If you cross the Androscoggin River that leads to Lewiston, on the left you’ll discover the waterfalls that once powered textile mills. On the right, mounted on the brick wall of one of those mills—now abandoned, but back then it produced tens of thousands of bedspreads per week—a 10-meter-wide illuminated sign displays the word HOPEFUL.
Full of hope, that’s exactly how I felt that day. I was with my wife, we had just left New York to settle in Maine, when we passed by this old sign. It was 2020, a hot May afternoon. The 100,000th American would soon die of Covid, and I had just landed the job I’d dreamed of.
When we reached Bates College, we entered the empty campus before turning left to park our moving truck in front of our new home: a colonial house about a century old, near the campus, surrounded by blooming lilacs and wild blackberry bushes. The lawn had been mowed. We had just unpacked and emptied our first boxes, admiring the house, twice as big and half the price of our Queens apartment, when an older man stepped out to introduce himself, crossing the street. He was a retired university professor. We exchanged two or three harmless pleasantries, Norman Rockwell style. His wife, crouched in the shade in their garden, waved her pruning shears in our direction.
The setting was gorgeous. I told myself I’d lucked into something extraordinary, even as my academic career had already yielded pleasant surprises. My aim had been to secure a professorship, and so far everything had gone smoothly. In 2014 I had gone directly from my bachelor’s degree at Haverford to a fully funded PhD in comparative literature at NYU. Five years later, I found myself on the brutal academic job market, landing a tenure-track position at Bates. I would teach interdisciplinary humanities within the environmental studies program—a field in high demand at the university. I had received the confirmation email on December 23, 2019: a genuine Christmas gift. To crown it all, I had signed my contract a couple of weeks before the country’s first coronavirus case, so I didn’t suffer from hiring freezes or job-offer cancellations that would halt faculty recruitment.
That year, when I defended my dissertation over Zoom in the spring and secured the tenure-track post, one of my thesis supervisors laughed, saying it felt like I was “witnessing the birth of the last dinosaur.” I took that as both a compliment and a bleakly realistic comment. I’d hit the jackpot while the apocalypse loomed. I had a stable, prestigious, well-paid academic appointment, a species on the verge of extinction in a world where most scholars are consigned to the bottom rungs and to adjunct posts.
The following summer was pure bliss. I ran along the Androscoggin and around Lake Auburn, lined with pines. I unpacked and catalogued my books in my bright office and bought sansevierias for the windowsill. My wife, who had long worked for Glacier National Park during vacations, was thrilled to be in a place where nature reigned supreme. We would drink robust cider in an orchard perched on a hill overlooking the White Mountains, bake pies with berries from the garden, pose for photos in front of the giant boot outside the L.L. Bean store. Everything was good for forgetting New York, the thirst for money, the fashion pop-ups, the quilted-vest-financiers, and the chaos of Covid. We did everything we could to become—if not true residents of Maine, since we weren’t born here—at least people who looked the part.
I was naïve. I believed in American higher education, much as a young missionary believes in his mission. I came from a family that had long believed the university was the promise of a better life. My grandmother, born in a small mountain hamlet in West Virginia, had dropped out of high school. My mother completed two years of college and earned an Associate’s degree before I was born. I saw my path as the reward of generations of sacrifice, a prize owed to others’ renunciations. I believed American universities were the best in the country: education as emancipation, as civilizing, a public good, deeply democratic, not a luxury reserved for a few privileged. I saw myself teaching at Bates for the rest of my days, or nearly.
The town of Lewiston betrayed many traces of a greatness now largely vanished: vast factories repurposed for yet another rehabilitation project; old houses perched on a hill, with chipped façades and rusting cars in a yard that must have been magnificent; street corners where addicts lounged, or held a sign to defend themselves. The town was bloodless. Especially beside Bates College, a 54-hectare paradise of well-kept green spaces and buildings, in the heart of this post-industrial purgatory.
The neighborhood we lived in was a kind of extension of the campus—an amalgam of houses owned by professors, current or retired, and properties, including the residence of the department head whose house we rented part of. Right beside us lived a woman of color I’ll call Ava (I’m choosing not to name people, not to stigmatize individuals, but to evoke the issues I witnessed at Bates College and in higher education more generally). She was part of the university administration and was deeply involved in all things diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).
