Leftist Professor Breaks Rank To Get "Wokeness" Out Of Schools

A liberal educator is calling for reforms in the social sciences that have been "captured" by extreme leftist agenda after joining a coalition of scholars from both sides of the political aisle dedicated to ending wokeness in higher education.

"The idea is that really, one would think that when we're talking about science, whether it's social science or medical science or anything like that, political opinion shouldn't matter. It shouldn't cloud the pursuit of truth," Wayne State University professor Jukka Savolainen told Fox News Digital.

"And we are doing this because we are convinced with good evidence that this mission has been, this plot has been lost over the years, over the decades, and we want to restore these traditional values of objective inquiry and truth."

Savolainen teaches criminal justice and "Sociology of Sport" at Wayne State University in Detroit.

While Florida was considering cutting sociology as a core general education requirement in 2023, Savolainen wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal arguing that he saw the discipline "morph from a scientific study of social reality into academic advocacy for left-wing causes."

His comments bucked the majority of his academic counterparts who were pushing to "Save Sociology." He added that there are other sociology professors who "silently" agree with him.

Now, Savolainen is the point person of the sociology community of the Heterodox Academy.

"Eric Kaufman is the director of the Institute for Heterodox Social Science, and heterodoxy, of course, means the opposite of orthodoxy, the opposite of groupthink. We are all joined in our displeasure with groupthink and monoculture in academia, and we are interested in viewpoint diversity and those types of things," he said.

Savolainen signed "The Buckingham Manifesto for a Post-Progressive Social Science" that was published by The Chronicle of Higher Education in July.

The manifesto, led by political science professor Eric Kaufmann, calls for a "post-progressive social science" to be "pursued in new universities and centers, among dissident scholars in the academic mainstream, in think tanks, or, best of all, in a future academe rededicated to open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and civil discourse."

Savolainen said that Kaufmann is seeking a coalition of people from all political backgrounds that care about the truth. He added that critics of the manifesto may consider all the signatories conservative because they do not subscribe to the "sort of left-wing social justice type of narrative."