For The Atlantic’s September cover story, staff writer Tyler Austin Harper writes about how he came to lose faith in academia, chronicling his recent career as a professor and his decision to leave his tenure-track position after five years at Bates College in Maine. “I saw clearly now what should have been obvious all along. Bates was not a good place to work, nor a moral one. And the problem went beyond a single college: Bates was a node in a higher-education system that offered teenagers an uncertain future in exchange for often unpayable debt, and that asked scholars—enticed by the tweedy dream of a kind of faculty life that has long since been clubbed to death—to keep waiting for the real job that would surely come after the temporary job, and the next.” Harper began as an enthusiastic assistant professor when he started at Bates: “I saw my academic success as the culmination of several generations of familial sacrifice, paid for by the deferred dreams of others. And 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. I imagined myself teaching at Bates forever.” But over time, Harper encountered hypocrisy at Bates and in liberal-elite academia more generally that gradually wore down his initial idealism. He focuses on Bates’s celebrations of DEI and anti-racism, which he felt functioned only as a Band-Aid over the deeper social injustices that he saw the college perpetuating. And he details how, in his view, this infected the courses offered, including a proposal that all students regardless of major take at least two courses “centering” race, white supremacy, and colonialism; influenced who got hired (he served on search committees that passed over more qualified candidates); and shaped the activities on campus. After a few years at Bates, Harper writes, he “began to see the version of affirmative action that I had defended in my head as a fantasy.” He continues: “I had spent my entire adult life at college, in grad school, and now working as a professor, and I had never before been self-conscious about being a beneficiary of affirmative action. I had always assumed that if I simply worked harder than the people around me—if I read more, went to more conferences, published more and in better venues—then nobody would question whether I deserved to be there. My experience on that search committee, though, disabused me of the notion that any of this mattered at Bates. The school’s culture encouraged us to see professors of color as vehicles for achieving the college’s diversity goals. The inescapable conclusion I arrived at was that I had been hired to be visibly Black first and a scholar second, if at all.” Harper continues, “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.” Tyler Austin Harper’s “Confessions of a Token Black Professor” was published today at TheAtlantic.com. Please reach out with any questions or requests. Press contacts: Anna Bross and Paul Jackson | The Atlantic [email protected]
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