Ava wore her heart on her sleeve; she was a passionate advocate who likely felt compelled to be a neighbor and a consummate professional to ensure that her new Black colleague and his charming White wife felt welcomed in Maine. Her openness essentially translated into house parties, with chairs spaced a couple of meters apart to respect social distancing and a bottle of Chardonnay on the porch that separated us.
As the days went by, I got to know her and learned that she believed central Maine was a hellish place fit for Stephen King—a crucible of old prejudices and hidden violence behind the cheerful façade of this university town. My wife and I heard all sorts of stories of alleged racist incidents, ending with Lewiston being portrayed as a bastion of white supremacy—a White hotbed nestled in a state famed for its homogeneity. Until, one day, Ava admitted that when she drove through the town and spotted the “little whites” on a nearby porch (not unlike ours), she sometimes told herself they wanted her skin.
I was perplexed. Not that the phrase “little whites” startled me, but it was not a slur a university administrator should utter—especially at a school that hosted a substantial number of working-class White students from Maine. Besides, I found it hard to believe I had landed in a nest of Ku Klux Klan fans. I had grown up in Pennsylvania, in the Harrisburg area, a post-industrial suburb continually being rehabilitated, and Lewiston wasn’t new to me. I assumed people were friendly, hardworking, and uninterested in other people’s business. I don’t think Ava could have imagined that I came from the same kind of suburban, working-class background.
Even when she sometimes made socially snide, perhaps even hurtful remarks, I liked her. She was sharp, enjoyed laughter. When we visited our families in Boston, she’d water our tomato plants. We’d text each other about the baby fox scurrying through the nearby gardens in the morning, or the fat marmot harassing the dogs. I would drop off still-warm loaves on her doorstep; we’d grouse in chorus when there were power outages. She was a bit paranoid, but very intelligent. And she was a reference whenever it came to racism, the kind of commitment I take seriously. What more could you ask for?
I admit I had some reservations about identity politics. Since my student days I leaned left, toward socialism, though I’d noticed that progressives were far more at ease discussing race than class. At the same time, I thought conservatives’ complaints about what they’d begun to call “wokeness” were largely the rantings of Fox News hosts. I had no reason to think those grievances were perhaps justified before arriving at Bates.
At Haverford in Pennsylvania, the campus political climate was earthy, rock‑and‑roll, pacifist—more concerned with Barack Obama’s “late capitalism” and the drone war than with any flamboyant identity politics. At NYU, students and faculty were more excited about enjoying New York’s wealth and hedonism than about anything one might call “woke.” The new politically correct boom that spread through many prestigious campuses was more a background noise, a harmless ripple.
The day Ava recommended a number of books on racism, I read them without trouble. Occasionally I found them a bit light, or politically odd, even, because of an evident essentialism, more or less racist, but I told myself the problem was with me. I’m a Black man with light skin who does not speak African American English, and I’ve rarely faced real prejudice. I wasn’t perhaps Black enough—to be authentically Black—to understand this pessimism about race that has become currency.
Ava wasn’t the only pessimist. At the start of the term, I sat in a casual orientation meeting for Black junior scholars, expecting to meet colleagues and discuss our research topics. Instead, I found a mélange of therapy session and HR seminar. At one point someone offered a list of restaurants to avoid, supposedly as dens of reactionaries. Worried to see Black-White relations at a point where it was necessary to avoid certain establishments, I asked why one restaurant had such a terrible reputation. Because a student of color had worked there and carried a bad memory, I was told.
I eventually understood that the university leadership was the main reason for this distress. Early on I told the dean that I was delighted to be at one of the few universities founded by abolitionists. The dean—a white man, trained as a biologist, specialist in sponges—furrowed his brow, as if my idyll about the university’s origin physically offended him. True, he said, the school was founded by Oren Burbank Cheney, an abolitionist preacher, but the textile magnate Benjamin Bates, who funded the university, exploited cotton picked by enslaved people. I had imagined being a Black scholar hired into a faculty whose predecessors had fought for abolition; I was confronted by a dean who seemed to say that this was an exception to be ashamed of and mentioned only with great caution.
That kind of endemic self-flagellation was infuriating. But Bates College’s tension reflected the country’s own at the time, at least at first. Yes, the university organized debates around works such as White Fragility and How to Be an Antiracist. Yes, the president bragged about recruiting 67% of its faculty who identified as BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People of Color), even if some anti-discrimination laws had to be bypassed. Yes, the administration kept lengthening the acronym for sexual orientations from LGBTQ to LGBTQAIP2+. And yes, many of us added pronouns to our email signatures, like the virtuous Martin Luther pinning his 95 theses on a church door. I did it then, and at the time it seemed normal. It was 2020. Bates College was a strange place, but America was a strange place too.
