Higher Education’s Age of ‘Insufferable Hypocrisy’

**Derek Thompson** (0:06)
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**Derek Thompson** (1:04)
Here's an understatement. Higher education faces a number of challenges today. Some of these challenges are external, like attacks from the Trump administration and science funding cuts. 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. 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.
I'm Derek Thompson. This is Plain English.
Tyler Austin Harper, welcome to the show.

**Tyler Austin Harper** (3:12)
Thanks for having me.

**Derek Thompson** (3:14)
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.

**Tyler Austin Harper** (3:32)
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. 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 experience. 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, et cetera. 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 great, a lot of great things about NYU, but it is, you know, it is opening campuses abroad with slave labor and 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. So teaching at Bates was the kind of thing I wanted to do. I 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.