The reactionary champions of “free thought” on X have declared The Atlantic’s September cover story by Tyler Austin Harper essential reading, a rare and searing analysis of the DEI sickness afflicting academia by a self-declared former token black professor. Ironically, the power of Harper’s piece, which is rich in telling anecdotes extrapolated into powerful truths and utterly devoid of empiricism, lies in the author’s unique brand of identity politics. It is a confessional by an improbably naive black socialist who arrived on campus with “the dewy fervor of a young missionary” and saw too much: too many peers and administrators blithely trampling on academic freedom, blind to the labor exploitation they perpetuated.
Like Harper, I was a token black professor at Bates. I was a member of the history department and the Africana program, and my pre-tenure departure in summer 2023 was what briefly made him, in his words, “an irreplaceable negro.” Like him, I co-chaired the MLK Day committee. Because of course I did. Unlike him, I was also a member of the Curricular Working Group that he spends much of the piece excoriating, and thereby co-authored what he called an “Orwellian masterpiece, by turns insane and sinister,” apparently in a crazed bid to eradicate thoughtcrime by making Bates scientists teach woke chemistry.
There are recognizable parts of Harper’s account, stories so familiar to any [insert marginalized identity] instructor in contemporary academia as to be barely worth mentioning. Gross union-busting and casual cruelty toward adjuncts by white deans and senior faculty spouting inane DEI-isms while committing microaggressions — gasp. The unrecognizable part of Harper’s tale, and the one seized on by the anti-woke warriors on social media, is pernicious enough that it demands rebuttal. By his telling, Bates’s senior leadership was the “source of the most intense racial monomania on campus,” but the simultaneously illiberal and neoliberal elite had foot soldiers, some combination of fanatical DEI holy warriors and unwitting dupes united in an axis of evil that he alone could perceive.
Harper writes that the college’s Africana program was “one of the centers of performative radicalism at Bates,” a hub of coddled students and faculty — mostly black, Harper doesn’t need to say — unable to perceive the economic injustice inherent in our “133-acre Eden of manicured greens and august buildings smack in the middle of postindustrial purgatory.” Worse, it seems we were only one symptom of the woke rot decomposing the academy.
This is a provocative framing. But in a piece that purports to center labor exploitation, the author is curiously uninterested in considering an obvious alternative — the myriad and sophisticated ways that black students and faculty members have, for many decades, collectively resisted degradation by leveraging their status as valuable, tokenized icons that white institutions use as living, breathing, touchable evidence of their professed commitment to racial justice.
Early in the piece, Harper sets the stage by portraying a supposedly minor spat between college students, one involving white peers threatening to call the police on a black roommate, as an opportunity for faculty to indulge in anti-racist hysterics. Labeling the faculty response “emblematic of the kind of ‘politics’ that dominated at Bates,” Harper emphasizes the statistical unlikelihood that any such call would have ended in the young black man’s murder by police (apparently the only negative outcome he can imagine), while studiously ignoring the history of a community he claims to champion.
I remember this moment well, but differently. The black student couch-surfed for a week before he told his advisor, a pre-tenure biologist affiliated with Africana, that he’d been kicked out of his apartment under threat of police intervention. She reached out to colleagues, who responded with well-founded concern for the student. Before, during, and after my time at Bates, black students have protested mistreatment by campus security and Lewiston police officers. A few months before the incident, the Lead Campus Safety Officer was fired after an unjustified use of force against a black student. It was a big deal at Bates, but I guess Harper missed it.
Immigration was another source of tension on and off campus. Town-gown relations were historically tough, and Lewiston’s large African diasporic community — assailed during Trump’s second term by ICE and CBP agents — even then had been at the center of racial hostility for roughly two decades. Many black students I knew at Bates, including majors and minors in Africana, were from immigrant backgrounds. Harper was not affiliated with the program, so perhaps he never spoke with them frankly about the issues they faced. We did. They all had stories. They were tired of telling them. The idea that they imagined persecution while peacefully frolicking on an idyllic campus is pure fantasy.
