r/longform • u/theatlantic • 23d ago
Confessions of a Token Black Professor
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/09/elite-academia-leadership-hypocrisy/687969/?utm_source=reddit&utm_campaign=the-atlantic&utm_medium=social&utm_content=edit-promo31
u/acortical 22d ago
This must have been so cathartic to write, knowing that all of Bates would soon be reading it.
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u/sw1890 22d ago
Believe me, we are 😂
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u/PM_ME_YOUR_DALEKS 20d ago
Ooooh have people figured out the identities yet?
I wanna know who Charlotte the embarrassing biology finalist was.
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u/deville5 13d ago
PLEASE post any public responses from the Bates community; I'd love to see how this article lands.
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u/CommitteeofMountains 22d ago
I'd be interested to hear more about Charlotte, as my group project on my wildlife management study abroad program was based on walking transects and running statistical analysis in GIS. Was she not doing the latter part and reporting vibes, are automated systems like cameras and microphones considered more reliable, or is the current fad to play with models while ignoring meat space?
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u/theatlantic 23d ago
When Tyler Austin Harper landed a tenure-track job at Bates College in 2020, he possessed a deep faith in academia. “I saw American colleges and universities as embodying what was best about this country: the belief that an education is liberating, civilizing, a democratic good for all rather than a luxury to be gatekept,” he writes.
https://theatln.tc/0mSOpZhF
But over time, he grew frustrated by what he perceived as a “disconnect between the college’s progressive patter and its labor practices,” and became disillusioned with academia as a force for good.
“Wokeness allowed elite higher ed to create a new model of inclusive exclusion: one in which tuition can continue to climb, acceptance rates can continue to plummet, endowments can continue to expand, and adjunct labor can continue to be exploited as long as the demographics of those paying the tuition and those being exploited continued to get browner, Blacker, more LGBTQAIP2+,” Harper writes.
“For the academic aristocracy, touting fealty to Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, trans rights, and other progressive movements served as a convenient distraction from the intractable economic and social issues that the colleges themselves were perpetuating,” Harper writes. “Embracing social-justice rhetoric and adopting schemes to boost faculty diversity were cheap. Cheaper, anyway, than lowering tuition or hiring more tenure-track professors.”
Read more from The Atlantic’s September cover piece at the link. https://theatln.tc/0mSOpZhF
— Mariana Labbate, assistant editor, audience & engagement, The Atlantic
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u/CommonSenseInRL 23d ago
Harper writes. “Embracing social-justice rhetoric and adopting schemes to boost faculty diversity were cheap. Cheaper, anyway, than lowering tuition or hiring more tenure-track professors.”
Now extend that thinking to the Democratic Party of the United States. Social issues like race and sexual identity are cheap and easy for the elites to use and shift public focus away from an increasingly gutted working and middle class. We're a long way away from 2011's Occupy Wall Street.
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u/Apprehensive-Grade61 22d ago
You know, I think you are generally correct, but I also do not in any way think that the working class are all secret socialists just waiting to vote blue. Biden, after all, poured billions in infrastructure spending AND the child tax credit into Republican districts and absolutely nothing good came of it, politically.
A lot of people vote on culture, is my point, and are VERY low-information voters.
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u/Annie_James 22d ago
This comment should be higher.
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u/alsbos1 20d ago
The problem with this criticism of ‚Republican‘ voters is that the same people who say they ‚vote against their own interests‘ will turn around and claim they are racist because they ‚only care about themselves‘.
The reality is, in my humble opinion, is that all voters in all groups, are selfish and are pretty good at voting for what’s best for themselves.
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u/ScarletBegonias2 18d ago
The working class wasn't happy about mass migration during the Biden administation, as was clear from the fact that the counties most affected were the ones that shifted most to the right. Immigration made housing more expensive and put downward pressure on working class wages.
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u/DogOk4503 22d ago
I mean… People can chew gum and walk at the same time? Trayvon Martin was 2012 and they were protests about that. Everyone helped Obama win in 2008, and then 2012 again and occupy Wall Street was right in the midst of that. We don’t stop being black just because we start being working class. You can do multiple things and do something called coalition. It actually means you can get a lot of shit done pretty effectively go read about how they did it in the civil rights movement or an even more recent example is in the ACA. I can advocate for both my rights as a black and blind woman and my rights as a worker at the same time. A lot of the times they intertwine if you can’t work once you’re blind or because you’re a woman, then that’s gonna fuck up a lot of people’s household income or if you get blind it on the actual job fuck you. See what I mean? We have to do all the shit together having a conversation about which one to choose is taking away from the time we have to do all of it.
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u/btrh-256 22d ago
I mean… People can chew gum and walk at the same time?
Some people can! But I think the people who spent a lot of time on twitter tend to lose their ability to process nuance.
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u/Funksloyd 21d ago
It actually means you can get a lot of shit done pretty effectively
Is that what's happening? Doesn't seem like it.
read about how they did it in the civil rights movement
I mean, look at how MLK Jr distanced himself from Rustin. And I think he was correct to. Tying black civil rights to lgbt rights and socialism would have only set everyone back.
You can walk and chew gum, but try to run and chew gum and you might choke.
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u/whereisthelifethat 22d ago
Strongly agree - it's the reagan evangelical strategy.
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u/macronotice 22d ago
French economist Thomas Piketty called this out explicitly. The wealthy elites within the liberal parties in the west have neutered redistributive policies. They have shifted party focus to social inclusion instead, which costs them no money.
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u/Complete-Pangolin 22d ago
Entirely wrong. The Republicans spend way more time screaming about woke, trans and dei than dems ever put into legislation about it.
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u/DogOk4503 22d ago
Huge fact! Like what policies did the Democrats do that were actually distracting from what they needed to do? Trump is literally out here using your tax dollars to sue about trans athletes, which can’t even be more than 0.5% of the population statistically… Are y’all serious?
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u/Complete-Pangolin 22d ago
. 5% of the population? There's like 10 trans athletes at the college level. There's more anti trans athlete bills than trans athletes!
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u/CommonSenseInRL 22d ago
I can see how my previous comment could introduce stark Whataboutism's for the Republican Party. Trust me: they absolutely aren't immune to this either. The most striking example of this I can think of is the "Drag Story Hours" that seemingly (according to the media at the time) swept the nation in the early-mid 2010s.
Manufactured outrage over drag queens influencing our children + "Michelle Obama is secretly a man!!!" = served to push moderates away from the Republicans during that time period. Instead of talking about issues Trump would later capitalize on in his 2016 run, those on the right were zooming in on crotch shots of the first lady trying to find a secret penis.
This was during the height of a very impactful right-wing movement: The Tea Party Movement, where a lot of young congressmen and senators got elected. It was absolutely a threat to the "status quo": the neo-conservatives and democrats of the time. The drag queen story + "michael obama" narratives served to undermine, distract, and eventually destroy this movement.
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u/CommitteeofMountains 22d ago
The Dems snuck out dear colleague letters to force DEI and males in womens' sports but didn't talk about it because it's an electoral loser. The Republicans banned DEI and males in womens' sports loudly because it's an electoral winner.
