Higher Education’s Age of ‘Insufferable Hypocrisy’

0:05Derek Thompson: This episode is brought to you by JPMorgan Chase. In today's unpredictable world, geopolitics isn't just a backdrop. It's shaping markets, business strategy, and risk. The JPMorgan Chase Center for Geopolitics brings together former senior policymakers and seasoned practitioners to translate fast-moving global events into clear, decision-ready insights. From conflict and great power competition to energy and supply chain disruption, the center helps clients anticipate what comes next. Read the latest insights at jpmorganchase.com slash center for geopolitics. This episode is brought to you by Lincoln.

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1:32Derek Thompson: Some are internal, like the decline of academic standards and the rise of grade inflation. And then there's diversity politics, what sometimes goes by the name Wokeness or DEI. Such programs can encourage more classes on racism or colonialism. They can encourage the hiring of non-white faculty or advance the careers of professors and administrators who focus on diversity. Most criticisms of campus diversity politics come from the right. They come from white commentators criticizing a system that they see as illegally benefiting non-white students and professors. Today's guest is different. He's a self-avowed Marxist whose profound criticisms of higher education, DEI, and wokeism come from the left.

2:19Derek Thompson: Tyler Austin Harper is the author of a new viral essay, Confessions of a Token Black Professor, about his experience at a liberal arts college in Maine and the crisis of academic freedom and economic justice in higher ed. America's colleges and universities are going through a period of intense change, partly as a response to their record-high unpopularity, partly as a response to the administration and the court's pressure on diversity politics and affirmative action. But Tyler's essay serves as a vivid portrait of how a combination of good and craven intentions have led higher education astray.

2:59Derek Thompson: I'm Derek Thompson. This is Planting the Show.

3:25Derek Thompson: Tyler Austin Harper, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. 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, quote, with the dewy fervor of a young missionary. Take me back to May 2020 and tell me how you felt. 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 advisors, 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.

4:12So 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 experience. 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 like 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.

4:50and 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 Dhabi 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, right? 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.

5:26I wanted to be 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.

5:37Derek 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. Yeah. So I think in many ways, my first year at Bates, there were things that blipped across the radar. I was in a 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.

6:16One 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, okay. Right. 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, in 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.

7:07The 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.

7:44But 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 an 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 in essentially an attempt to have a classmate killed.

8:26And 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 and 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.

8:50Derek Thompson: So you've described these anecdotes of racial paranoia and racial fixation on the college campus, but we haven't yet talked about anything that is the actual college bureaucracy, the administration itself embodying these principles. And that really comes to a head in your piece in the fall of 2021, when the dean announces a new initiative at Bates College, a mandatory racism self-audit by every department and program at Bates. Tell me more about this. Yeah, this initiative was called the Foundational Dialogues, and we were tasked with spending time within our departments and programs, sorting through our curricula, looking at our major requirements, trying to unearth places where white supremacy or colonialism, et cetera, might be present within the major.

9:42And I was not intrinsically opposed to the idea that within disciplines, there might be ways in which racial bias is still lurking, right? The field of environmental studies, which is what I was in, certainly has a complicated history in relation to race and immigration. If you look at some of the great environmental thinkers of the 20th century, often their record on issues relating to race is not the best, right? So I was not intrinsically hostile to the idea that that might be an exploration worth undertaking. What I was hostile to, though, was that this would be mandated top down by the academic bureaucracy, that every unit on campus would be tasked with doing this.

10:19And moreover, I was troubled by what seemed to me, one, a clear violation of academic freedom, because this was a highly contestable and, in my view, pretty political thesis that there is racism latent in every corner on campus, that we were being forced to accept as a conclusion and then work backwards to the evidence, right? In other words, the dean was saying, there's racism in your department or program. Find the racism. Write a report. Tell us about it. Make changes, right? And that's not really how you're supposed to reason as an intellectual, right? You might make hypotheses, but you're not supposed to decide on a conclusion.

10:51and then gerrymander or cherry pick evidence to support it. So I began to find this incredibly alarming. And I began to realize in particular that, yes, look, were there some kooky faculty members at Bates? There were. And I talk about them. But the point of the spear was administrative overreach and a top-down effort to really install, like I said, an extremely contestable version of political progressivism on the campus and to institute it really across every corner of academic life.

11:24Derek Thompson: And this leads to a race, power, privilege, and colonialism requirement that you describe in your essay, the RPPC, which, as you said, is inserted into the curriculum requiring that every major is forced to offer at least one course related to these subjects, race, power, privilege, colonialism and their consequences. Now, there's a faculty meeting in March 2023 to discuss this RPPC requirement, and you offer comment. And this is the part of the essay that I left out loud during, and I don't want to steal the punchline here from you, so I'm going to hand you the mic Again, set the stage for us.

12:08Derek Thompson: What is this debate and comment meeting for the RPPC requirement all about? And what is the interaction that you have with some professors there? Yeah, so we were debating the merits of the legislation, whether it made sense, for example, to force every major on campus to offer a course on white supremacy, colonialism, etc. Or, for example, whether there should be some requirement in general education, but not housed in the major, for example, that like, okay, every Bates student should have to take at least one course on race or racism or whatever, right? Which felt to me more defensible. But at a certain point, I stepped up to one of the microphones in the auditorium and basically laid out my case against this requirement.