So is the idea that curricular reform at Bates was a DEI fever dream cooked up by a few scheming admins and tweed-swaddled radicals. The Curricular Working Group was established by senior leadership in response to campus protests spearheaded by students of color. These students, some of whose images were being used to promote a $300 million fundraising campaign at a time when white alums were feeling especially generous about racial justice, had legitimate reasons to feel unsafe and undervalued. They demanded an institutional response. Whether the CWG was a correct or effective one is a completely fair question. But the impetus for its creation was an ongoing negotiation, one forced by students unwilling to accept a bad deal from an institution they were literally enriching with their presence.
Like every scholar asked to do “Black Guy Work,” I joined the CWG with ambivalence and mixed motives. I deeply respected the senior professors on the committee, and I wanted my students to feel as though protest could lead to meaningful change. I also wanted them to have better lives on campus. That said, I had my doubts. My initial skepticism about our institution’s commitment to racial justice had long since curdled into cynicism, but I was able to negotiate a course release to reduce my teaching workload in exchange for participating. On balance, the chance to collaborate with great people and ideally steal back some time for my own research seemed like a fair trade for whatever value I could provide.
Harper portrays the CWG, which had the gall to suggest that newly required courses on race and power should be distributed across the college’s majors, as a wild outlier spawned by an entitled and newly empowered DEI elite. It was the opposite. Our strategy was shaped by students and scholars of color with hard-won institutional knowledge. From painful experience, in some cases over decades at Bates, we concluded that any proposal would be interminably debated and almost certainly watered down by colleagues whose commitments to racial justice were, to put it charitably, a bit tenuous. Harper says he took solace that the CWG proposal was “so self-evidently unhinged that it would never get past the rest of the faculty.” Well, yes. We anticipated that our proposal would fail to pass in its original form. That much was obvious to everyone involved in drafting. When entering a difficult negotiation, one generally anchors high.
More importantly, we understood how badly under-resourced Africana and ethnic studies were at Bates. These programs, which did not have the same institutional status as full departments, were consistently treated as second-class citizens. Their workloads were mostly shouldered voluntarily, by faculty members housed in departments with their own heavy demands on our time. In institution-speak, the programs had too few FTEs (“full-time employees”). Africana had one, at a time when the English department had as many as nine. And we were being increasingly burdened by white administrators’ squeezing maximum value from minimal investment. Senior leadership expected us to produce a splashy new curricular initiative to pitch to students and alums. It would significantly raise student demand in some disciplines, while leaving others untouched. We surmised from experience that the institution would not provide corresponding resources. The demand would be absorbed overwhelmingly by pre-tenure and adjunct faculty members of color with scant means to resist labor exploitation, as well as by those senior scholars who cared enough to share the load.
The committee was an intellectually diverse group. CWG members were intentionally drawn from across the faculty. We all wanted to spread the workload equitably rather than contributing to a racist status quo. Harper is appalled by one of the sample courses that we proposed: “Mathematics for Social Justice.” It was pitched by a tenured mathematics professor on the committee who later won a major national award for teaching excellence. She was better positioned than Harper was, despite his protestations about the boundaries of faculty expertise, to assess the feasibility and curricular value of the class she proposed.
What Harper sees as groupthink madness was interracial solidarity by experts in their fields. Rather than allowing the institution to coerce more unseen labor from our peers, CWG decided to force the issue with our colleagues: if you value DEI like you say you do, put in sweat equity. We wanted our self-professed allies to think deeply about how they could share our burden rather than patting us on the back and returning to business as usual. As expected, some of them balked. They submitted a counterproposal that would have forced the added workload back into our ghettoized program. Africana faculty responded by threatening not to cooperate. Harper casts this as a racial tantrum, missing what it really was: hard bargaining, institutional intransigence met with the threat of a labor strike.