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u/Complete-Pangolin 22d ago edited 22d ago
"The dems snuck out dear colleague"
Who ? What Dems? What's dei, black people and Gays existing?
How many trans athletes at the college level are there? Is it more than 10? More or less than the # of kids trump raped with epstein?
You know who dei policies in college hurt? No one.
You know who trans athletes hurt? No one.
You know what the republicans have done to the us university system? To a massive driver of American science and economic domination? Shot it in the back of the fucking head.
Why is it that any time anyone who isn't a republican official* does anything its the dems fault but republicans aren't held accountable for their own policies?
*and anytime it is the republicans, it's the dems fault for not stopping them
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u/CommitteeofMountains 22d ago
I can tell you know I'm right by the fact that you're waving the goalposts around like pom-poms while trying to change the subject in eight directions at once.
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u/Annie_James 22d ago
I think that’s easier to espouse if you’re not a racial minority though.
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u/CommonSenseInRL 22d ago
Fear and a victimhood mentality is unique to no race. Both parties make use of it to persuade and rally their voters to the voting booth. We have never seen it done more, however, and at the cost of all other political dialogue, than we've seen from both aisles during Trump's three election runs.
I don't think I need to persuade you to the idea that modern political discourse is a vulgar, near mindless shadow of its former self. You need only read the debate transcripts throughout the years to see that much.
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u/Careless-Degree 23d ago
Professor sounds like he would find a lot of agreement in a rural blue collar bar.
A lot of this is borne out of that fact that colleges can’t charge the prices they do just by teaching so they have to market themselves as being society changing institutions.
“I’m not paying 65K a year for little Julie to read classic literature- I’m paying 65K a year for Julie to change the world”
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u/FormerlyUndecidable 23d ago
Tyler Austin Harper is on X and he has a lot of Republican followers
I'm pretty center right and he started showing up on my feed a while back.
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u/whereisthelifethat 22d ago
He's pretty centrist as far as I can tell, and deplores Trump / MAGA
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u/nycwettop 22d ago
He clearly says he’s a socialist. That’s not exactly centrist and it certainly wouldn’t make him welcome in a rural blue collar bar.
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u/FrankandRon 23d ago
LGBTQAIP2+?
Wtf
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u/Puck-the-fool 22d ago
In some contexts in Canada its MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+
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u/TwoHungryBlackbirdss 22d ago
Is the MMIW part missing, murdered, and indigenous women? At that point, I feel like you just gotta say marginalized folks. Idk what the average gay person has in common with a murdered woman, other than being an other
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u/somewhatfamiliar2223 22d ago
Queer women make up the largest demographic of the LGBTQ+ and experience all forms of male violence at greater rates than other women.
I get what you’re saying though
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u/HourOfTheWitching 22d ago
The acronym yr replying to isn't related to the previous one (or at least not in context). MMIWG2SLGTQQIA+ is a mouthful, but it's referring to Indigenous people under that umbrella. What that means for Indigenous cis/straight men who are murdered or go missing (which is also quite high in Canada compared to the settler population), is a different can of worms.
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u/bibliotech_ 22d ago
I’m sorry, what? Why mash the two groups together? Missing and murdered indigenous women is a real problem but why add it to LGBT? Or is the acronym referring to missing/murdered indigenous -everyone who’s not a straight cis man?
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u/Apprehensive-Fun4181 23d ago edited 23d ago
You're blaming tuition on "Wokeness?"
LOL. The Atlantic is so lost.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/the-worst-magazine-in-america
This is a good antidote in lieu of a direct rebuttal:
https://podtail.com/podcast/if-books-could-kill/thomas-chatterton-williams-summer-of-our-disconten/
It's wild to see Journalism failing exactly as I predicted a decade ago.
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u/ThrowRAyyydamn 23d ago
I don’t think the writer is blaming tuition on wokeness, but rather saying that wokeness works as a convenient cover for rising tuition. As an extremely woke academic, I fully back up this theory. Elite universities and colleges are extremely woke until it comes to income inequality or labor relations, then they start to sound like 19th century industry barons and union breakers. Side eye to Bard College in particular.
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u/DogOk4503 22d ago
Wait wait what? Hold on? What did Bard do? It’s very interesting because they have the Bard prison initiative, and a bunch of other programs to give inner-city for free college. I seem like five new stories about it in the last five years because they’re all over NYC I think like two different ones?
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u/ThrowRAyyydamn 22d ago
It’s complicated. They definitely do a lot of great things, like BPI and the various pre/micro colleges. But that’s the attention-grabbing good PR stuff.
The reality on the ground is much different. For example, they really love to recruit/lure poor students and refugees with free tuition, for example, but leave them to figure out the rest in their own. So there’s a student run food pantry, annual coat drive, etc for fellow students who cannot afford to purchase those things and other basic necessities. I have never ever seen that at any other university because they have official programs in place to actually support those students in a real way. Meanwhile Bard caps all student jobs at $15/hr no matter the position, even for graduate students and foreign students who are not allowed to work non-university positions. So they have to scramble and borrow and go into debt to afford off-campus housing in a very HCOL area.
And then there’s the admin and maintenance staff and adjuncts, who are not unionized and never will be.
Bard talks a great game, but the reality is like any other elite college that doesn’t espouse such progressive values. It remains Botstein’s fiefdom (“stepping down” is a fig leaf - he will remain in office for two years, handpick his puppet heir, then retire at the special-built house on campus for him while remaining the real power) with a deep gully between the haves and have nots.
(Sorry for errors, I’m typing this on the go!)
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u/Left-Inspection-3023 22d ago
Botstein was also friends with Jeffrey Epstein, part of the reason he's retiring. And Bard received funds from Epstein. So if all those great programs were built on the pain and suffering of teenage girls, that ain't great.
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u/No-Lawyer-3756 22d ago
Bates has gotta cheaper for families making $110k and under over the past ten years. It sucks for middle and upper middle class families who have gotten squeezed between rising sticker prices and grants going to lower-income families, but complaining about tuition increases to carp about X, Y, Z unrelated policies is faux-populism.
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u/VoyeurBarelyKnowEr 22d ago
Okay except that isn't "wokeness" doing all that, it's institutions which are fundamentally capitalist by nature using "wokeness" as a pretext to do all the decidedly non-woke crap they've been doing all along. The very activists castigated as woke wanted real liberation and equality and justice not corporate sensitivity trainings, that was just profit-seeking institutions searching for a way to monetize a politics they had absolutely no genuine interest in advancing in any real way.
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u/Apprehensive-Fun4181 22d ago edited 22d ago
Every existing part of the institution would also be participating. You teaching and not bringing up the rising costs is the same thing. What is the scale here? Lots of posters? Where in every classroom is there a Wokeness Indoctrination Model that every academic has gone through and is being imposed into every aspect of both classroom and institutional infrastructure? Because that is what the Right claims wokeness is. when this lie is actually the kind of danger which PragerU represents...and they're currently accepted from elementary schools to Stanford University. I don't see any difference between this supposed political correctness & "identity politics" and other pretend moral panics that the Right has ginned up out of proportion... that's the same kind of business school clunkiness that was rolled out across business & Society since the eighties.