I had just arrived. I laid low and closed my eyes to the oddities I noticed here and there. Between classes, grading, advising students, Zoom meetings, Covid tests twice a week, the hyperactive puppy we’d just adopted, and my efforts to endure the Maine winter, I had more than enough to do. I didn’t have time to linger on the university’s—and the country’s—quirks. Paradoxically, however, that year proved to be the healthiest I’d known at Bates College.
The offer came in mid‑June 2021: to co‑chair the working group tasked with organizing Martin Luther King Day, the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s birth.
At Bates College, the Faculty Governance Committee assigns a mission of general interest to each professor before their second year of tenure-track. But you could request to be assigned to a field aligned with your interests or strengths. I chose a commission charged with preparing students for graduate study, a matter close to my heart. To pad my paycheck, I had worked as an independent advisor for graduate admissions, and I thought that would be an asset. Unfortunately, for the committee, my research in environmental humanities made me the obvious pick to organize Martin Luther King Day.
“You’re kidding me,” I thought. I fired off a text to a fellow academic friend, furious. “Refuse,” he shot back. “Better yet, you ask, ‘Who?’”
It went without saying that I’d been chosen because I was one of the few teachers who did not need a full screen—i.e., I could teach without all the digital bells and whistles. I certainly admired Martin Luther King, but that wasn’t the point. The issue was that I’d be given a “task reserved for Black people” for which I had no specific qualifications. All I knew about MLK was what I’d learned in high school—not much.
I would have preferred to tell you that I was outraged. But no, I accepted. I didn’t want to be seen as difficult. I figured (or hoped) that by accepting I’d make a good impression and perhaps be rewarded later with a mission I’d enjoy. I even wondered if I was a touch touchy. The administration probably wanted me to see this grand celebration through an ecological lens. After all, why begrudge them giving a Black man the face of the nation’s most famous minority-awareness day? Given the climate of censorship surrounding race matters, it seemed prudent.
A month later, an even more destabilizing email arrived. A colleague warned me that one of my white students—let’s call him Mason—had tried to lynch a Black student.
I was stunned. The colleague was someone I respected; she wouldn’t level such an accusation without evidence. Mason, an environmentalist with left-leaning tendencies and a vegan persona, had been in my course on Climate Fiction, and I recalled a paper in which he critiqued “the Western colonial empire” as staged in a feminist science-fiction novel I’d assigned. What exactly were the circumstances of the lynching attempt?
Apparently, tempers had flared among several white students, including Mason, and a Black roommate. The white students allegedly told him to leave, threatening to call Lewiston police and claim he had threatened them if he tried to recover his belongings. For my colleague, they’d conspired to “weaponize state power to terrorize or kill” their Black classmate. So she concluded that it wasn’t merely a case of racism but a genuine lynching attempt. She also accused several female students, who’d cried during the incident, of exploiting their “woman of color” status, and demanded Mason and the white students be sanctioned. She also urged that professors of color be given “protection” in case any of the white students in this so‑called “white supremacist incident” should attend their courses.
Someone on the loop added that the university might be investigating the incident, but to my knowledge, if there was an investigation, it produced nothing. In any case, that email stayed with me.
I don’t know what happened between the students or who was at fault, but one thing I’m sure of: their quarrel wasn’t a question of racial hatred. I was and am troubled by the idea that a clash between police and a Black student at a liberal arts university could so easily end in death that simply calling 911 would amount to a homicide. Even though Black men are more likely to be killed by police than White men, the number of unarmed Black people killed in this way each year in the United States is minuscule. For example, in 2021 there were 11. Moreover, most victims of law enforcement are not undergraduates at one of the country’s most expensive universities.
The Mason case epitomized Bates College’s political sensitivities—an campus where today’s and tomorrow’s elites paid—or were paid—to pretend to be radical, victims, or both. In this tiny 54‑hectare universe, for Black students, a “lynching attempt” was a more serious threat than debt problems, and teachers needed protection from their students. I felt some colleagues wanted to reenact the civil‑rights struggles, Wonderland‑style: the slightest racist misstep, the slightest deliberately manipulated exchange, as grave as the sight of a hanging knot swinging from an oak branch.