Harper’s main argument, that fanciful racial grievances overshadowed the college’s anti-labor repression when Bates workers sought to unionize, is nonsense. At the time, I was a historian of nineteenth-century American history. The book I published in 2021 was about how demagoguery and police violence undermined interracial labor solidarity in the early Jim Crow South. When campus workers were allegedly threatened illegally for unionizing, I joined many students and faculty members in loudly protesting the administration’s indefensible actions. Anybody on campus at the time would have recognized that the overlap between the voices for racial and labor justice was approximately total.
One of my colleagues in Africana was among the most visible faculty organizers in the unsuccessful campaign to establish a wall-to-wall union of staff and adjunct professors. He was a white male anthropologist who ultimately worked as a contingent professor at Bates for nearly a decade, eventually having to depart despite a well-reviewed book and a college-wide teaching award. One thing I remember from that especially grim season is his courage. He had a young family; he worked on a short-term contract, meaning he could effectively be fired in retaliation for outwardly opposing the administration. But he was on the front lines of labor and racial justice campaigns that were turning increasingly fractious. He stood in solidarity with workers and tenure-track Africana colleagues like me, even though we were paid more than he was to do the same job. His sense of intersectional justice, and his bravery in acting on his beliefs without the benefits of comparative job security, inspired me.
When Harper’s article landed, I thought about that anthropologist immediately. He was the archetypal deserving white dude disinherited during Peak Woke. What did he think about this mess? I asked him. “One of the major functions of Africana was to provide a space of community and care,” he responded, while acknowledging the limitations of our attempts under institutional pressure. “I’ve been telling former students who ask that I feel exceptionally lucky to have been trusted as a white guy in a space where I was a clear minority, because it let me see all this in a way I never would have otherwise.”
Speaking as the other token black male professor who chose to leave both Bates and academia rather than going up for tenure, I agree with Harper that, like many of its peers, Bates was “deeply, incorrigibly racist.” But Harper’s analysis of the problem is wildly off base. He is right that, during our stint on campus, white administrators exploited workers and students (of color and otherwise) while implementing half-baked DEI policies as marketing tools. They no doubt believed they were doing good, but they too often ignored those who had the most at stake in the conversation. Harper misses, however, the ways that workers and students (of color and otherwise) countered exploitation by acting in solidarity to leverage the institution’s public commitments in fights to achieve labor and racial justice. On our campus, as in the nation and the world, these uphill battles were inextricably intertwined.
Harper has since moved on to memorializing Jason Arday, in a piece that strikes a very different tone than the Atlantic staffer had taken on X ten days before. When Arday, then still alive, resigned in the face of a social media lynch mob, saying he had “reached the limits of what any person should reasonably be expected to endure,” Harper, who had been posting prolifically about the whole saga, responded: “Look, if you’re going to be a turbo-fraudulent serial fabulist whose crime spree has discredited one of the world’s oldest academic institutions, then you should at least have the decency to be funny. And this, my friends, is funny. We’ll miss him when he’s gone.”
Now Arday is gone. Harper farmed over a thousand likes mocking him when he was in agony. This week he is presenting himself as a sage of the whole sordid tragedy. Just like the DEI mania he witnessed in academia, the hypocrisy of “the online hive mind” is apparently unbearable to someone like Harper with such a clear-eyed view of the real problem. “The same platform that loosed an algorithmically accelerated torrent of abuse is now dominated by kind remembrances and mawkishness. I find the whole pageantry grotesque.” His own grotesque role in the pageant is downplayed significantly; his many X posts are alluded to only obliquely.
The acclaim that has greeted Harper’s article suggests that the market for token black intellectuals is even more bullish outside academia than within it these days, but its products are different. The DEI hires of Woke 1.0 are being cast aside for the DEI deniers of Trump 2.0, but some things never change. The machine still commodifies black identities and rewards the few black writers who pitch themselves cleverly enough to reach a wide audience. And it is always looking for bold new voices to spin a good tale.
Andrew Baker is a recent law school graduate, a former college history professor, and the author of To Poison a Nation: The Murder of Robert Charles and the Rise of Jim Crow Policing in America.
Well said Andrew.
Very well said