MAN BITES DOG: AN EXCELLENT, NON-PC ARTICLE IN THE ATLANTIC. Confessions of a Token Black Professor. Why I Quit the Tenure Track: The insufferable hypocrisy of elite academia. (Link was free to me, but here’s an archive link just in case.)
I attended an informal orientation event for early-career Black faculty, where I assumed we would talk about our research interests or simply get to know one another. Instead, the gathering felt more like a combined therapy session and HR seminar. At one point, someone casually rattled off a series of local establishments to steer clear of, vaguely implying that they were filled with bigots. Alarmed by the notion that race relations were so bad in Lewiston that there were places I should avoid eating, I asked why one restaurant in particular had earned a reputation for intolerance. My colleague said that a student of color had worked there and not liked it very much.
The source of the most intense racial monomania on campus, I came to realize, was senior leadership. . . .
In retrospect, it is no coincidence that wokeness blossomed at prestigious American colleges at the very moment when those schools were facing rising discontent over student debt and tuition costs. For the academic aristocracy, touting fealty to Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, trans rights, and other progressive movements served as a convenient distraction from the intractable economic and social issues that the colleges themselves were perpetuating. This allowed higher education to reclaim the moral high ground after Occupy Wall Street and the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign—to say nothing of the anti-elite fury that gave rise to Donald Trump—had kicked mud all over academia’s ivy-twined walls. Even better, embracing social-justice rhetoric and adopting schemes to boost faculty diversity were cheap. Cheaper, anyway, than lowering tuition or hiring more tenure-track professors.
Indeed. Read the whole thing.
Plus, this sequel on X:
