Higher Education’s Age of “Insufferable Hypocrisy”

In the following excerpt, Tyler Austin Harper explains to Derek when and how his views on higher education began to shift.

Derek Thompson: So in the spring of 2020, you arrived at Bates College in Maine to take a job as a professor. And you write that at the time you believed in the mission of American higher education “with the dewy fervor of a young missionary.” Take me back to May 2020 and tell me how you felt.

Tyler Austin Harper: Yeah, I just wrapped up a PhD in comparative literature at NYU, which had been largely a wonderful experience. I had, unlike many grad students, extremely supportive advisers, and I really loved my time in graduate school for the most part.

Before that, I had been at Haverford College, realized pretty early on I wanted to go into academia, spent most of college preparing to try to go straight to my PhD, which is what I ended up doing. So I had really had pretty much a fairy-tale run. I was spared a lot of the pain and heartache, both on the job market and within grad school, that I think a lot of academics experienced. And so my view was pretty rosy.

I was not unaware of problems within higher education. I was not unaware of issues pertaining to labor exploitation, etc. But my view pretty firmly was that, on balance, American colleges and universities are what they say they are. They are places where young people are educated in the service of a kind of democratic good. They are places that basically are for the betterment of society, if imperfect.

And I thought liberal arts colleges in particular were some of the best educational institutions in America. I had been, like I said, at NYU, which is the sort of pure form of a corporate university. There’s a lot of great things about NYU, but it is opening campuses abroad with slave labor in Abu Dubai and so on and so forth. And so it is an institution that’s hard to be too idealistic about.

But my experience at Haverford had been incredible: small classes, intimate relationships with your professors, and so on and so forth. And so teaching at Bates was the kind of thing I wanted to do. I wanted to be at a small college that was teaching-centric. And so moving to Maine and joining the campus was kind of a dream come true, at least initially.

Thompson: You write that after the first few months at Bates, you caught whiffs of what you describe as intense racial monomania. Those are your words. Can you give me some examples?

Harper: Yeah. So I think in many ways, in my first year at Bates, there were things that blipped across the radar. I was in an early orientation meeting that was informal for early-career Black faculty, and there was an instance in which someone was giving recommendations for places they liked to eat in Lewiston. But then they also gave recommendations for places to avoid but suggested that these were places that minorities might not be safe in the Lewiston area. One of them was a restaurant. I won’t specify the restaurant so as not to slander the poor establishment, but I said, “What is wrong with that particular restaurant that it’s not safe for Black people to go there?” And they sort of hemmed and hawed and were like, “Well, a student worked there, and they didn’t like it.” And I was like, “Oh, OK.” But those incidents were easy to write off at the time.

I think the first one that really began raising alarm bells that there was something more serious and paranoid and delusional going on on that campus was an instance the summer after my first year at Bates, where on summer break I got an email that I was CC’d on along with a number of other people informing me that one of my white students had been involved in an “attempted lynching” was the phrase that was used, which immediately I was concerned about.

The student in question was somebody who was extremely progressive. I knew them quite well. They’d been in one of my classes, and I had a really hard time imagining they were involved in an instance of racial terror.

As I read the email, it emerged that what had happened was there had been an argument between several white students and a Black classmate they lived with. That argument escalated to a point that the Black classmate was asked to leave, and there was a suggestion that if he returned, the police were going to be called.

Now, I think it’s important to note that I’m not privy to why or how that argument unfolded and who was in the right or not, but the claim was made by a faculty member on campus sending the email informing us of this that the threat to call the police was an attempted lynching and explicitly, and this was the phrase used, an effort to weaponize state power to kill this Black student.

And this was really befuddling because the faculty member in question was smart, somebody whose academic work I took very seriously. And I had a hard time imagining that they would sort of fabricate this instance and call something an attempted lynching where did they not really believe it.

But on the other hand, it was impossible to believe that this student had engaged, essentially, in an attempt to have a classmate killed. And so I began to become uncomfortable with what seemed to be a degree of racial paranoia that was completely out of keeping with the reality that we were at a small, very progressive liberal arts college in a relatively blue state and in a city within that state that was relatively diverse, at least compared to the rest of the state. So that was the first moment where I began to have serious pause.

This excerpt has been edited and condensed.

Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Tyler Austin Harper
Producer: Devon Baroldi
Additional Production Support: Ben Glicksman