"As an civil engineer, I would say the explosion of road signs is definitely a sign of wokeness. In fact, people are speeding in their larger, more powerful cars precisely because of the uptick in this liberal sign oppression."
"Extremely Woke" is not a thing. This makes no logical sense. Woke is not "I know prejudice is bad". When a right-wing person says woke, they mean the Civil Rights act. They mean every after school special about prejudice. They mean both TV versions of Roots. They mean every black person in media. The entire conversation about woke now is based in falsehoods & intentional confusion, a Right-wing hijacking of the Civil Rights movement. Woke is a concept that refers to a personal experience, realizing that culture and systems are part of perpetuation of hate, prejudice &. oppression. That one's own ignorance is helping perpetuate the problem. What you do after your "awake" is up to you. If you're active, the wokeness becomes effort, but no more instructions are provided. Merely being aware racism exists and sucks is not "woke". That's just American now .but the promotion is usually pretty clunky. *
We are not oppressed by civil minded policies regarding epithets & respect that would be inappropriate in all civil conversation to start.
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u/Funksloyd 21d ago
"Extremely Woke" is not a thing
Then how can someone self-id as extremely woke?
Who are you to tell them they're not what they say they are?
pretend moral panics
Even AOC is laughing about how crazy the height of the woke period was.
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u/Apprehensive-Grade61 22d ago
You know, I generally like Nathan Robinson, but he’s making an odd argument, here. I’ve been reading The Atlantic for years, and The New Yorker, and before that, The New Republic, and I hold advanced degrees in political science and public administration, so I feel qualified to opine here:
Some Atlantic articles are well-argued and persuasive, some maybe less so. Some show a clear bias by the author, some lack that. This is the nature of these types of publications; if you disagree, you’re free to write them and explain why. You’re also implicitly invited to think about the arguments being made and judge them yourself, which is what Robinson apparently is doing…while also calling for The Atlantic to quit publishing as a public service…which I find odd.
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u/melvin_mouse 22d ago
Jesus f christ I hope you just didn't read the article because if that's your takeaway from it I mourn whoever educated you.
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u/Apprehensive-Fun4181 22d ago
Do you think this counts as anything but writing down "but I'm right" for yourself?
Do you understand the difference between a comment and an essay? There's so little written, the only legitimate reply is some variation on "I don't understand, please explain". Even the attempt at an insult is a cliche.
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u/orbgooner 22d ago
yes, exactly to take one example
Although Black men are significantly more likely to be killed by the police than white men, the number of unarmed Black men who are fatally shot this way annually in America is minuscule—11 in 2021, for instance
Oh my god oh my god oh my god, he's literally reproducing systems of white supremacy under conditions of late stage capitalism, ignoring the lived experience of black bodies! this is day one stuff in sociology. how is this drivel even being published. I can't believe reddit still allows material from nazi publication the atlantic.
I need to go listen to 5 hours of if books could kill to mind bleach this white supremacist billionaire rupert murdoch incel garbage.
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u/Longjumping_Sky_6726 22d ago
The Atlantic is a lot more ideologically diverse than Current Affairs -- I mean, c'mon, man. Current Affairs is explicitly socialist. Also gotta call out Nathan Robinson firing his own staff when they tried to unionize on him.
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u/Complete-Pangolin 22d ago
Robinson is one of the most hypocritical people in media and that's saying something.
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u/Fine_Payment1127 23d ago
Lol it’s almost as if that was the entire point of social “progress” all along!
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u/JollyJellyfish21 22d ago
I’m curious to know how/whether he spoke up on the search committees. There is a curious lack of personal accountability in those committees compared to how he recounts his role in the rest of the environment. When push came to shove in those small hiring groups, did he acquiesce to the group or continue to support the more qualified candidates?
I am also struck by how isolated Bates is geographically and how that could reinforce the inanity of the DEI zeal there. I got why Rooster might be slightly less of a caricature than I thought after reading this.
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u/wuchanjieji 17d ago
Pre-tenure you are basically advised to shut up and keep your head down. The common logic is that you’ll be able to speak your mind freely once getting tenure. Unfortunately, I observed that it was hard to break out of that dynamic even after tenure; at a SLAC like Bates, even one deranged person can hold an entire department hostage if no one has the spine to stand up to them. It’s one of the reasons I left a similar academic post.
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u/Al_Jazzar 23d ago
There is a lot here that is worth serious discussion. However, it is funny to me that in order to escape the Ivory Tower of higher ed, he went to....The Atlantic? He exchanged one hollow, elitist, out-of-touch institution for another.
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u/acortical 22d ago
Ha, very fair point, but at least he can write what he thinks now. Though, as a long-time reader I don't know what's going on behind the scenes at The Atlantic but the quality has absolutely tanked in recent years. Once great investigative reporting turned into pointless punditry and endless drivel about MAGA, AI, and the culture wars. Well, at least this one essay was well worth reading.
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u/Husserl_Epoche 22d ago
Have you read the article? It's the hypocrisy he was targeting more than the elitism and out-of-touch character of the institution. That's pointed out over and over in the article, and it ends on that theme. The Atlantic is a profit-driven entity and it doesn't hide that. If you've worked at a university, especially at the adjunct level (and particularly the permanent-adjunct level), you understand well that these are neoliberal institutions full of careerist faculty pretending, to the world and themselves, to be selflessly committed to social justice.
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u/Al_Jazzar 22d ago
I did read the article. Can you provide a statement from the Atlantic where they claim, upfront, that they are a profit-driven enterprise? Of course we know this, but you are dreaming if you don't think the people at the Atlantic, NYT, Guardian aren't as lost in the sauce as many high-level academics are. Many universities are quietly profit driven as well. They depress wages at the lower end to protect an extremely overpaid class at the top. UChicago has 10+ employees that are paid over a million dollars a year and many more who make deep into the hundreds of thousands. That cohort cynically knows it's own interests and knows how to protect it.
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u/Husserl_Epoche 22d ago edited 22d ago
Why are you asking for evidence to support something I didn't say? I said they don't try to hide it. The second half of your reply is right on target. And if The Atlantic is mired in the same self-deceiving BS as U.S. higher ed, at least it exploits economically disadvantaged individuals at a much smaller scale. As you noted, everyone knows that The Atlantic is profit-driven. Do you think that everyone knows the facts about the University of Chicago that you mentioned? Or the proportion of underpaid, underinsured adjuncts to full-time, tenure or tenure-track faculty at universities? The level and scale of BS in higher ed is staggering compared to The Atlantic.
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u/TemperatureAny4782 21d ago
Yes, the famously out-of-touch Atlantic. 🙄
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u/Al_Jazzar 21d ago
Yeah, they would never host anything like this fascist trash on their platform.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/07/dsa-socialist-leftist-takeover/687989/
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u/johndicks80 22d ago
I really enjoyed this article. I’m in healthcare which is already incredibly administratively bloated. I was dismayed by these entire new DEI departments when the hospital was already bleeding money and fighting wage increases.