12:49One was the academic freedom piece, but I had already been vocally opposed to this requirement in smaller door settings. There have been these listening groups and I'd spoken to faculty members who supported it, et cetera, and had made versions of the academic freedom argument, right? That like, this is an expressly sort of progressive political thesis that we are forcing every department on campus to take up, and that seems wrong. But I soon realized the academic freedom argument was not one that folks wanted to hear. And the only versions of arguments they could hear were around questions of harm, right?

13:21So in the faculty meeting, I said like, look, I think there are these academic freedom questions, But also, we are asking scientists, chemists who have never taught on racially sensitive topics to suddenly teach about white supremacy, right? Like, we can imagine this going horribly wrong. One, they have no expertise to be doing that, and faculty have a duty to have substantive expertise on the courses they teach, in my view. But setting aside the expertise piece, right, we can imagine the fumbling attempts of somebody who's never had a difficult conversation about race in a classroom because they're a chemist suddenly trying to do so and becoming ugly unintentionally.

13:55So I raised the question about student harm, right? And a faculty member who supported the requirement said, well, the key would be to have a culture of repair. Make sure we foster a culture of repair. And I said, I have no idea what the hell a culture of repair means. And she said as an example, well, perhaps there could be a system where if somebody says something racist, a black student could say, oops, or ouch, to let everyone know that offense had taken place. And this was just a through line to this piece is that college has become daycare and has also become daycare for the faculty. Right.

14:27And and the idea that this was such a fly by the seat of your pants operation that, one, the people pushing this requirement hadn't really thought about, like, what would it be like to be a minority in one of these classes in which an astronomer is talking to you about white supremacy? But two, they had this extraordinarily infantilizing image of black students on campus that I just found extremely galling. These were kids, in many cases, paying a lot of money or taking out loans to be at that institution, to be taught by experts. And instead, they were getting racial therapy, mainly for the benefit of white students who we were supposed to be educating in the ways of anti-racism and so on.

15:07Derek Thompson: You write that they were treating these black and brown students, quote, 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. It took every last ounce of my already threadbare professionalism not to lean into the mic and say, oops, as if you are the one who needs the call for repair. What we've discussed here is your experience. Anecdotes. To what extent in research that you've done or conversations with professors around the country, would you say that the phenomenon that you're describing here really is a national, pervasive phenomenon within elite higher education, whereby these concerns about racism and sexism and power and privilege and colonialism have metastasized to the point that there are now enormous bureaucracies within colleges and universities, essentially requiring that math and chemistry and engineering professors teach racism and colonialism.

16:20Derek Thompson: Like, is this phenomenon you're describing at Bates, which is in some ways depressing and hysterical, truly a national one? I think it is a national one if you were talking about the strata of elite universities. And I is an important point, right? Because there are public universities in red states where, yes, you have elements of these phenomena. And I've heard from people at these sort of universities who will say, yeah, we experienced a more muted version of this, and it was also insane. But I've also heard from people at red state universities whose experience is very, very different, right?

16:52And they're under assault by right-wing legislatures who don't want them to even use the word gender in a classroom. So I think it's important to note that the American university system is heterogeneous in that particular way. But if you're talking about the elite strata. And I think as it is important, of course, to talk about public education in this country and underfunded public state universities and community colleges, et cetera, the reality is that elite higher education shapes what education looks like in this country. It shapes what the public thinks about it. And it is the place that generates our senators and our leaders and so on and so forth.

17:26It's massively influential. And so I think it is most acute at these elite institutions And it is widespread there. And I think even as it is not acute everywhere, it matters that it happens at these top schools. Is it as extreme everywhere as at Bates? Maybe, maybe not. I don't think so in all instances. But I think versions of this are happening all across the country. And my inbox has been flooded with emails from people telling similar stories about their home institutions where similar policies or similar sorts of problems have also percolated. But the thing I would point out is sometimes it looks like a curricular requirement, or sometimes it looks like what's called cluster hiring, which is where a university administration announces a hiring initiative where they're going to hire in one particular field.

18:12And this is a way of ending around faculty, right? Because faculty usually have some say, a department, let's say an English department, has some say over like, okay, our Shakespearean retired, we need a new Shakespearean, you go to the dean or the provost or whatever and request a tenure line for a new Shakespearean. But over the last 10 years, there's been a move to what's called cluster hiring, where rather than the department saying, hey, we need this person with this kind of expertise or someone in this subject area. The university administration says hiring in black studies is a priority for the university.

18:46If you would like a tenure line for your department, you can apply to have one of one of the tenure lines in the subfield. Right. Because the administration knows that left to their own devices, often the English department's just going to hire a Shakespearean. And if the best Shakespearean is someone who works in black studies, great. And if the best Shakespearean is someone who does it, that's also great, right? So faculty can't be relied upon from the administration's point of view often to push these particular kinds of progressive initiatives that the administration wants for all sorts of other reasons.

19:15And so we have these top-down things like cluster hires where essentially fields are dictated to departments that are often starved for people power. So the English department is left saying, okay, well, we really need a Shakespearean, but more than that, we need a warm body because we have too many major advisees and our major keeps growing and we keep losing faculty. And so we can't turn down a tenure line, even if this isn't an immediate curricular need for us to shore. We'll hire somebody doing black studies, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So, yeah, there are different versions of it. Like I said, it's not always a curricular requirement, but these sorts of administrative overreaches in the service of DEI are absolutely widespread, or at least were until very recently across the top end of the academic sector.

