.
A dour brand of identity politics had been a part of American academia long before the rise of wokeness. In the late Eighties and early Nineties, it was called “political correctness” and mostly inspired mockery. Scholars and students who disagreed rolled their eyes and could get on with their academic lives. But the latest iteration was different. It changed the climate on American campuses quickly — and dramatically.
“Wokeness” accelerated. Pronouns became a sort of badge of loyalty, and a way to sift prospective faculty in place of academic merit. My religious students were vilified for expressing principled disagreements about changing social norms. It didn’t matter that they were reasonable, even compassionate in their discourse. I witnessed as one professor labeled as “extremists” Orthodox Jewish students who practiced gender separation. A term typically reserved for suicide bombers now ensnared a perfectly peaceful community.
The hostility influenced the career trajectories of students. A brilliant psychology doctoral student who happened to be an evangelical was pressured by her adviser to leave the programme. The adviser feared she would discriminate against LGBTQ people — never mind that her research had nothing to do with sexuality or that she had never expressed a single anti-LGBTQ sentiment; her religious identity alone was enough to cast suspicion on her fitness for academia.
Before resigning, I spent more than a year exploring alternatives to the professoriate. I needed a place where I could earn a reasonable salary, maintain work-life balance, and stay in my current city. I also wanted to work in an environment that allowed for intellectual heterodoxy. I didn’t want to be encircled by ideological conformity, whether from the Left or the Right.
To my surprise, the federal government emerged as my top choice.
Beyond public policy, I knew little about the day-to-day realities of federal work. I personally knew few federal employees. During my rebellious college years, I often railed against the federal government, convinced every single inch of it was riddled with corruption, inefficiency, and bureaucratic excess. Frankly, I also assumed it was a painfully dull place — filled with uninspired suits, yes-men, and offices decorated in Seventies beige. I feared leaving a space dedicated to ideas — however stifled by the woke dispensation — for a slow-moving, bureaucratic machine. Still, I took the plunge because I could no longer stay in academia in good conscience.
It turns out that my fears were justified. Federal work can, indeed, be boring. The amount of paperwork is staggering, and the adoption of modern technology is painfully slow. There are rules for rules. One of my colleagues — another exile from academia — once dryly observed that many federal bureaucrats lack even a basic grasp of political science. They are so absorbed in navigating outdated and sometimes nonsensical regulations that the broader purpose of their work can get lost. It is not that they are incapable of higher-level thinking, but the machinery of government breeds submission to the minutiae.
Yet I also found that the common caricature of the “deep state” as an unaccountable cabal of unelected bureaucrats engaged in shadowy conspiracies is overblown. Nor is the federal workforce a bastion of radical Leftism requiring a scorched-earth response, as some critics argue.
Yes, federal employees have partisan leanings like anyone else, but most ultimately follow the directives of the sitting administration. In my own office, I have heard leadership with Democratic views explicitly state their commitment to carrying out the new administration’s policies — not because they personally agree with President Trump, but because they respect the Constitution and the rule of law. The executive branch, they believe, must be responsive to its head, and the people who elected him.
What often gets overlooked is the intellectual heterodoxy within the federal workforce. My colleagues come from all walks of life. I regularly attend meetings with liberal gay and lesbian colleagues, and in those same meetings, I work alongside conservative evangelical Christians — including pastors and ministers — who say “Merry Christmas” and “Amen” without fear or hesitation.
Having spent years in academia, where self-censorship was often the price of survival, I was stunned by this level of open expression. Conservative employees, in particular, seemed far more comfortable speaking their minds than they ever could on a university campus. This was true under both the Biden and Trump administrations. Unlike in academia, no one has ever forced pronouns on me. Instead, we focus on our jobs and work faithfully to serve the nation.
Now, however, many of these same colleagues — both liberal and conservative — are worried about their jobs. Some of my centre-right colleagues live in rural areas, where remote work has allowed them to contribute meaningfully to government service without relocating. But with return-to-office mandates looming, they face a difficult choice: leave their jobs or uproot their families. Ironically, it is often my liberal colleagues, who live in major cities with multiple federal buildings, who will have an easier time complying with these policies.
I understand that, from a high-level perspective, it is difficult to separate the genuinely problematic elements of federal bureaucracy from the rank-and-file employees who are simply doing their jobs. President Trump and Elon Musk, among others, have championed sweeping measures to “drain the swamp”. But my hope is that there is still time to craft a more precise approach — one that targets entrenched bureaucratic dysfunction without indiscriminately dismantling the institutions that, for many of us, have provided a refuge from the excesses of wokeness.
There are federal workers like me who found in federal government service a space for intellectual heterodoxy — one that no longer exists in academia. For that reason, I am hoping for a controlled burn, not scorched earth.
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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/