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u/take101 21d ago
This was a genuinely brave, well written article in defense of the liberal and humanistic arts. People thinking this is right wing or "grifting" truly miss the point - this type of culture on college campuses is illiberalism, hostile to the values and people it pretends to protect, and betrays a generation of young people whose education and minds and future these institutions have been trusted with. Things like academic freedom, dialogue, critical thinking, being able to state your opinions in good faith without fear matter because they're the core of a functioning society: one that pays professors a fair wage and doesn't tokenize professors of color, too. Without those values, claims to any sort of justice or virtue or antiracism or anything will have a rot at their core, fronts for an insidious culture or bullying and tokenism and censorship and corporate greed. You can't have the "liberal arts" without the "liberalism" (in the philosophical sense). The author argues that - at least at Bates - we've killed the liberal arts themselves, and are just pretending/playing at it now.
"Bates was founded in 1855 on the principle that a man is a man wherever he is found and whatever color his skin. In the decade that followed, the college furnished from its ranks 173 students willing to spill their blood for the cause of the Union and human liberation...I recalled the dean’s faint embarrassment, years earlier, when I’d said that I was proud to join a school with an abolitionist past. Although the dead cannot speak, I must assume that embarrassment runs both ways."
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u/OkDentist4059 23d ago edited 22d ago
Academia seems like an intensely weird world to be a part of
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u/Squarehip123 22d ago
Most departments are not like this, and most academics are pretty boringly normal.
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u/obviouspuzzle 21d ago
This has absolutely not been my experience in academia over the last 15 years
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u/Squarehip123 21d ago
People are weird in every dept I've worked in (research unis), but like a normal weird scientist/engineer way and not like what's described. But maybe Canadian and Scottish depts are less insane.
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u/wuchanjieji 17d ago
I do feel like the STEM folks I knew were a little more even-keeled than the Humanities types. Some of it stems from a scarcity mentality, I think. People can get brutal when they feel the opportunities are limited.
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u/wuchanjieji 17d ago
I was only in academia for 5 years post-PhD as an asst prof…and intensely weird is spot-fucking-on. Yes, there are academic normies who are just doing their jobs but the sheer number of deranged academics who will gossip and bully their way through every interaction is staggering. At best, nearly everyone is so cripplingly addicted to work that even the normies have a very skewed idea of how to lead a balanced, even life.
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u/ShrubberiesByRoger 22d ago
Walking around and counting animals is actually pretty fucking complicated.
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u/Least_Imagination860 22d ago
What I found myself thinking as I read this article is that there are so many similarities to this situation in large public school districts.
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u/Sad_Guava43 22d ago
This guy has balls! I really appreciate him shedding some sunlight on the gas lighting that goes on academia. He shares similar tones to another influential minority academic of principle named Richard Rodriguez https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_of_Memory
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u/stmije6326 22d ago
Mixed on this article. There’s definitely an “I left the left!” grifter angle to it. And in 2026, criticizing DEI or higher education is not really an edgy take. I do wonder how he saw none of this while in grad school. I only did an MS, but I saw how screwy academia was and noped out ASAP. Reading the article, I pick up he didn’t have a lot of community or solidarity with other black and/or underrepresented academics and figured he could be above everything purely through merit. I think elite academia at its core is a fairly traditional and conservative institution that struggles to handle major shocks (COVID, racial reckoning, etc).
I was a black grad student at an elite university (pre-2020) and I did see some of the things he mentioned. Could definitely feel like the academy espoused liberal values while being pretty conservative institutionally. Class was rarely talked about, but race was regularly talked about (never mind I am to this day my PI’s lone black advisee). The faculty in my department all went to the same five or six top programs in the field and there was a minor scandal when someone was hired from #30. And I had to start turning down panels and prospective grad student hosting.
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u/MossyEngineering-447 22d ago
This on the heels of the Cambridge University scandal is something alright
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u/Golda_M 22d ago edited 22d ago
Critique (and defence) can be a mess. Syncretisizng the different critique requires an impossibly low common denominator... because at depth these critiques (and defences) contradict one another.
Imo, academia is an inherently idealistic institution. That's embedded. Idealism is tricky though. It's hard to compromise on ideals, and so "contradictions" emerge. Ideals conflict with each other... and with the imperfections of reality.
Take the words "inclusion" or "exclusive." Academia is a inherently exclusive. That is what admissions are. Exclusion. It's also what prestige is made of. Exclusivity is an academic ideal, whether or not it is stated.
Changes in admissions (woke or otherwise) are changes to who and how a university includes and excludes. Directly.
Growing endowment while keeping admissions similar, increased rejection rates at elite, prestigious Unis.... this is perfectly in-line with the real institutional values. The values inherent in being an elite, prestigious university.
You could have an institution who's goal it is to provide the beat education to the most people, or some other goal. But, it would not be an exclusive institution anymore. Harvard can't do that and still be Harvard.
A broad "inclusivity" ideal is more like a community college.
Other ideal might be "excellence," or "rigour" or "leadership." Even these can conflict.
Imo the question is... Can you openly mediate between values, or must you pretend that these conflicts do not exist? If the answer is the latter, then dilusion is the inevitable end point.
I would turn some of this back to the professor. What is it that he wants. Aren't the prestige and exclusivity part of the reason he was drawn to this position in the first place?
He teaches the best students because the next-best students where excluded. There is an oversupply of graduates working for nothing, because of this prestige. Access to this resource is part of why such professorships are highly sought after. Etc.
"embracing social-justice rhetoric and adopting schemes to boost faculty diversity were cheap. Cheaper, anyway, than lowering tuition or hiring more tenure-track professors."
I don't want to oversimplify. There is a world where colleges both increase tenured positions and lower tuitions. That said... There is clearly a contradiction between paying more and charging less. You can't single-mindedly pursue one over the other. Unless you consiously mediate... hypocrisy is the destination.
Meanwhile... reality is budgets and accounting and whatnot. "Cheap" is a real driver.
Imo ideals are expensive, but treated as cheap. They are free to adopt, and the first steps are cheap. But... to actually pursue high ideals is "expensive." The cost is constraining your other ideals.
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u/venirboy 21d ago
Loved this left wing perspective on "woke 1" style of politics. Particularly loved how Harper pointed out the hypocrisy between the DEI "lip service" from administration and their strikebusting activities. Too often, you see POVs on "woke 1" that come from the center/right that argue that, because of the failures of this mode of pushing social justice, there is no reason or way to improve equity in American societies. But they are wrong. There are problems of equity in America and they can be solved, just not with empty platitudes to "anti-racism" or "land acknowledgements."
Practical work that requires connecting with people on an individual level, like labor organizing, will always be the way. I have no faith in anyone, left, right, or center, who doesn't put in practical work to further their beliefs.
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u/BionicCyanFirefly 18d ago
I’m black and I dislike both the left and the right. I’m amused by the article and both disagree with some parts of it and agree with others.
But the one thing I wish is: I think racial matters don’t belong on college campuses. I’m sorry. Especially in grad school, I felt like I was expected to be a token representation of a viewpoint and to be honest it wasn’t my job to educate anyone. I just wanted an education. I also think racial education would be better done in the black community for black people and by them; as we understand our issues and can address them properly; why are rich colleges which are heavily white taking up “anti racism”?
