WATCH: Dr. Michael Robillard says academia betrayed him

Campus Reform’s Addison Smith sat down with Dr. Michael Robillard to discuss his exodus from “woke” academia. A former researcher at Notre Dame, junior research fellow at Oxford and resident research fellow at the U.S. Naval Academy, Robillard told Campus Reform that he’d been aspiring to be an academic philosopher since he was 19, but in 2009, he began to see a woke “shift” while he was in grad school.

“The undergrad department that I came up in at West Point [in the 80s-90s]... was a fair and pluralistic department… [but] starting grad school in 2009 or so… you started to see a beginning of this shift towards woke-ism.”

Robillard then explained how “more radical” ideologies like Critical Race Theory and transgenderism started to take off around 2015, and his awakening to the downfall of academia came after getting his dream job. As “contradictory” leftist ideologies erupted onto the scene, Robillard noticed that no one would critique it for fear of “the shame mob”.

“I got my dream job appointment at Oxford, at the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics… Suddenly, this obviously contradictory ideology —  fraught with contradictions and inconsistencies —  nobody was touching it for fear of reputational damage… fear of the shame mob.”

Robillard then offered hope in spite of academic downfall.

“I don’t think we’re totally at a point where we need to opt out of, you know, society in general and start total parallel institutions from the ground up… There’s still some pockets at like, a Claremont, a Hillsdale… that are putting up a good fight, and that is important, and those folks should be there”. 

Watch the full interview above.

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