…where he used to teach, before joining The Atlantic. Harper is Black and also a socialist. I first encountered him on Twitter, where he was a sharp critic from the left of the excesses of the Wokerati. This new piece is beautifully written and both horrifying and laugh-out-loud funny at points. Some excerpts (but there is much more interesting detail in the full piece):

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+. It also helped nurture the delusion that elite college graduates were being prepared for lives of civic virtue, and that their highly priced education would be deployed in service of the public good. Never mind the fact that, during my time at Bates, roughly a quarter of the school’s graduates went on to jobs in tech, finance, or consulting—a startling figure that nonetheless pales in comparison to the nearly half of Harvard and Yale students who end up in these same career tracks.

All of this was the backdrop of the dean’s announcement to faculty, in the fall of 2021, that the college’s next major project would be to napalm the strangling weeds of bigotry that were apparently rooted deep in its soil. “Racism, sexism, ableism, classism are deeply embedded in society, in our fields of study, and in the spaces we occupy,” he observed. “To eradicate these inhibitors, these retardants to progress and educational potential, these poisons,” we were told, would require setting aside “self-censorship” and “dogmatic positions.” Some of this “work” would focus on the individual: “Many of us, especially white faculty and staff, require explicit training.” But as with all cultural revolutions, the real change would involve collective struggle.

The dean explained that every department and program at Bates was to complete a racism self-audit….To facilitate this work, departments were required to bring in an external consultant. Each major would produce a “curricular transformation plan” and deliver the report to the dean’s office….

To me, the whole initiative rang serious alarm bells for academic freedom: The faculty was being made to accept a highly contestable and expressly political conclusion—that racism was latent in every department and program on campus—and then sent on a treasure hunt to find evidence supporting that predetermined finding. Given that the transformation plan was mandatory, We didn’t unearth any white supremacy hidden in our astronomy courses clearly would not be an acceptable verdict.

Even more disturbing was what the dean said would come next: “serious consideration” of a report from Bates’s Curricular Working Group, a committee composed of faculty and students, which proposed that all students be required to take at least two courses “centering” race, white supremacy, colonialism, and “intersecting experiences of power and privilege” within their major. In other words, the report recommended that every single major on campus—not just those in the humanities and social sciences, but also physics, chemistry, biology, and the like—offer and require two such courses.

The whole document struck me as an Orwellian masterpiece, by turns insane and sinister. The only thing that gave me solace was the certainty that the proposal was so self-evidently unhinged that it would never get past the rest of the faculty.

All of this social-justice rhetoric also felt wildly hypocritical. The same October day that the dean promised to abolish “retardants to progress”—including classism—adjunct faculty and staff announced that they were starting a union drive, citing “low pay, and poor working conditions at the college.” The union was intended to be “wall-to-wall,” meaning that it would include not just non-tenure-track faculty but also people working in facilities, the dining hall, and other nonacademic roles on campus. The administration’s skulduggery started almost immediately….

The college declared that it would not remain neutral during the unionization drive, and by November, Bates had hired the same consulting firm that was helping Amazon crush labor organizing on Staten Island.

I began to develop a case of political vertigo. There I was, joining my colleagues in sifting through our curriculum like anti-racist truffle pigs; assigning an Afro Caribbean graphic novel, Marshallese ecopoetry, and the like to diversify my syllabi; and organizing a “Decolonization and Liberation”–themed MLK Day celebration meant to honor a civil-rights leader who had been assassinated while supporting sanitation workers agitating for basic labor rights. Meanwhile, the college was paying ungodly sums to corporate mercenaries to ensure that it could continue exploiting its most vulnerable employees. But if administrators felt the least bit sheepish about their hypocrisy, they didn’t show it.

I was in a search-committee meeting, reviewing the scores of applicants who had applied for an open tenure-track position in the environmental-studies program, when a colleague from another department shared their thoughts on a candidate whose work focused on the African diaspora. “I’m worried his work will be too close to Tyler’s,” they said.

The comment left me dumbstruck. Too close to Tyler’s? This would have been a good point—it is routine to pass on candidates whose interests are too similar to those of faculty already on campus—except that my research and teaching were about 19th- and early-20th-century British literature, with a focus on science fiction and the history of science. Apparently, my colleague had assumed that, because I am Black, I must be an expert on the African diaspora.

Partway through the meeting, I sent an email to a friend recounting the incident. “All of these good white liberals are so racist,” I wrote. Minutes later, I sent another update. “Now we just nixed a candidate who works on American environmental history and Edward Abbey,” I said, “because he did not ‘even acknowledge the profound whiteness of Edward Abbey.’ ” I did not know what “profound whiteness” meant, exactly. (Were all white people profoundly white, or was it possible, through hard work and good behavior, to become merely moderately white, or even mildly white?) But I did know that, whatever “profound whiteness” meant, it wasn’t good….

I never stopped believing in affirmative action in principle, but I slowly stopped believing in it in practice. I’d understood the spirit of affirmative action to be about recognizing that people from historically underrepresented groups often face additional barriers, about affirming that talented minorities who may be less connected and superficially less refined can nonetheless rise to the occasion if given the opportunity. It seemed to me that the Bates administration’s push to diversify at all costs had led some of my colleagues on the faculty to internalize the opposite idea: that it is not especially important to find minority candidates who are capable of being held to traditional academic norms. Justice and anti-racism required a two-tiered system, a sort of woke Jim Crow, in which radically separate standards were applied to white and nonwhite candidates. In short, I came to see Bates College, self-styled beacon of progress, as an institution that was deeply, incorrigibly racist….

I was angry about the culture at Bates. I was sick of being treated like a racial prop rather than a professor, which included being continually recruited to do Minority Work I found silly or degrading. In addition to serving on the MLK committee, which I did for several years, I had been asked to be on multiple committees related to the college’s metastasizing diversity bureaucracy—work it seemed that my white faculty friends were rarely asked to do….

At a March 2023 faculty meeting, the [proposed new race, colonialism etc. course] requirement was put up for debate and comment. I commented.

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”….

I also got an email, after the meeting, from “oops, ouch” Sandra, who seemed quite anxious that a young Black professor with leftist politics objected to the committee’s vision. During our exchange, she noted that my views on academic freedom were also found among “faculty with libertarian leanings”—as though the mere fact that my opinion was shared by professors who were not liberal progressives was proof that the opinion was illegitimate. She added, “I do have some suspicion about white people using arguments like this to avoid addressing systemic racisms.” To me, it seemed obvious what she meant: Did I, a Black man, really want to be on the same side as people who didn’t want to Do the Work?

I told her that I saw Bates’s new scheme as simply the liberal mirror image of what was already happening in places like Florida, where the state government was policing curricula to advance a racist, homophobic agenda. “I’m not willing to support violating intellectual freedom in higher education just because it happens to be my team that’s doing it,” I wrote.