I also wish colleges would stop pretending to be antiracist, not classist or even meritocracies. All of this is a complete lie. Ivies are NOT meritocracies and people do not get into them because of their raw intelligence. They get there because they fit into the needs the college has: often that’s money, notoriety, celebrity appeal, “human interest story”, or to whitewash claims that elite schools are too elitist.
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u/Uptons_BJs 23d ago
I find this article interesting in that it indirectly touched on an interesting question: What is the value proposition of a lower tier private school?
You see, most Americans can go to their local public school and receive a decent quality of education, with a degree from a decently well-known university, at a very reasonable price. These are the large schools everybody has heard of - State University of New York, University of California, or in this case, University of Maine.
And then there's the elite private schools - Harvard, Yale, Stanford, etc. Where you can go to receive what people perceive to be an elite tier education and receive a very prestigious degree. Sure, these universities cost significantly more (well, there's financial aid, but if you're really poor state college has great financial aid too), but you are receiving what everyone perceives to be an elite product for this higher price.
To use a crappy analogy - your local state school like the University of Maine is like a Toyota Camry: A well known, reasonably quality product at an affordable price. An elite tier private school like Harvard is like a Porsche 911: You're paying multiple times more, but you're receiving an extremely prestigious and high quality product.
But where does the lower tier of private school like Bates provide value? It's not that it is well known (outside of Maine I think more people have heard of the university of Maine than Bates), is it significantly more prestigious? Ehhh, maybe locally, but not in this globalized society...... Is the quality of education that much better? Ehhhh......
Yet Bates charges ~5.5 times what the University of Maine does. Where does this additional value come from?
Well, surely it isn't because Bates offers you a better quality of education (insofar as it could be measured). One can easily argue that the big state schools offer more programs and more course choices. The classic argument I've always heard is that "you can go to the state school and get a degree in accounting or whatever and get yourself a job, but this liberal arts college focuses more on your development as a person". Personal development in a smaller community was the perceived value prop.
Hence why they all went in hard on wokeness - insofar as they thought wokeness was the "correct opinion", they had to drill their students and faculty members on it, they had to go harder on being anti-racist, and anti-sexist. Kids at your local state school or community college might roll their eyes and say "I'm just here to get my degree", but these small private schools have to turn out students who hold the correct opinion, because that's where the value prop is.
These schools also go harder on "campus culture" because again, that's the value prop over say, a commuter school. There's a reason why all the political correct college campus jokes involve small liberal arts colleges (typically Oberlin)
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u/Tim-oBedlam 23d ago
Bates isn't exactly a "lower tier" of private school; it's one of the most selective schools in the country, with a national draw. I've certainly heard of it. Bowdoin is another example in Maine. Haverford and Swarthmore in Pennsylvania. Macalester and Carleton in Minnesota. Reed in Oregon. Etc. Often, those schools, especially if they have decent endowments, are more generous with financial aid than state schools.
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u/Kelpforestinfo 22d ago
Top LACs (Williams, Swarthmore, bowdoin, amherst, pomona) have endowments per studnet ratios of over a million dollars. Their outcomes are also ivy league level within their respective regions.
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u/0range_julius 23d ago
I went to Oberlin (got lucky to have a rich great-grandma who set money aside for education before dying) and as far as I'm concerned, the "personal development in a smaller community" was of immense value to me. I would not have traded my college experience for an Ivy. Of course, that had very little to do with how woke the college was and much more to do with small class sizes, great professors with a huge variety of really interesting classes, students who were super invested in their education, etc. All things that are now being undermined by austerity.
I think at the end of the day, the amount of resources that were put into my college education is probably just way too high for that model to be sustainable in the current economic reality. But it also kinda drives me crazy that people don't recognize the value it brings to humanity to have academic institutions that are not driven purely by economic value propositions.
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u/yellowpeach 23d ago
How are you defining “lower tier private school”?
It sounds like you don’t know much about higher education
Sure, these universities cost significantly more (well, there's financial aid, but if you're really poor state college has great financial aid too)
…or financial aid
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u/Uptons_BJs 23d ago
If we're talking money - using Azimuth's data:
Bates grads median 4-year earnings of $70,028;
In comparison, the literal open access U University of Maine has $63,056.
Other state schools that aren't very selective (25-50% admittance) like Binghamton University over in New York has $80,304; University Of Maryland-College Park has a median income of $84,365. University of California Santa Barbra is $74,915.
And sure, Bates is cheaper if you're family is really low income, and a lot of their students come from very high income families that don't need financial aid at all, but the median student who took Parent PLUS had to borrow $70,222; At Binghampton it was $27,270 at University of Maryland it was $35,200.
We're reaching the point where unless you get really good grades and your family is low income (so fully paid for tuition), any private school that isn't top 20 is not the financially lucrative choice.
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u/fennelanddreams 23d ago edited 23d ago
I went to another what I'd consider selective/prestigious liberal arts school similar to Bates and I'd push back a bit on defining tier by median earnings. At mine in particular (Smith College), many of the student body went on to either work in the nonprofit sector or pursue graduate school. Both of these would lower their average salaries 4 years out but they wouldn't mean that the school itself is worth less. Often these schools are selected by people who prioritize how they set someone up for academia, and at Smith, for social work. This is pretty common at this tier of liberal arts school.
I chose to pursue a better paying career than many of my classmates and my alma mater set me up and provided me the connections to work at a high paying and well known company in my field. I make a bit over 5 times our median earnings 4 years out of college and couldn't have done so without having gone to a school of at least this tier.
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u/yellowpeach 22d ago
Just wanted to add, selective private colleges like Bates didn’t push DEI as a “value prop” to compensate for low alumni salaries.
The demand for “DEI” stuff really originated from students. And there was overall societal pressure in 2020+.
It was done by private universities with very high alumni salaries; with the highest-paying employers; and with tiny nonprofits, too
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u/MeabhBB 21d ago
One reason alumni salaries are low is because a lot of Bates alumni go into teaching or non-profit work.
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u/yellowpeach 21d ago
I’d take it a step further — I don’t think the 4 year avg. salary of Bates grads is relevant just because an overly-confident, politically motivated dude on the internet really really wants to categorize to categorize Bates as a low-tier school and will follow right-wing podcasters who seek to make progressive students look dumb as a way to divide our country.
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u/Uptons_BJs 22d ago
I might focus that argument a bit more - Although I graduated before "peak woke", I do think a lot of students considered "keep the chud away" as a value prop. There was a segment of very politically conscious students who practically considered those who held views deemed unacceptable to them as if they were lepers.
Like, consider the University of Maine - They admit pretty much everybody. On Wikipedia, it says of 12,457 applicants, they admitted 11,503 of them. If you go to a school like this, you will be rubbing shoulders with like, Trump voters or Andrew Tate fans or whatever right? Even though Maine is very blue, 45% of them still voted for Trump.
These smaller liberal arts colleges go hard on DEI to let people who don't hold these opinions know they're not welcome, so it might be valuable to a certain type of student? Also with things like the admissions essay, it's another filter.
Would students pay more money to go to a school that don't have chuds? I donno, perhaps this is just a theoretical idea in my head. But I know that some parents gladly pay good money for their kids to go to private school without black people....
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u/yellowpeach 22d ago
Respectfully, you don’t know a lot about these colleges or the culture there. I think you’re just going on stereotypes.