20:00Derek Thompson: You write, quote, in retrospect, it is no coincidence that wokeness blossomed at prestigious American colleges at the very moment that these schools were facing rising discontent over student debt and tuition costs. end quote. This is a really, really interesting argument. And it's really core to your piece. So I want to make sure that we spend time on it because it's distinct from the individual anecdotes. What is wokeness as you see it? Is there a definition that you think is serviceable enough to allow us to see the phenomenon? And why do you describe it here and throughout the piece and really throughout your work as a reaction to or inconvenient distraction from the economics of higher education?

20:49Yeah, I think there is often an attempt to understand wokeness as a variety of political correctness, right? To say, well, what we now call wokeness is just the long trail of what we call political correctness in the 80s and 90s when people like Alan Bloom were writing about writing the closing of the American mind and complaining about similar sorts of phenomena. And I think what is distinct about the most recent iteration of political correctness, which we've called wokeness, is that unlike that moment in the 1990s, wokeness emerges, in my view, as a kind of immune response to the 2008 financial crisis, which leaves universities really cash-strapped, leaves students not being able to take up well-paying jobs.

21:27They're not able to pay back their debt. You have the Occupy Wall Street moment, which we now forget a huge pillar of that movement was student debt, right? A huge percentage of the people in Occupy were student debtors calling attention to student debt. Then you have Bernie Sanders come on the scene. And Bernie Sanders is saying colleges should be free and making these similar cases about the problem of student debt. Right. And then, of course, Donald Trump has his own related critiques of the academy, although in a very different kind of register. Right. And so in the 2010s, universities are really taking it on the chin from this populist backlash that is painting them as debt lords that are that are raising tuition and these like corporate universities that are are saddling students with loans are never going to be able to pay back.

22:13Right. Well, what can they do about that? They can't fix the tuition. Right. The business model is kind of baked in. Many of them are pretty over leveraged in their real estate holdings and their margins aren't as good as you would think. Right. And so they're not going to lower tuition. Right. So what can they do to try to reclaim the moral high ground that had been lost amid this populist backlash? Well, they can say we are on the side of social justice. Right. And wokeness emerges as a program of what I believe is a project of elite diversification. What I always joke is wokeness is about ensuring that the correct percentage of blacks work at BlackRock, right?

22:46Like that is basically the program. Because it is much cheaper institutionally to hire a few minority professors, many of whom, by the way, are not going to be on the tenure track. They're just going to be visiting assistant professors or adjuncts. But it's cheaper to do that kind of stuff, to force some curricular requirements down everyone's throat, than it is to try to find a way to bring tuition down from what is now approaching$100 ,000 at many institutions like the one I taught at to something more manageable, right? And so, look, do I think in a Machiavellian way, administrators woke up one day and were like, if we did social justice stuff, then we wouldn't have to deal with all the labor stuff?

23:25No. But do I think, because I don't subscribe to that kind of conspiratorial explanation, but do I think that there was this sense that like, okay, we're really taking it on the chin. What can we do? Well, we can't really lower tuition. We can't solve the student debt crisis. We can't really solve the labor crisis that the vast majority of faculty are now untenured. But what we can do is this kind of performative rhetoric, right, that will make us all feel a bit better. And that's what ended up happening. So yeah, I really do see wokeness as a defense mechanism. I don't think the cause of the decline of public trust in universities is exclusively due to wokeness.

24:02I think it's due to these financial pressures that universities have helped foment, as well as the general crisis of the expert class that extends beyond just the university system. But I think wokeness did emerge as a last-ditch effort to try to save American universities reputationally. And I think it failed very catastrophically.

24:23Derek Thompson: One of the reasons that I find it difficult on this show or just in my general life to talk about wokeness isn't just that it's difficult to arrive at a common shared definition, but also that it's difficult to agree on the harm. Like if I'm having a conversation with, let's say, a conservative and a libertarian economist and Jonathan Haidt and you, I'm hearing maybe four very different arguments for the harm of wokeness. I'm hearing from the conservative that wokeness is creating critical race theory socialists. And that's bad for America because they hate America. I'm hearing from maybe the libertarian economists that this is intruding on academic freedom in exactly the way that you described, right?

25:05Derek Thompson: An administration, a bureaucracy forcing an economist, a chemist, a calculus professor to teach about the legacy of colonialism within their subject on which they are no expert against their will. There's another argument that I think from, you know, Haidt and Greg Lukianoff that says this is about safetyism. This is about the fact that college is about, is in part about building adults who are ready for the real world when they graduate. And a culture of academic safetyism on college campuses is going to make them think that it is somehow inappropriate for them to hear something that offends them even 1%.

25:43Derek Thompson: But finally, you're offering, I think, a really interesting and distinct critique of what is often called wokeness, which is not that it creates socialists or necessary. It reduces academic freedom in some cases or is not focusing on safetyism. You're saying the problem is that it's not solving the problem, right? That wokeness is in some ways a kind of elite strategic distraction from the fact that there are class issues in America, that wokeness allows us to create some shiny bobble over here and say, well, we're hiring a bunch of people that are critiquing Shakespeare from a critical race theory perspective.

26:20Derek Thompson: And so we don't have to pay the adjuncts more. Can you just go a little bit deeper here? Because I do think that's an important twist on this phenomenon of someone from the left criticizing wokeness in a way from the Marxist left, that you really do think that this is distracting elite institutions from their actual economic class failures. I think a lot of the complaints of wokeness that you read, many of these are diagnoses I agree with, or the basic set of problems, like, yes, I agree those are problems. They're idealistic in nature, by which I mean they start from the presupposition that there were bad ideas, aka wokeness, safetyism, political correctness, etc.

