EDITORS' CORNER
ANALYSIS
A lengthy exposé published this month in The Atlantic details how elite, liberal academics prioritize identity politics over meritocracy.
It is one of the most widely read higher-education critiques in recent memory, exposing how an elite private college operates through the eyes of a moderate black professor caught in its soft bigotry of low expectations and manufactured racial hysteria.
In “Why I Quit the Tenure Track,” Tyler Austin Harper painstakingly chronicles his hopeful arrival and frustrated departure from Bates College in Maine.
Harper holds nothing back, exposing how well-meaning white scholars and deans acted with condescending paternalism while fellow black scholars embraced the role of victim.
They elevated clearly underqualified faculty candidates because of their skin color. They demanded DEI be embedded in every single department while quashing employee attempts to form a union. They created an imaginary “attempted lynching” on campus while ignoring real problems black students faced, such as rising tuition costs and debt.
“In short, I came to see Bates College, self-styled beacon of progress, as an institution that was deeply, incorrigibly racist,” Harper wrote.
Much of Harper’s magazine-length tome focused on his effort to derail an attempt to require a Race, Power, Privilege, and Colonialism requirement, which called for every major to mandate at least one course related to “race, power, privilege, colonialism.” Students would have to take two such courses to graduate, including one in their major.
Harper recounted the moment he publicly challenged the proposal:
Standing at the mic in a cramped auditorium, I laid out my case against the requirement: It was a clear violation of academic freedom. The burden for teaching these new courses would probably default to minority faculty members, who would be further pigeonholed into race work that they may not want to do. And asking professors in the sciences to teach courses on race and colonialism would likely be a disaster. Most Bates science faculty lacked any expertise in these areas, nor did they have much experience discussing fraught social issues in the classroom. I argued that pushing them to act as bigotry experts not only was of dubious educational value, but would likely do more harm than good, especially to students of color who would be subject to their fumbling attempts at teaching racially sensitive topics.
I leaned on this last point especially hard. If my time at Bates had taught me anything, it was that the most reliable way to get progressive white academics to do what you wanted was to translate your concerns into the therapeutic language of racial harm. As if on cue, a professor on the council whom I will call Sandra hastened to assure me that she took potential trauma to minority students very seriously. She insisted that there would be ways to ensure that classroom dynamics did not become unpleasant for them; the key, she explained, would be to foster a “culture of repair.”
When I said that I had no idea what a culture of repair meant (really, I just wanted to see her try to substantiate her hollow jabber), Sandra gave a helpful example of what “repair” might look like in action. She suggested that perhaps there could be a system in which students of color could call out “oops” or “ouch” if somebody accidentally said something racist—as though these were not young adults with basic human dignity paying minor fortunes to be taught by ostensible subject-matter experts, but toddlers learning not to bite their friends when someone grabbed their toy truck. It took every last ounce of my already threadbare professionalism not to lean into the mic and say “Oops.”
Harper eventually left the job to become a full-time writer at The Atlantic.
A clearly talented and humorous writer, Harper has written a story worth reading. But no one should make the mistake of thinking this is strictly a Bates College problem.
The rot Harper exposed is ubiquitous. The same story could be told at Williams, Reed, Oberlin, Bowdoin, Pomona, Amherst, or virtually any other elite liberal arts college in the country.
What Harper witnessed wasn’t an isolated malfunction, but the current state of modern academia.
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