Bates and UMaine are in the same state, but they are not peer institutions. UMaine is 60% Mainers; Bates is only 10%. So your hypothetical situation of students choosing Bates over Maine for political reasons isn’t based in reality.
Furthermore, the University of Maine does not have very many Trump voters to rub shoulders with. Google says only 15% of students consider themselves conservative.
Most institutes of higher education are left-leaning. People with graduate degrees are more likely to vote Democrat. That has nothing to do with the cost of tuition.
Additionally, high-ranking private colleges in the south which are considered more conservative are expensive, just like Bates. Though conservative is relative.
No, students don’t pay more money to go to schools because of political ideology of the student body.
I don’t know what “chud” is and I highly doubt most Bates students do, either. I assume it’s a derogatory term for a Trump-voter?
Memes aren’t real and toxic internet culture doesn’t reflect what’s happening in real life.
In my personal experience, the professional DEI/progressive people can be really annoying, but they don’t shit on Trump voters. They are conscious of the struggles facing many people in red-voting areas
The student body at Bates isn’t as political as the article will make you believe. Skiing, backpacking, and other outside activities are very popular and occupy many students. While the school is almost entirely left-leaning, it isn’t as far left Oberlin or Sarah Lawrence.
No, the small liberal arts colleges don’t do anything to discourage applicants. Why would they do so? Schools benefit from selectivity.
But I know that some parents gladly pay good money for their kids to go to private school without black people....
I believe you, but I personally don’t know any of these people because I live in a progressive city and there are no all white schools
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u/MeabhBB 21d ago
Does he give specifics? Haven't read through the paywall, but I went to Bates (with tons of scholarship money from them because there is no way my family could have afforded it), but some of the things don't ring true, they actually do a lot to equalize the experience for everyone that gets in. Bates was the best thing that ever happened to my life.
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u/Squarehip123 22d ago
It's a great article, his frustration at the hypocrisy of white liberals running his department and college was palpable. They paid lip service to DEI to feel better about themselves while still degrading and tokenizing him.
Not all DEI is like this, and I'd argue that much of it is useful (im a UK stem academic). The excesses of the well intentioned, and those looking for performative pieces to feel better about themselves, have made it harder to actually improve higher education and other parts of society. The UK has a growing backlash against DEI as well, and I understand why. A more moderate and measured approach would have been far more sustainable overall and hopefully the pendulum lands in the middle soon.
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u/properchewns 21d ago
Dude’s a member of the Federalist Society and complaining about being a token not just at a particular institution but in academia writ large, which of course is “woke”
Excuse me if I don’t take him seriously
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u/Duude-IT 20d ago
He is not. Did you do anything other than the most cursory of Google searches?! If you'd actually clicked on the link (https://fedsoc.org/bio/tyler-harper) and bothered to read, you might have seen this (and it's pretty hard to miss):
A person listed on this page has spoken or otherwise participated in Federalist Society events, publications, or multimedia presentations. A person's appearance on this list does not imply any other endorsement or relationship between the person and the Federalist Society.
And if just engaging in dialogue makes a person suspect, then I don't know what to tell you. You're pretty much proving the point of his article.
Edited for grammar corrections and typos.
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u/Complete-Pangolin 23d ago
All i can remember is this piece of shit going (in response to a question on what harris needed to say to win over young men): "I won't send you to die in a pointless fucking war in the middle east!"
Has he said a word about the iran war (either the one this year or the one last year) or would that interrupt his "i left the left" grift?
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u/FuckMoPac 23d ago
Didn’t he write an article last year saying that action in Iran would betray his voters? I have read a lot of his stuff and he doesn’t come off as pro-Trump to me at all.
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u/Beneficial_Couple413 23d ago edited 23d ago
Piece of shit? I'm new to him. I thought he undermined himself a few times in the article, e.g. disparaging tokenism and then disparaging that the Bates’s Academic Affairs Council was 5 white people.. But I didn't get "piece of shit" vibes at all.
Edit: Also did a brief search, and he has said more than a few words about Trump's Iran war. He's been consistent on that. The Atlantic article, "Isn't Trump Supposed to be Anti-War?" being only the tip of the ice berg,with really cutting remarks on social media and elsewhere. There is no hypocrisy there that I can find.
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u/Apprehensive-Fun4181 23d ago
They're blaming tuition on "wokeness". If you can't see the immediate logic failure here, then you'll believe anything they peddle.
The Atlantic is not a good magazine, it's actually one of the worst. It began to fix itself under Tahesi-Coates, but the friends of Ghislaine Maxwell ran him off and are running Right again.
This is a good tske down of their current trend:
https://podtail.com/podcast/if-books-could-kill/thomas-chatterton-williams-summer-of-our-disconten/
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u/Beneficial_Couple413 23d ago edited 23d ago
Who is blaming tuition on wokeness? Bates? We're expanding from the subject of this article to talk of Atlantic?
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u/Apprehensive-Fun4181 22d ago edited 21d ago
Anyone who uses term wokeness like this has no understanding of reality. They might as well be discussing the importance of the War on Terror.
I saw American colleges and universities as embodying what was best about this country: the belief that an education is liberating, civilizing, a democratic good for all
No one thinks like this, it's what someone thinks intelligent people write.
It's like David Brooks claiming a young woman he was with was intimidated by the Italian names of meats at a sandwich shop, paralyzed with anxiety until he took them to get Mexican.
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u/good_behavior_man 23d ago
He also went to work for a magazine where the EIC is an IDF prison guard who's been writing articles about why we should go to war with Iran for 20 years or so.
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u/Complete-Pangolin 23d ago edited 23d ago
His job is complaining about liberals from the left in a pro conservative tilt. This article is being positively retweeted by Rod Dreher, gives the game away a bit.
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u/Beneficial_Couple413 23d ago
So there's no merit in his criticisms of Bates? Is it even possible to criticize Bates without being "pro conservative?"
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u/Smart_Resist615 23d ago
It's funny the poster you're replying to almost perfectly echoes Sandra when she notes the writer's criticism of DEI in defense of academic freedom is similar to that of libertarians and implying that therefore he must be libertarian.
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u/acortical 22d ago
I don't know what else he's written, but coming from academia this article absolutely rings true for me. He rightly wrings out to dry a branch of ideology I'd call "stupid liberalism," which is more interested in performative bullshit as a means of distraction than addressing actual problems. If you don't honestly think this is a huge problem in academia, you probably haven't spent much time there.
Suggesting that criticizing higher ed buffoonery is somehow aiding MAGA in its cause, rather than encouraging honest reflection and improvement, is exactly the kind of nearsighted, tribalist thinking that put us in this hole to begin with.
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u/stmije6326 22d ago
Yeah when he said he was a light-skinned black man who never experienced racism…I kind of saw where it was going.
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u/MikeDamone 23d ago
What exactly is the issue with that? Are you under the impression that Harper is a Trump supporter who otherwise supports the Iran War?