27:00The bad ideas won in these elite universities, and we just need to restore the good ideas, and then things would go back to normal. And I'm a materialist, right? I'm a person of the left, and I reject those kind of battle of ideas explanations. In fact, I think the ideas that govern society are downstream from political, economic, and material conditions. And so I think one of my goals in writing this piece is to try to correct the argument I see unfolding, which is just that like, OK, we just need to get back to the better ideas. We need more conservatives. We need more viewpoint diversity, et cetera.

27:30It's not that I disagree with any of that. I would love to see more viewpoint diversity in the American Academy. But I think the response we have seen post, let's say, the election of Donald Trump, the corrections we've seen have been, OK, let's hire some conservatives. Let's start some civic centers. Let's do some free thinking task forces, et cetera. And my view is that this leaves the fundamental problem, which is the business model intact. And you are just substituting a different kind of political program, right? For another kind of political program I didn't particularly like, which was wokeness, but leaving this festering issue untouched.

28:04I mean, if I can be permitted a brief Marxist digression, the French Marxist Louis Atherzere has this really interesting observation where he says institutions, or as he calls them apparatuses, but I won't to avoid confusion. He says institutions have primary ideologies and secondary ideologies. The primary ideology comes from the society at large, and that's what determines how the institution is organized, its labor practices, what it looks like as a bureaucracy. The secondary ideology are the ideas that emerge from the institution itself organically. These are the stories an institution tells about itself, its values, its mission statements, its culture, and so on and so forth.

28:39I think the mistake conservatives and sort of center-left critics of the University have made and libertarians have made is that they think the primary ideology of universities is wokeness, right? And if you just correct that, things will be fine. My view is that the primary ideology is rapacious corporate capitalism, right? The secondary ideology is wokeness, which was a way to try to obscure some of the problems caused by the primary ideology. And that has basically failed. But the thing that I think folks on the left don't always like about my particular critique is I think a lot of professors, quote unquote, woke professors, see themselves as the kind of Zapatista territories in Mexico, where you have these like places on campus, like the English department that are places where there is progressivism and good things happening.

29:23And yes, the university is this rapacious corporate structure, but wokeness or progressivism or whatever you want to call it, right, is like a countervailing pressure within that corporate ecosystem. And my argument is the exact opposite, is that the progressivism is in a symbiotic relationship with the corporate university model, right? That these two things are hand in glove because the progressivism allows the public, at least did for a while, to be distracted from these simmering labor crises that are festering within the university. So I really think the debate we're having right now is solely about these sort of superficial problems of what ideas do we want on campus without solving what is, in my mind, a labor crisis, a tuition crisis, and an exploitation crisis.

30:10Derek Thompson: And you are on ramping right to my next question, which is, I think, the necessary follow up. What are the symptoms of rapacious corporate ideology as you see it within higher education? We're talking tuition, debt, adjunct pay levels, decline in tenure professors. Unpack this one for us. Yeah. So I think the most acute one, at least that bears on the educational mission or causes problems for the educational mission is the adjunctification of faculty and the move from a professoriate in the 20th century that was almost, was overwhelmingly tenure stream, right? Tenured on the tenure track to a professoriate that is overwhelmingly not tenure stream.

30:50It is overwhelmingly contract workers who can be fired more or less at will. Academia is one of the only businesses, if you want to call it that, in this country, the enterprise of which is truth-telling. And the point of the tenure system was to secure the ability of academics to say what they think without fear of the hammer coming down on them or their employment being made vulnerable, right? It is not a coincidence. If you look at the mid-20th century, it was not just the high point of tenure on American campuses. It was also the high point of intellectual diversity on the American campuses.

31:25A lot of people think of the 60s and 70s as these, like, radical moments in American life on universities. That is true to an extent. But even in the mid-70s, about a third of American professors identified as conservatives, a third identified as moderates, and then about 40 % identified as liberal or left, right? So certainly a left slant, but plenty of institutions have some selection bias in a left or right slant. That's not that abnormal, right? But today, we've gone from a world in the mid-20th century where most academics were tenure-stream and 30 % were conservatives to a world in which most academics are not tenure-stream and single digit percentages at many elite universities are conservatives, right?

32:01And the case I'm trying to make is those two things are related. You could line up the graphs of the collapse in tenure density. In other words, the collapse in the percentage of faculty who are tenure stream and the collapse of faculty diversity on campus. And those graphs would just overlap and basically be identical, right? And obviously correlation is not causation, but I am trying to say it is not surprising when you have a labor force that is casualized, proletarianized, terrified of being fired at any moment. Fired not only mean, by the way, I'll need a new job and I'll need new health care.

32:33I'll probably have to pick up my family and move to a different state to become a visiting professor somewhere else, right? So the stakes are even higher than just losing a regular job, right? It is not surprising in a world where most faculty are laboring under those conditions that you would have group think that people would be afraid to rock the boat when they're not wearing a life vest and so on. At Edward Jones, we believe rich isn't about having life all figured out. It's opening yourself to all the possibilities. That's why your dedicated

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35:04Derek Thompson: Not necessarily one I believe, but just one that I think is important to have on the table. I think someone more sympathetic to diversity politics would say, this is not a politics that emerges from either a craven administration or necessarily even one that emerges from um economics it emerges from other things happening in the world it comes from triggering events like ferguson from anger and exhaustion with racism and sexual hierarchy and it's been supercharged by the internet, which has a flattening ability to put oppressors and the oppressed on the same platform, on the same feed, where the public can speak truth to power.