It’s no accident that the term “woke” emerged on America’s most prestigious campuses at a moment when student debt and tuition costs were rising. For the university’s aristocracy, invoking Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, transgender rights, and progressive movements in general has been a convenient distraction from the economic and social problems these institutions perpetuate. Higher education has managed to take up the mantle of morality, just as Occupy Wall Street and Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign—let alone the anti‑elite fury that opened the way for Donald Trump—had smeared the ivy walls of the Ivy League. But there’s more: adopting social‑justice rhetoric and DEI initiatives isn’t expensive. In any case less than cutting tuition or hiring more tenure-track faculty.
The “woke” culture has allowed the cream of higher education to create a new model of inclusive exclusion: tuition can keep rising, admissions can drop, endowments can increase, and adjuncts can be exploited, provided the race, color, and sexual-orientation of those paying the tuition remains more varied. It has also sustained the illusion that graduates of elite schools are prepared for virtuous citizenship and that their high-priced training serves the public good. Never mind that around the time I was at Bates, about a quarter of students went into tech, finance, or consulting—a remarkable figure that means little when nearly half of Harvard and Yale graduates do the same.
Against this backdrop, at the start of the 2021 school year, the dean announced a new project: to poison‑ivy‑weed out the deep‑rooted sectarianism in the soil. “Racism, sexism, ableism, and class discrimination are deeply embedded in society, the disciplines we inhabit, and the spaces we occupy. To eradicate these inhibitors, these progress‑retardants and educational poisons,” we were told, we needed to forget “self-censorship” and “dogmatic viewpoints.” It was a true “work” on oneself: “Many of us, especially the white faculty and staff, need explicit training.” But, as with any respectable cultural revolution, the real change would come through collective action.
Every department and curriculum would be required to undergo an audit about racism. The project, dubbed “Foundational Dialogues,” aimed to identify fields where white supremacy, “colonial” biases, and other forms of prejudice might lurk—whether in programs or the core requirements of each field. Departments would be required to hire an external consultant. Each department would develop a “curriculum transformation plan” and deliver its report to the dean’s office.
Immediately I saw a grave red flag for academic freedom: teachers would be forced to accept a wholly contestable, overtly political premise—that all departments and programs suffered latent racism—and be sent on a treasure hunt to find evidence to support that predetermined conclusion. Because it was mandatory, even a sentence like “We found no form of white supremacy in our astronomy courses” would be unacceptable as a verdict.
But what the dean announced next was even more worrying: a “deep reflection” stemming from a report by the “Curriculum Working Group,” a committee of faculty and students who proposed that all students take at least two courses “centered” on race, white supremacy, colonialism, and the “intersection of power and privilege” within their major. In other words, the report recommended that every field—not just the humanities and social sciences, but also physics, chemistry, biology, and others—offer and require two such courses.
The report claimed that adopting this proposal “will make our students of color feel safer,” but it offered neither how nor why. Moreover, most of the data cited suggested the proposal made no sense. The committee noted that in 2020, 94% of Bates alumni had taken at least one course addressing questions of race, power, privilege, colonialism, or white supremacy. Yet it lamented that only 21% of Bates’s courses addressed these topics.
The committee also noted that they had compared Bates with 32 other universities to determine how many had mandatory DEI courses. Although a little over half had at least one required course, none integrated this requirement into the main core of any of their major programs—a finding the committee seemed to regard as particularly exciting. The claim that no comparable university had tried to compel science courses to address exclusion of others proved to them that Bates’s proposed mandate was “unique and transformative” (rather than, say, misguided and utterly daft) and would help “distinguish Bates from its peers.” The committee even suggested course titles to meet the requirement: for instance, “Mathematics for Social Justice” would help students understand “the role of guardians and the engine of injustice that mathematics can be,” etc.
And still, even the most absurd recommendations were nothing compared to those under the “Accountability” heading. The plan called for external consultants to “train the faculty” and to implement “the cultural change we now need.” Funds for developing these programs could be redirected toward professors who might design courses on approved topics. The implication was clear: faculty evaluations, a major indicator in the tenure process, would partly rest on loyalty to the new standards.
The worst idea was to assemble an “External Monitoring Group” comprised of Bates and external faculty experts, university staff—especially DEI liaisons—students in validated courses, and “community leaders and activists.” The committee proposed a roster of external offices that could supply enforcement agents, including a non‑profit culture group focused on social justice and a virtual law firm that supposedly sold DEI online seminars.