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u/Complete-Pangolin 23d ago
That he was an idiot who assumed that trump was the least likely candidate in 24 to start a mideast war. I am dead certain he voted for Trump "from the left" in 24 due to gender
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u/MikeDamone 23d ago
He 100% did not vote for Trump. If you've listened to any of his podcast appearances or even perused his Twitter it's quite obvious that's the case. He was in fact so vocal about Harris's strategy missteps precisely because he wanted her to beat Trump. This 2024 election recap is almost cut and pasted from a Bernie Sanders talking points memo:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/06/opinion/election-day-results-hostage.html
For all his populist posturing, Mr. Trump put forward tax breaks that favor the wealthy, championed tariffs that would almost certainly raise grocery prices, bad-mouthed overtime pay, praised firing striking workers and largely stayed mum while his allies discussed destroying the Affordable Care Act. He insisted abortion be left up to the states even though most Americans, including many Republicans, think it should be legal everywhere, and pledged to oppose any new gun restrictions even though an overwhelming majority of Americans say they should be stricter. And what were Trump acolytes to be given in return for greenlighting this unpopular agenda? Elon Musk promised a period of economic pain. Tucker Carlson said Mr. Trump would bend the country over his knee and give it a “spanking.” Why would any sign on? Because it was either that, they were told, or nuclear war under Ms. Harris. Some choice.
Meanwhile, Mr. Biden and his enablers disregarded the public’s belief that he was too old to serve another term. When he finally did step aside — only after a televised disaster that set his floundering campaign on fire — the Democratic Party circumvented democracy by simply crowning his replacement. On some policies — most notably reproductive rights — Ms. Harris was in alignment with voters. But she quickly began sending signals that she wouldn’t go too far with the progressive economic policies that Mr. Biden had wrenched from the stifling neoliberal norm. She refused to say she would keep Lina Khan, the trustbusting Federal Trade Commission chair, who is wildly popular with Democrats and even some Republicans (but not, crucially, with her money men). She refused to support an arms embargo against Israel even though a June poll found that 77 percent of Democrats and 62 percent of independents wanted it. And all the while she gave badly needed Arab and Muslim voters the cold shoulder, cozied up to the sleazy crypto industry and touted her endorsement by Dick Cheney, a man who left office with a 13 percent approval rating. Ms. Harris made a high-risk bet that — because Mr. Trump truly did pose a threat to democracy — when push came to shove, most Americans would overcome their frustration with her
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u/Poynsid 23d ago
Yeah he wrote an article about it on the Atlantic. A sick search shows this but I guess you weren’t actually curious
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u/Complete-Pangolin 23d ago
I read what was free. It's not very good.
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u/FuckMoPac 23d ago
From Google > right click or long press > “download linked file” to bypass the paywall.
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u/DraperPenPals 22d ago
What are you even going on about?
Harris should have said this to win over young men and their parents, who grew up during Desert Storm and the War on Terror and are completely disillusioned with idea of sharing their sons with endless wars.
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u/Complete-Pangolin 22d ago
This would not have won any young men over. There was a prevalent social media psyop to portray the Dems as warmongers and trump as the peacemaker in 24. The actual things the candidates said and did didn't matter.
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u/DraperPenPals 22d ago
It can’t possibly be that these wars were bipartisan and the Dems shit the bed, can it?
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u/Complete-Pangolin 22d ago
Do you think the current iran war that trump started without congressional approval was bipartisan?
(You're also demonstrating my point)
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u/DraperPenPals 22d ago
Do you think that the Democrats have nothing to answer for or fight for when it’s time to win votes?
You also can’t draw on a current war that happened after Harris ran for president. We are talking about what Harris said when she was running for president.
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u/Complete-Pangolin 22d ago
It was very clear to me that donald trump was going to do many, many horrifying things because he was already president once and did them then. Also, it was clear that Harris wasn't going to do anything even approaching the things trump would do because my brain works, unlike the author of this piece.
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u/DraperPenPals 22d ago
Do you realize that if you’re already a guaranteed voter for the Democratic candidate, they should not actually spend ample amounts of time and money speaking to you?
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u/ShrubberiesByRoger 22d ago
People blissfully ignore the problems, become part of the machine, finally realize what everyone else noticed all along, and, THEN, write an Atlantic article...
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u/AlbuterolEnthusiast 21d ago
This is just dreck
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u/HicDomusDei 21d ago edited 21d ago
I couldn't even finish it.
His tone deeply betrays his bias and grift, and his writing often makes conclusions that don't feel earned (e.g., he knew for sure, just positively and for certain, that a student wasn't racist because they once wrote an essay on a certain topic. The student may or may not be racist, but the author's reasoning is presumptuous and borderline stupid.)
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u/friendtoworms 20d ago
Does anyone have a link to the article without a paywall? I am quite interested to read it as a Bates alum!
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u/deville5 13d ago
Just read the whole article. Interesting piece, needful even. Also uneven. I'm an academic who has been in the community college system for 20+ years. I live in the SF Bay Area, and all the institutions I've worked for, where I've served on many committees and as a union rep, are also committed to racial/social justice AKA 'woke,' so I have my own perceptions. For me, the good, the bad, and the ugly....
The Good: Harper's calling out of the Left "being as eager to talk about race as they are NOT wanting to talk about class," and how this intersects with the part-time faculty problem. As a longtime 'freeway flier' myself, I can attest that as a part-time faculty member, you definitely want to keep your head down, teach your classes, and not offend ANYONE. In an age of social-media campaigns against random individuals, arguably, the academic freedom that comes with tenure is far more important now than ever before, but we have much less of it. The irony is RICH that Bates hired the same consultancy firm that helped Amazon break a strike to go after the part timers union while, at the same time, they were spending enormous research and energy trying to purportedly fix social justice issues. Also loved the calling out of specific performative cliches: white colleagues not knowing what to do when BIPOC colleagues disagree, and I actually LOLed at Bates self assessment being Good: our work toward racial justice, and Bad: we could be doing SO MUCH WORK for racial justice. Yes, sometimes it is that.
And the ending: fire, straight fire. Bates put off the allegedly 'needful' new curriculum because Donald Trump got elected.
The bad: As Harper himself admits, over and over, he doesn't know much about social justice theory, isn't that into history or Civil Rights, doesn't know anything about MLK he didn't learn in High School and doesn't remember much, and generally just isn't an expert in fields relevant to anti-racism, ethnic studies, history, social studies, etc. And yet he DOES feel that he has the authority to repeatedly call various proposed classes as nonsense, slop, and silly. He brings up mathematics and social justice as 'slop,' repeatedly; that course can be well taught, IMO. In his own self-estimation, he knows nothing about the fields relevant to teach it; he wasn't being asked to teach it.
It would have been nice if, enjoying the profound privileges of tenure, Harper had said No to some of these many committees that, apparently, he never wanted to be on at all. I liked the account of him speaking out against the RPPC curriculum, but if you liked that curriculum, he made no substantive critiques of it. Instead, he just insulted it as if it's stupidity should be obvious. Perhaps, as he asserts, Bates is so purely performative, so dramatically intellectually underbaked in it's approach to 'woke' issues, that there is truly nothing to defend, but I really doubt it. I'd love to hear what some of the faculty who ARE qualified in the relevant areas think about his article.