35:51Derek Thompson: And that's really where diversity politics, that's really where wokeism comes from. It comes from observations of oppressor dynamics in the world, which are communicated through a platform that allows the oppressed to go viral against the oppressors. So what do you say to that explanation of why the so-called Great Awokening happened when it did? Yeah, I think social media certainly turbocharged it, right? And I would include technological change as a Marxist under the set of material conditions that are changing in society, right? And I think that the rise of social media creates an atmosphere in which not only, yes, can the marginalized plead their case, but where also online mobs can be assembled, right?

36:39Sometimes for very good reasons, it should be noted, right? Like in the Me Too moment when you did have an extraordinary amount of tension put on really, really bad behavior that needed to see the light of day, right? So the online mobs aren't always a bad thing, right? Sometimes they address problems that have long simmered, but sometimes you also have online mobs that get way over their skis, right? And I think this bleeds back into the problem I'm mentioning on college campuses about you have a labor force that is casualized and the academic equivalent of Uber drivers, right? Because not only do you have to worry that your administration might be upset if you, say, disagree with the requirement they want to pass, right?

37:15You also have to be worried, is this going to end up on social media, right? Just to give you an example, one thing I describe in the piece is the final meeting where this vote was passed, right? Students were brought in, apparently, as sort of props to cheer for the requirement. It seems to be what was going on. Faculty previously had been somewhat lukewarm on this requirement. In fact, in a faculty poll a year earlier, actually most faculty opposed the RPPC legislation. But you have these students in the room, and then magically, all of a sudden, 73 % of faculty at Bates, I think that's the correct number, end up voting in favor of passing the legislation, right?

37:54And would those people have passed the legislation? Were they not worried about, one, losing my job? But two, am I going to vote this down? Are we going to vote this down in front of students? And then this ends up on social media. And then we're being pilloried from both the left and the right for for what we did. Right. And so I think the technological change creates an additional layer of paranoia on top of like now not only do I have to worry about ramifications within my institution, I also have to be deeply paranoid about things happening without my institution. that I will become one of these professors who's quote-unquote heterodox or who's anti-woke or who gets yelled at all the time.

38:32And I think it's worth noting just very briefly, it is not only non-tenure track faculty who are not speaking up. It is also tenured faculty, right? I cannot tell you how many times I would oppose something on campus or I would make a comment and someone would approach me later and say, I'm so glad you said something. I've been thinking this. I'm so glad you said it. And my response in my head, at least, I usually didn't say this to the person was, you have tenure. You could have said it. Why do I have to say it? I'm just on the tenure track. You have tenure. You could speak up. And the reality is that are they afraid of losing their jobs?

39:05Probably not. They can't lose their jobs, but they are afraid of getting yelled at, right? And I think they're afraid of getting yelled at at their institution. But I also think in some cases, they're afraid of getting yelled at online. So I do think the social media piece of this has exacerbated the problems caused by the labor crisis. But I would argue that it's not social media alone that is the point of the spear in terms of the problems within academia and why this kind of progressive extremism prevailed.

39:31Derek Thompson: So I saw several critiques of your piece on Twitter, on a brief dip into Blue Sky throughout Reddit. And it seems to me like there's like three categories of critique of your argument, of your essay. Number one is what Tyler is describing is real, but actually it's good. Diversity politics is good, so don't criticize it. Number two is that what Tyler's describing is real, but it doesn't matter. What really matters is these broader forces, whether it's Trump's attack on universities or declining enrollment because of demographic change. And number three is the most interesting critique, and we're going to get to it in a second, but I want to go through the first two.

40:10Derek Thompson: We'll do one question on each. Got it. So for the people who are saying what Tyler's describing is real, but it's good, I think their argument is that an emphasis on diversity on affirmative action for non-white professors, on the occasional cluster hire. These are good things for higher education. They diversify higher education so that it's not just an old white boys club teaching the politics of the 1970s. What is your argument against the, yeah, it's happening, but it's good response? I think I would say that I support affirmative action theory. I believe that black Americans and minorities, but especially black Americans, are still disadvantaged by things that happened 100 years ago.

40:51I believe in what is called structural racism. I don't think that's some left-wing fever dream that was cooked up. I believe there are instances of institutional racism that need addressed and that in theory, affirmative action is a sensible way to think about addressing them. However, I think in practice, what has happened on American campuses is not the version of affirmative action we imagine in our head, which is that minority candidates get a bit of a bump up to account for these kinds of structural disadvantages. It is in some cases that standards are drastically lowered. I discussed in the piece an instance in which there was an effort to hire a woman who somebody in her field that we consulted for their opinion described her work as 50 years out of date, simplistic, being in middling journals, etc.

41:36Right. But she was a minority and she had done some diversity work. And there was an effort to hire her on that basis, overlooking the fact that this was a person whose research was 50 years out of date and whom we admitted in our discussions with the dean or in our letter to him that we weren't sure they could help our students enter the modern workplace, use the most modern tools, etc. Right. All in the name of basically affirmative action, at least tacitly. And my point about that, right, like setting aside, are we setting up this woman for failure who may not get tenure because her work is so out of date?

42:06But there are black students on campus, some paying and then some not paying or receiving financial aid, who want to go to med school, right? How are we serving them, having this person whose research is way out of date, who we admit that may not be able to prepare them for the job market? How is it serving those students to have that person on campus? Is the benefit of seeing someone who looks like them worth the considerable tradeoff of having someone teach courses, which they're really not especially qualified to teach? And my view is no. Can you imagine a version of affirmative action? And does this version exist in some places?

