Tyler Austin Harper, a former tenure-track professor in environmental studies at Bates College who is now a staff writer at The Atlantic, is one of the most reliably interesting — and in some precincts, polarizing — observers of academic politics. A special interest: the bespoke monoculture he saw engulfing places like Bates, where administrators eager to appease the activist wing of their campuses institutionalized a highly moralized version of progressive politics, often to the detriment of academic freedom and other values integral to higher learning.
His most recent essay, “Confessions of a Token Black Professor,” is a farewell to all that. As a combination of conservative backlash and liberal-reform efforts undoes much of the campus consensus of the 2014-23 period, Harper’s essay serves as a kind of postmortem — a vexed requiem, by turns amused and appalled, for a period when therapeutic identity politics, and a single-minded fixation on a narrow and prescriptive vision of social justice, threatened to eclipse the university’s essential commitments to research and learning. At Bates, the same administration endorsing this project worked to suppress a unionization drive.
We talked to Harper, who joined us via Zoom from his home in Maine, about the cowardice of tenured faculty, affirmative action, the “intellectual gerrymandering of the academy,” and beer.