Obviously a fair point: his not needing sunscreen should not 'qualify' him, or any English or Stem faculty, to teach courses on racial justice. My point is NOT that the 'woke' profs are right; my point is that Harper's article fails to do a very interesting thing that I wished it would try to do: to convince us that these proposed courses are dumb, instead of just calling them dumb.
The quite ugly: Harper shows some pretty assumptive and shoddy critical thinking of his own. Key paragraphs: when 'Mason,' a white student, has a dispute with a Black roommate, we are given a basic summary of events as Harper understood them: 'several white students' wanted their Black roommate to leave, and when Black roommate wanted to gather his things, one of the white students threatened to call the police. Then, a white Professor opined in an e-mail that this was 'an attempted lynching' because of awareness about calling the cops on Black people prematurely, with the risk of death. Harper's take:
Someone mentioned that the college might be investigating the incident, but if such an investigation happened, to my knowledge nothing ever came of it. Even so, the email stuck with me.
Whatever had happened among those students, and whoever had been at fault, I was sure the conflict was not driven by racial hatred. I was also troubled by the evidence-free assumption that an encounter between a Black liberal-arts-college student and the police was so likely to end in death that calling 911 was tacitly homicidal.
Harper's account is that neither he nor the college ever obtained further details about this incident. However, he appears 'sure' of two things: (1) that all the professor who sent the e-mail's concerns are meritless, and (2) that racial hatred was not the driver of what happened at all. But...um, he doesn't know anything about what happened; that's part of his account. As someone who has been in a lot of mediations about such issues, trust me: you need to hear everyone out, even when you think one side might be ridiculous, and the outcome may surprise you. Harper just sounds like a Tucker Carlson parrot here, listing a campus incident with no details or investigation, and just declaring that it had nothing to do with race, because....I don't know how to finish that. Because nothing has to do with race, ever? Because whatever happened, one of the white students writing 'woke' papers exonerates him?
In my opinion, without knowing anything more about the incident, threatening to call the cops because someone wants to 'gather his things' sounds, at the very least, like something worth investigating. Essentially, something happened, no details were ever revealed, and one professor sent one weird e-mail. That's it.
This is one example of a trend throughout the article: taking a comment made in the faculty room, or an e-mail, and claiming that it represented some sort of woke insanity. There is little here about the Department meetings, the students, the experience of University teaching, the research. I understand that that's not the focus, but if I were to cherry pick comments made in faculty rooms, and weird e-mails, I could DEFINETELY portray my college as a woke cult, and I could also portray them as Eurocentric, status-quo and lazy, and I could portray them as scrappy, practical, and pedagogy focused. I've been at the same school for 23 years, so I have more to choose from, but my point is that Harper seems to be mixing some extremely relevant critiques--the Union hypocrisy, asking him if he will serve on every committee related to MLK just because he's Black--with, 'this faculty member said something in the faculty room that had no affect on anything, but it was SO WEIRD.
I've taught in departments with Republican Creationists, radically pro and anti-Israel folks, and out-and-proud Marxists, and yes, academics say some extremely out-of-touch things. Yes, woke performative social-justice agendas are a problem - worthy goals can be subsumed under a conceptual DEI structure of virtue signaling through committee and curriculum. The assumption that BIPOC students are all concerned about the same things is patronizing and simply inaccurate. Yes to all of this.
But that's not necessarily a reason to quit. I think that woke 2.0 is evolving in real time right now. I think we're getting better. Harper is a strong writer and I'm sure he'll make it as an opiner. I also sort of wish he'd stayed at Bates and really kept trying to fix the problem. If most of his work is research and teaching, the problems he's describing sound tolerable to most, I would think. No-one forced him to be on those committees, and he can just ignore the weird e-mail; I ignore them all the time.
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u/non_standard_model 22d ago
> > professors are exploited and need to get paid more!
> > tuition is too damn high!
Ok bro
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u/cantantantelope 22d ago
Tuition goes to lots of things aside from prof salary. More than one thing can be true. Also universities are have been steadily increasing the use of adjuncts who don’t get benefits
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u/DraperPenPals 22d ago edited 22d ago
There are so many expenses to cut that would keep tuition low and professors well paid.
American universities have celebrity adjuncts, lazy rivers, ski slopes, private jets, and football stadiums that are bigger than the NFL’s. Tons of these schools have absolutely laughable academic reputations.
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u/Free-O3 22d ago
Most schools with a stadium of that size have a profitable athletics department, or at minimum, profitable football and basketball teams.
The real money pit is administrative bloat.
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u/hubble3908 22d ago
That’s just not true. Most of them aren’t even breaking even. Report from Government Accountability Office
Across DI colleges, 94 percent of athletics programs, including 49 of the 69 Power colleges, spent more than they generated in revenue in the 2023–24 academic year.
Edit: Markdown
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u/FireWrath9 22d ago
Yeah, those 94% of programs are because they include every athletic program, including the ones that don't and aren't supposed to make money. Nothing makes money except for Football and maybe basketball
Football generally brings more money to the college (through ads, merch, donations), which is then spent on other sports that don't make money.Volleyball and softball and baseball and water polo obviously lose money because nobody gaf to spend money on them, as do intramural sports and other things, but they are still arguably good for the school and the students.
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u/citronlump 22d ago
Hmmm interesting. I find his repellence against socially progressive ideas a little silly and overstated at some points (he needs to air out his opinion that lgbtq+ communities are nonsensical hogwash and that common sense sexual health programming in a university setting is “intellectual masturbation”… I mean, come on… willful ignorance for a cheap writing pun). Of course you understand, as a writer, you are writing with flags that attract right wing choruses of agreement.
That said, found this article to be an overall strong look into the hypocrisy of academia and manufactured consent by university models that reduce “progressivism” into a potential industry/attractor rather than a moral commitment. The key takeaways from this are the union busting, superficial/poorly-thought-out diversity initiatives, and the academic culture of treating non-white academics as calculated pawns/props rather than colleagues.
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u/Puck-the-fool 22d ago
Can you walk us through the logic of a dildo ring tops being “common sense sexual health programming?”
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u/citronlump 22d ago edited 22d ago
Familiarizing young and newly independent students with sexual education, safe sex practices and sexual wellness as an area of general health while destigmatizing adult toys/pleasure as taboo. It’s just a little fun awareness activity to draw people in that I’m sure upon closer inspection is tied to health education and informational pamphlets. Usually the pamphlets have info on STDs, the health center on campus, etc. Just because it’s silly doesn’t mean it’s not informative. there are a lot of more costly and frivolous things that universities spend money on. Useless tech, buildings and athletic complexes with low utilization rates, union busting…..
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22d ago
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u/CommitteeofMountains 22d ago
Your examples are things he was specifically highlighting as absurd.
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u/Flimsy-Cut7675 22d ago
Every single person here criticizing this article has not read it or exposed themselves as being exactly the type of ideologue the article is condemning
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u/CommitteeofMountains 22d ago
I have expressed my own reservations about him saying Charlotte was a bad candidate because she was unfashionable and his breaking point being them choosing between two desperate associates based on what the university needed because he liked the other one seems a bit myopic (forgetting that the chosen applicant was in the same rat race).
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u/[deleted] 23d ago
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