42:44I'm sure it does. Can you imagine a version of affirmative action that says if you have roughly equal candidates but the minority isn't quite as polished but you see promise there, you hire the minority in an effort to diversify? You can imagine that. I think that happens at some places. But that relies on good human judgment. And when you have a culture that has eroded much of that good human judgment, that is so eager to be progressive and to be seen as good people and so desperate to diversify at a moment when there's a lot of external pressure to do so, that they're willing to overlook a lot of standards, I think that's really dangerous.

43:15The other point I would point out, some people have said, what is wrong with teaching biology courses about, say, white supremacy? There's a long history of racism in the field of biology. Just look at eugenics, right? And I agree with that. And in fact, this is a point I would often make in faculty meetings and elsewhere, right? My academic expertise was on the relationship between literature and history of science. I know a lot about the 19th and early 20th century eugenics movements. I think there are really important and interesting courses that could be taught around that. And if you want to say every biology major on campus should take a course in which the relationship between the history of biology and racism is taught, I could get on board with something like that.

43:55But what the legislation was doing was asking biologists to teach those courses, right? Which is a wild thing to do because you were describing a history course that should be taught by someone with a history PhD and substantive expertise. But you're saying, well, we're actually gonna have the biologists teach them. They can read some Wikipedia pages and read some books, right? And there's a way in which I just want to note that's actually profoundly racist. One of my, the talking points I often appeal to was like, the argument, right, was racism is everywhere. It's in every major. Ergo, every major must teach about racism.

44:26And the argument I would always make was computers are everywhere. We live in a digital society. Now, every major on campus needs to teach at least one course on computer science, right? You would say, that's insane. Computer science is complicated. That's a subject people have real expertise in. And race is also complicated. There are people who have real expertise in it, right? And your attempt to make chemists and physicists, et cetera, teach courses on this in the name of progress is actually a way of like not taking the topic seriously at all or the people who have substantive actual expertise in these areas, you know.

45:02Criticism number two.

45:03Derek Thompson: Yeah. This just doesn't matter that much. Like there are larger existential threats to higher education. Trump has these major attacks on universities, Harvard, Columbia. There's cuts to science. There are legal moves to wipe out affirmative action, obviously. These are all happening in a broader context of declining college enrollment, of funding crises. Why, Tyler, isn't your article akin to critiquing the interior design of the honeymoon suites on the Titanic as it takes on water? That's a great question. One of the things I reject, I think, across my writing, also about Democratic Party politics, not just higher education, is what I think of as state of emergencyism.

45:43And that is this reflexive posture I think you often see in liberal and left spaces. where the argument is basically, I'm not saying you're wrong, but I'm saying now is not the time. We are in a moment of an authoritarian state of emergency where fascism is on the rise in America, where we have a quasi-fascist presidential administration and where we have a Republican Party that is gutting universities and red states across the country. Now is not the time to have this conversation. And I have seen over the last 10 years that argument become a way to constantly defer self-criticism that would help institutions, whether it is the Democratic Party or whether it is a university, become healthier, right?

46:24Because those critiques are always deferred, because the conversation is never had, the problems fester and fester and fester in the name of not wanting to draw attention to these universities or whatever at a moment that they're under assault. And I think that strategy has proven to be a disaster because what has happened over the last 10 years is that trust in American higher education has continued to fall off a cliff. And it's worth noting it has fallen off a cliff, not just among Republicans, but if you look at the Gallup data, also among Democrats who have lost faith by about 20 points over the last 10 years in higher education.

46:54And the number one reason cited in those polls in that data is politics, right? Cost is a close second. But these concerns, you can't just kick the can down the road because you're scared that Republicans are going to like you pointing out these examples. I think you just have to rip the Band-Aid off and try to tell the truth. Yeah.

47:14Derek Thompson: The third category of criticism that I found most interesting is not going to sound particularly interesting when I read what the criticism is, but I think it speaks to something really fascinating. It was that what you were describing is rare, and the professors making this critique said, I don't see it anywhere. I don't see what Tyler's describing. And when I saw that critique, I would often click on the profile, and I was almost never surprised by what they were teaching. It was professor of economics, professor of economics, professor of computer science, professor of engineering. Economics, computer science, engineering.

47:53Derek Thompson: All quite pre-professional degrees. All degrees were the bridge between what you're studying in college and what you're doing when you're 22 years old in the labor force is very, very clean. And it makes me wonder whether what you're describing is really not a crisis of higher education so much as a crisis of the humanities, that the fields where you're seeing this phenomenon do not have the pre-professional clarity of, say, an engineering degree or a computer science degree. Is it fair to say that the real locus, the epicenter of this social justice warrior mentality is specific humanities departments and administration and bureaucracy that come out that comes out of those humanities departments?

48:45So I would say a few things about this. The first is that I see the main wellspring of these issues as administrations. The dean who pushed this requirement at Bates was a biologist. He was a STEM person. He was not somebody who would come up from a humanities discipline. So I think that's worth noting. I would also just say, and then I'm going to address the main point here. I would also say that I've talked to a lot of faculty who say, I've never seen anything like this on my campus, right? But then you talk to somebody else on their campus and they're like, this place is a madhouse. Or I remember talking to folks at Bates when I was leaving that like, oh, there are these attacks against colleges and universities that have politicized their curriculum.

