The issue isn't the universities teaching "woke facts" or something. I think most people accept that university lecturers should be able to use their judgement to decide what to teach. The issue is their conduct in engaging in racial discrimination. That is unpopular and unlawful.

The reason that it happens is that these institutions have been captured by a new ideology. Facts, evidence, reason: these don't matter any more. All that matters is conformity with the ideology that has no better name than "woke" (If I knew a better name I'd use it, because the term does upset people.) But the fundamental issue isn't the woke teaching, it is WHY it happens: the median humanities lecturer in the West is either far-left or completely incapable or unwilling to challenge far-left ideology.

A coordinate result is that they also use their judgement and teach a lot of woke rubbish. There is little internal pressure within the university not to teach courses with descriptions like this:

> This course examines the representations, contexts, and politics of gender, sexuality and the media. By interrogating the discourses of gender and sexuality as they are 'mediated' in a variety of forms (including television, film, popular music, social media, advertising), we will examine the construction and disruption of categories of gender and sexual identity, and their intersection with other identity frameworks.

If you talked this way in real life, you would be ridiculed and rightly so. Interrogating the discourses? Really? Construction and disruption of categories of sexual and gender identity?

Yet there are no classes taught by people with equivalently ridiculous fringe views on the other end of the spectrum. In fact, not even centrist perspectives are tolerated. Can you imagine a course at a public American university that looked at the development of gender ideology neutrally, covering founding figures like John Money and the cruel experiments he did on young boys?

The Overton window of the university barely overlaps with the Overton window of the real world.

Also I take issue with your 50% claim. I think it is likely that the vast majority of the public is opposed to using public money to teach far-left politics (Marxism, gender ideology, etc.) to young impressionable minds.