Oops: The post-credibility university

Tyler Austin Harper was a "token black professor" at Bates College in Maine, he writes in The Atlantic. Getting a tenure-track job right out of graduate school was a dream come true. It turned into a nightmare. Professors of color were seen "as vehicles for achieving the college’s diversity goals," he writes. "I had been hired to be visibly Black first and a scholar second, if at all."

Tyler Austin Harper

He served on a hiring committee that recommended a "low-wattage academic . . . mostly due to her pigmentation and her enthusiasm for DEI bureaucracy," he writes. That was good enough.

At Bates, he writes, "current and future elites paid — or were paid — for the privilege of cosplaying as radicals, victims, or both."

Administrators and a minority of professors pushed for racism "audits," Harper writes. Woe betide the astronomy department if it could find no white supremacy in the stars. A committee proposed requiring all students to take at least two courses "centering" race, colonialism, etc., including one within their major. A hypothetical example was “Mathematics for Social Justice,” to explain “the role of mathematics as a gatekeeper and driver of injustice.”

Harper argued in a meeting that requiring professors to teach the course violated their academic freedom. Pushing science professor "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," he added. '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."

"Sandra" told him the initiative would prevent that by creating a “culture of repair.” For example, "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." Harper writes: "It took every last ounce of my already threadbare professionalism not to lean into the mic and say 'Oops'.”

Wokeness blossomed at prestigious American colleges at the very moment when those schools were facing rising discontent over student debt and tuition costs. . . . Embracing social-justice rhetoric and adopting schemes to boost faculty diversity were cheap. Cheaper, anyway, than lowering tuition or hiring more tenure-track professors.

Only about a quarter of U.S. college professors are protected by tenure, Harper writes. That's down from two-thirds in 1980. "We went from a world where most faculty members could say what they think without fear of being fired to one where most people teaching college courses have to worry that their contract won’t be renewed if they cause intellectual offense. It is not surprising that a professoriat disproportionately composed of contract workers would also be one that could be pressured into groupthink."

He quit academia, and is now an Atlantic staff writer. He's a very good writer. Read the whole thing.

Jason Arday

Of course, Harper's story coincides with the tragicomic tale of Jason Arday, hired as a full professor in the sociology of education at Cambridge because of his "near-mythic" story of overcoming racism, autism, mutism, dyslexia, a brain tumor, testicular cancer, epilepsy and locked-in syndrome, which turned out to be entirely mythic. Arday's meager and mediocre research turns out to be based on plagiarism and fraud. He has resigned, and Cambridge is now investigating how he was hired in the first place.

"Arday’s mendacity and incompetence are especially stupefying," writes John McWhorter, a linguist at Columbia University, who also is black. But he is a symptom of academia's dehumanization of black scholars and willingness to accept intellectual mediocrity in its self-seeking pursuit of virtue."

Black students, told that "their blackness is what makes them matter rather than hard mental work, do not learn how to reason closely and clearly," McWhorter writes. "Arday was treated as brilliant for his self-involved, unfocused, underinformed drivel."

Arday was a terrible teacher, writes a former student in an education course at University of Roehampton in 2018. He played songs and film clips, told inspirational stories and rambled about racism, but said nothing of substance -- when he showed up. "He often arrived late and left early, once teaching for a single hour when four were scheduled," writes Fiona Brown on Unherd. "It gradually dawned on us that we were learning nothing of substance, and that much of his talk was nonsense."

Arday has died, an apparent suicide. Some blame media "hounding" and racism. Former Conservative home secretary James Cleverly, who is Black, blamed academia, reports AP.

“They put him into positions he was clearly not qualified for so they could have a Black wunderkind to show off; they pushed him into the spotlight for their own benefit,” Cleverly said.

Academics are "reputationally bankrupt," writes Megan McArdle in the Washington Post. "They must convince people that the radical pronouncements of the Great Awokening were a terrible mistake, now corrected, and that they are pursuing truth, not political agendas." While some understand this, others do not. If they don't get their act together, she writes, many institutions will be financially bankrupt too.