I felt I was reading a parody of Orwell, at once delirious and sinister. The one consolation was that the proposal was so obviously ridiculous that the rest of the faculty would never accept it.
All that rhetoric about social justice was glaringly hypocritical. Coincidentally, the day the dean promised to abolish “progress retarders,” including class discrimination, the adjunct faculty and staff announced a union campaign, invoking “low wages and poor working conditions on campus.” The movement aimed to cover “the entire spectrum”: not only non‑tenured faculty, but also facilities staff, cafeteria workers, and all non‑academic sectors. Overnight the university’s machinations began.
A week or so after the union campaign was announced, the student newspaper pulled an article about it at the university’s request, citing errors. (The young journalists denied any pressure from the university to pull the piece and claimed they wanted to ensure its accuracy.) Soon after, a revised version of the article appeared, presenting the campaign’s principal arguments and the corrections proposed by the aforementioned spokesperson. The university said it would respond to the union campaign, and by November, it hired a consulting firm that had helped Amazon quell the Staten Island workers’ movement.
I began to feel politically dizzy. I stood there with my colleagues, scrutinizing our curriculum as if we were anti-racist truffle dogs. One day I’d pick a Black Caribbean graphic novel; the following day ecological marshallaise poetry and other items to diversify my program; the day after I’d organize a Martin Luther King Day on the theme “Decolonization and Liberation” to honor a Civil Rights hero who had supported workers seeking basic labor rights. Meanwhile, the university poured gold-plated incentives on mercenaries in the corporate world to keep exploiting its most vulnerable employees. I wondered if there were leaders who felt ashamed of such hypocrisy. Apparently, they showed none.
One day I sat in a recruitment committee meeting to review many applicants for a tenure-track position in Environmental Studies. Until then, colleagues from another department had mentioned a candidate whose work focused on the African diaspora. “I’m afraid his research is too close to that of Tyler,” I heard someone say.
I was speechless. Too close to Tyler’s? The argument might have been valid—it’s common to reject candidates whose research interests are too close to those of current faculty—but my own research and courses centered on nineteenth‑ and early twentieth‑century British literature, especially science fiction and the history of science. Apparently, my colleague thought that because I’m Black, I must be the expert on the African diaspora.
I didn’t wait for the meeting to end to text a friend: “These nice white woke folks are mega‑racist.” Two minutes later I added, “We’ve just sidelined a candidate who works on American environmental history and Edward Abbey because he couldn’t identify the profound whiteness of Edward Abbey.” The “profound whiteness”? What did that even mean? (Were all Whites profoundly white, or could they, through hard work and good conduct, become moderately white, or even slightly white?) In any case, it looked bad.
Fresh from arrival at Bates College, I understood I’d become what conservatives call a “DEI recruit”—that is, I wouldn’t have the job had I not been mixed‑race. I had, after all, completed top‑tier PhD work, studied with excellent supervisors, gained above‑average teaching experience, and earned my degree with honors. I was more than qualified for my post. But was I more qualified than all the other candidates? Probably not.
Given the number of tenured professors and the scarcity of appealing positions, the United States is brimming with talented researchers who have spent years hopping between jobs hoping for a tenure‑track position. The system puts those who earned their PhD years earlier on the same plane as students just out of college. I belonged to the latter group. I am sure that the day I applied to Bates, I was competing with candidates who had taught longer, won a postdoc grant or two, or even published a book.
I knew my skin color gave me an edge in the job market—since the last decade, universities have not hidden it; they need to recruit minorities—but when I arrived at Bates I believed that advantage to be justified and fairly modest. Positive discrimination aimed to correct historical inequalities, and I knew roughly how it was supposed to work: imagine a White candidate with an A− grade and stellar record and a minority candidate with a B+ grade who still shows real potential; you hire the latter. It took me only two or three years at Bates to realize I’d been dreaming.
By the end of 2022, while I was on the search committee for a lecturer in the sciences, meritocracy—the ideal I clung to—took its first blow.
Aside from the students in need of training, selecting tenure‑track faculty is among the most serious responsibilities in higher education. In the United States, the university world is one of the few places where people are hired for jobs expected to last until retirement. In small colleges where departments shrink to a handful of professors, those decisions bear extraordinarily heavy consequences.