49:24I'm glad this is mainly happening at these bigger schools. And it's like, the RPPC, y 'all just passed, is an exact example of this. But they didn't see it that way. They just saw that, well, that's good intellectual practice, right? So I would just point out that people have, progressive academics, I've found, tend to have a lot of blinders about what is or is not political, right? But setting aside that, let's address the STEM question. I do think it is true that the humanities and the humanistic social sciences have been the main font of the social justice stuff on campus. And again, I think that is not because of particular brain worms in these fields, but again, because of the material conditions, right?

50:02I think as tuition exploded over the course of the 21st century, particularly after the 2010s, and particularly after the financial crisis, there was renewed attention on ROI of degrees, right? If I'm going to major in this, what job am I going to get after I graduate? How am I going to pay back these loans, right? Students and parents started getting smarter about, you can't just major in whatever you want and hope it works out. That's how you get$300 ,000 worth of debt you can't pay back, right? And so in this new landscape in the 2010s, where there is renewed attention or new attention on ROI really acutely, the case an economics department can make or a biology department is somewhat straightforward.

50:37We're preparing you to go to med school or we're preparing you to go into consulting, et cetera, right? You'll be able to pay back that degree. Now, the humanities departments and the humanistic social sciences, they can't really make the same kind of argument. They can't compete in economic terms with the economics department, right? They can't say, oh, come to the English program, come to gender studies. You're going to make six figures upon graduation, and we're going to send you to Google, right? They can't make that kind of argument. But they still have to compete in this increasingly utilitarian arena where there is intense pressure to justify why you should do one major over another.

51:11So they can't compete economically. They can't compete on postgraduate salary. So what can they compete on? Well, they can say, look, are you going to be making big bucks when you major in gender studies or English or history? Maybe not. Sometimes it's worth noting that's overblown. Philosophy majors actually do pretty well. But for the most part, right, they can't make that kind of case. What can they say? Well, what an English major does is give you critical thinking skills in a democracy to help you become a good person. It can help you become somebody who's an advocate for justice. It can help you become somebody who stands up for the downtrodden.

51:42and understands how power works in society, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The only utilitarian argument these disciplines could make was a political one, right? They couldn't say the ROI is economic. It's in raw dollar terms. But they could say the ROI is political and moral, right? And that utilitarian argument is what these programs ended up leaning into. There are other issues, too. You have the stripping of funding from humanities research. You have outside organizations like the Mellon Foundation that are progressive nonprofits it's pumping tons of money into, giving money to anyone who seemingly, who is willing to do research in social justice areas.

52:19So it's not just these intra-institutional problems. There's also extra-institutional actors. But I think that's a huge part of it, right? This push to explain what the ROI of a humanities major is and the bet that the best case you could make is a political one. The last answer really answered a question that I've had

52:37Derek Thompson: about just observing changes in college since in the, you know, whatever, almost 20 years since I graduated from Northwestern where I love Shakespeare. I was an actor before I was a writer. I love Shakespeare. I love reading Shakespeare. I love performing Shakespeare. And one thing that I saw or thought I was seeing is that the typical way to teach Shakespeare had changed in the last few decades from academics teaching how to read Shakespeare to understand Shakespeare to academics analyzing Shakespeare for the purpose of exploding patriarchy or for the purpose of unpacking racism and relating that patriarchy and racism to the conditions of patriarchy and racism in modern America.

53:20Derek Thompson: Yes. And I was always like, what is that? And I love, whether it's true or not, I love your explanation that as the literal financial capital of the humanities seemed to, or in some cases did in fact decline, You had this reaction within academia that said, if we can't outfit our students with financial capital, we can give them cultural capital. We can use the study of Shakespeare to give them a vocabulary to analyze the politics of 2026. And so Shakespeare in this case went from being valuable in and of himself to being this kind of machine through which the student could gain facility in going viral on Twitter criticizing the Trump administration.

54:10Derek Thompson: And maybe that's a really unfair description for folks who teach patriarchy and Shakespeare who listen to this show. But that's what I felt like I was looking at from afar. And this connects to one more piece that you've done before this most recent cover story for The Atlantic, which was about the Mellon Foundation and about the degree to which the money found for humanities research was in some case wagging the dog for the type of research that humanities professors were actually doing. Can you unpack that story and tell us a little bit about how foundation money is affecting things here? Yeah, in the mid-20th century, there was a, and I promise I will update this very quickly to the 21st century, but in the mid-20th century, there was this effort.

54:56The Council on the Humanities, I believe it was called, there was an effort to sort of figure out what to do about humanities funding in America because it was this moment of the Cold War. We felt that maybe we were getting outpaced by the Russians in terms of cultural influence and cultural output. We felt that like, okay, we need a robust humanities education system in this country. And that council ended up calling for two things. One, the establishment of the National Endowment for the Humanities, but two, a robust private funding sector as well. And the reason they wanted a private funding sector, this was in the middle of the Cold War.

55:26Obviously, state power is very scary because the state is associated with authoritarianism and so on and so forth. So there was some concern that if it's only the federal government funding humanistic research that will become prey to national politics. So you need these private funders that will be more ideologically diverse and that will step in and ensure that there's no one source of humanities funding. Well, actually, it ended up being the private actors were the main problem and not the public actors. The NEH has been largely, not exclusively, but largely kept itself above the political fray, while organizations like the Mellon Foundation have acquired a kind of monopoly on humanistic funding.