That year, after months of meetings, we narrowed down to three candidates: two from minority backgrounds and one White woman, let’s call her Sofia, Charlotte, and Sarah. All three visited in person to teach a sample class, present their research, meet students, and interview with faculty. It was obvious Sofia was the only one with true heft. She was finishing a remarkable postdoc, had an original research program, and worked on topics likely to appeal to students. Her race was an asset. I was confident my colleagues agreed, and at first, most did.
The deliberations moved forward, and the committee’s atmosphere shifted. First objection: despite being brilliant, Sofia lacked interdisciplinary experience. Second objection: she was more research‑focused than teaching‑oriented—which is not trivial for Bates, a school that naturally prizes teaching, and Sofia might have been better suited to a top‑tier research center. I understood these reservations and even agreed, but they were the only way out of the stalemate.
The two other finalists had obvious flaws. Sarah’s oral presentation was so dull it nearly disqualified her. Charlotte’s work in biology looked, even to me with little biology, weak. “I have serious reservations about her ability to deliver rigorous, sophisticated courses,” I had written after her session. Not to mention that, as far as I could tell, her work mostly involved wandering around counting animals. Her hypothetical course was frankly high school level. I recall a scientist, an expert in the field, saying her research was simplistic and at least fifty years out of date, not to mention that she’d published in second‑tier journals. He wondered if she had any real qualifications at all.
Given our doubts about Sofia and the weaknesses of the other two, I expected we would return to our pool of candidates and perhaps pull someone we’d overlooked. But no. A majority of the committee began to think Charlotte was the right choice. Not only did she have long professional experience, but she had offered interdisciplinary teaching and had implemented DEI programs where she’d worked. Indeed. But it didn’t change the fact she was a literally zero‑level academic. The only reason to consider hiring her was her skin color and her fervor for all things DEI.
The letter the committee sent to the dean, who had the final say, summarized the grounds for hiring Charlotte. It was a产tissue of vacuous statements claiming that her research was “primarily observational and focused on species distribution in various environments.” (In other words, she was just wandering and counting animals.) The committee admitted that “we were not sure her research program would evolve to utilize some of our most modern tools.” (In other words, we weren’t sure she’d abandon a methodology from the 1970s to align with 21st‑century science.) It added that we were not convinced she could help our students leverage their most useful skills to adapt to a more digital and computerized job market. (She might not be able to teach them to master the tools needed to land a job.) Nevertheless, we argued that Charlotte should receive a tenure‑track position at one of the country’s most selective liberal arts colleges.
Fortunately the dean proved a beacon of salvation. He was desperately defending the DEI line on campus—suffering a neurosis that could make Rachel Dolezal blush—yet he was a biologist and knew Charlotte wasn’t Bates material. He had “serious concerns” about the quality of her research and doubted her ability to meet the tenure‑track criteria. Finally, he was “very worried” that hiring someone who might not prepare students for the job market of the new century would be a mistake.
In the end Charlotte did not get the job. But the episode deeply unsettled me because it revealed how many of my colleagues viewed researchers of color.
Did they truly, even at a subconscious level, believe the only way to accommodate “marginalized” teachers was to lower standards to the point of reaching ground zero? It infuriated me, not only because it was a racist idea, but because, selfishly, it made me feel like a bad professor. I wasn’t the campus star, but I was managing; I read more, attended more conferences, published more in more prestigious journals, and I had a book project of interest to one of the world’s leading academic publishers. My evaluations from the tenure committee were glowing.
I’d spent my adult life in higher education; I was a professor, yet I had never felt like a pure product of affirmative action. I believed that by working harder than others—reading more, attending more conferences, publishing more, publishing in more prestigious journals—I would not have my merits questioned. What I experienced on that recruitment committee opened my eyes. The campus culture led us to treat Black professors as a means to an end for diversity; I could hardly avoid concluding that I had been hired first to be visible and Black, then because I was a scholar, and then more.
But there was something worse: the way I perceived new colleagues from minority backgrounds was beginning to change. I found myself asking whether Black professors were up to the task or if they were just another way Bates’s social engine would keep turning. I was fixated on what I’d learned: that many elements of this little prestigious college were delighted not only to shift lines to accommodate people like me but also to push them out entirely.
The dean obviously knew the research areas of Charlotte. But what if she had been a sociologist or a historian? Would he rely on the committee’s expertise? How many Charlottes had Bates already hired? How did other universities fare? It seemed unlikely Bates was the only institution whose determination to admit minority scholars would trump adherence to scholarly norms.