56:03The NEH pales in comparison to the amount of money that is spent nationally every year by the Mellon Foundation on the humanities. And in 2020, under the leadership of Elizabeth Alexander, president of Mellon, there was a decision made that Mellon would only fund projects related to social justice. Previously, they had funded in a more open-ended way. Yes, Mellon had always been progressive. And yes, you can go back 15 years and find projects with wacky titles in the name that are clearly very politicized, right? But they also did things like fund the Folger Shakespeare Library. But starting in 2020, Mellon will only fund humanistic work related to issues of social justice, which means that if you are an academic who needs research funds and can't get those from your university for your next book project, right, you have a choice.

56:53One, you can say, well, my book isn't really on race or isn't really on social justice. And so I'm just going to have to try to cobble together funding elsewhere or just not do the project I want to do. Or you say to yourself, well, you know what? I suppose I could add a race angle to this so that you can become competitive for Mellon funding. So this is a story of a billion dollar philanthropy, the board of which is stuffed by hedge fund people and led by a former Yale professor who is wielding literally a half a billion dollars annually in service of funneling money to American arts and letters and universities if they're willing to play social justice ball, right?

57:32And that is a piece of this story too. It is not that the blue hair gender studies professors are leading this effort to revolutionize the humanities, right? It's that you have a lot of, or at least you have one major outside actor throwing around a ton of money, not just giving it to individuals, by the way, also giving it to colleges saying, hey, if you social justify your curriculum, we'll give you$3 million, right? And some of these colleges aren't in a position to turn down$3 million. And so that's an important contribution to what we've seen over the last 10 years too, this outside nonprofit money dictating the direction research and teaching goes.

58:10Derek Thompson: No, and it's an interesting ingredient here. You know, I myself, I don't want to overrate it, but I think it's something that really surprised me when I read that reporting because I see the emergence of the social justice warrior mindset as being a really messy combination of people just paying attention to the news and seeing events like Ferguson going online and seeing what kinds of messages tend to resonate and go viral, which tend to lump the world into in groups versus out groups, oppressors and depressed and tends to have a negativity bias. You combine that with the precarity of the of the of the lecturer and professorial class that you described.

58:46Derek Thompson: And just the fact that, you know, since the Great Recession, which is pretty much where you began your analysis, you know, millennials and Gen Z are significantly to the left of the rest of the country and from generations that came before him. And so there's this cohort effect that that is is shifting all of this. And then finally, you add the top down effect of foundation funding. I think there's there's there's a lot of pillars holding up this phenomenon. on. We only have time for a few more questions. What should the Bates Colleges of America do? Like what what what should they do differently?

59:21Yeah, I mean, I think there has to be a real effort at self-reflection. I think simply stopping foisting these kinds of initiatives on faculty would be a great start. I think making sincere efforts to be open to other ways of thinking and other kinds of questions would also be a good start. I'm generally not in favor of doing DEI for conservatives. In other words, I don't think the solution to this particular problem is, okay, now we're just going to do all of the bad bureaucratic stuff we were doing for minorities. Now we're just going to do that for folks on the right. I think that just, again, repeats the same set of problems, right?

59:56But trying to increase the percentage of faculty on the tenure track, I think would be a huge help. Trying to raise money to enable that would be a huge help. It's worth noting that colleges and universities do fundraising drives all the time when they want a new sports facility, right? Strangely, they don't do fundraising drives when they want to say, hey, we want to get our class sizes down and we want to make sure more of our professors are on the tenure track so that we have a bit more opportunity for free thought and diversity of thought on campus. I'm sure a lot of alumni would actually give money to a drive like that.

1:00:23But strangely, colleges and universities, those sorts of drives don't tend to be a high priority. And I also think faculty need to realize that they need to go into searches with an open mind. They need to make efforts to add ideas they may disagree with to their curriculum. I think one of the problems we're experiencing with polarization in this country right now is that young people who are increasingly college educated only encounter conservative ideas on Twitter or on YouTube or through virulently anti-Semitic, psychotic right-wing streamers, right? And because they don't ever encounter the best version of conservative ideas in the classroom, that's where they get their conservative ideas, right?

1:01:04There are always going to be some conservative students you have, right? But when they're never encountering ideas from their side, they're going to go find them elsewhere, right? And so I think there's just also a kind of epistemic health that would be helped along if there were more conservative ideas being taught in American college campuses, right? So I think all, and then simply not discriminating, that would also be a huge help, right? That's something you can do right now. And so, but I will say, I am not optimistic about the possibility for reform. I think you have some administrators who are pushing reform, sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for bad reasons.

1:01:42But faculty, I think we've hired a lot of faculty at a lot of institutions around the country that have internalized, and especially in the humanities and social sciences, an essentially progressive and politicized understanding of what their job is and what it's supposed to be and what their research is supposed to be. And some of those people are getting tenure. And they're not going anywhere. And some of them are becoming deans and entering administration. And they really don't think they've done anything wrong. I think it's worth noting that anytime I write an article like this, I hear from people who are like the article and agree with it, etc.

1:02:11But I also hear from another kind of academic who basically thinks the Academy has done nothing wrong over the last 10 years. This is all because Fox News is mean to us. And this is all because of Chris Rufo's propaganda campaign. We haven't done anything bad. And if people would stop turning a spotlight on us, everything would be fine because we've done nothing wrong. And until those people have a come to Jesus moment, I'm not especially optimistic that there'll be the grassroots motivation to do the kind of changes that need to be done.

1:02:40Derek Thompson: Tyler, Austin Harper, thank you very much. Thanks, man. Appreciate it.

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