I had always believed in the virtues of positive discrimination, in theory, but in practice I ended up losing faith. The aim, I believed, was to acknowledge that people from historically underrepresented groups often face extra barriers, to assert that talented minorities, who may be less connected and outwardly less refined, can do better if given the chance. But Bates’s administration seemed to push for diversification at all costs, to the point where some colleagues had internalized the opposite idea: it is less important to find minority candidates who meet the traditional criteria; justice and the fight against racism require a two‑tier system with distinct standards for white and nonwhite candidates. In short, I came to think Bates College, which presents itself as the vanguard of progress, was a deeply and irrevocably racist institution.
I have a friend, a Black software engineer, who has a theory about how to navigate the 2020s job market as a Black person. Since he has a sense of humor (in the darkest sense), he posits there are “Replaceable Blacks” and “Irreplaceable Blacks.” The idea is to become an “Irreplaceable Black”: someone who cannot be fired because he or she is too good, works for a company with few Black people, so the company cannot afford to lose him, or, ideally, for both reasons.
In the spring of my third year at Bates, I came to the satisfying realization that I was an “Irreplaceable Black.” I had published more than all the pre‑tenure English literature professors in my cohort. I was teaching courses students enjoyed. The university had just lost two Black pre‑tenure professors. Bates College could not afford to lose another, and as I found the atmosphere increasingly strange and suffocating, I decided to speak my mind.
The Bates culture was driving me crazy. I was tired of being treated as a color-coded puppet rather than a professor, constantly being asked to participate in “Minority Work” that felt pointless or humiliating. Not only had I sat on the MLK committee for years, but I’d been asked to serve on who knows how many diversity commissions that multiplied like metastases—work rarely asked of my White colleagues.
Beyond symbolic violence, the gap between the campus’s high‑flown rhetoric and its actual employment practices exasperated me. Environmental Studies lost several non‑tenured, excellent faculty members. Meanwhile, the administration spent its time blathering about social justice until leadership made a caricature of a move and I cracked.
One day I attended a meeting of the search committee to review numerous applicants for a tenure‑track position in the Environmental Studies department. Until then, colleagues from another department had raised a concern about a candidate whose work centered on the African diaspora. “I’m afraid his research is too close to Tyler’s,” I heard someone say.
I was speechless. Too close to Tyler’s? The argument could be valid—it’s common to reject candidates whose research interests coincide too closely with existing faculty—but my own research and courses focused on nineteenth‑ and early twentieth‑century British literature, especially science fiction and the history of science. Apparently, my colleague assumed that because I am Black, I must be the expert on the African diaspora.
I didn’t wait for the meeting to finish to email a friend and tell him what had happened: “These nice white liberal folks are mega racist.” Two minutes later I added, “We’ve just ruled out a candidate who works on American environmental history and Edward Abbey because he couldn’t identify the deep whiteness of Edward Abbey.” The “deep whiteness”? What did that even mean? (Were all Whites deeply white, or could they, through hard work and good conduct, become moderately white, or even slightly white?) Either way, it was not good.
From the moment I arrived at Bates College, I understood I was what conservatives call a “DEI recruit”—in other words, I wouldn’t have the job if I weren’t biracial. Yet I’d completed high‑caliber PhD studies, worked with excellent supervisors, earned above‑average teaching experience, and completed my degree with honors. I was more than qualified for my position. But was I more qualified than all the other candidates? Probably not.
With so many PhDs and so few attractive posts, the United States is full of talented researchers who spend years hopping between temporary roles hoping for a tenure‑track appointment. The system equates people who earned their PhD years earlier and have publications with students fresh out of college. I was in the latter group. I’m sure the day I applied to Bates, I was up against candidates who had taught longer, earned one or two postdoctoral fellowships, or even published a book.
I knew my skin color was an edge in the job market—universities don’t hide that fact for a decade now, they need to recruit minority scholars—but when I arrived at Bates I believed that advantage was justified and modest. Positive discrimination aimed to correct historical injustices, and I understood how it was supposed to work: imagine a white candidate with an A−, a superb student, and a minority candidate with a B+ who nonetheless shows true potential; you hire the latter. It took me two or three years at Bates to realize I’d been dreaming.
At the end of 2022, while I sat on the committee recruiting for a lecturer in the sciences, meritocracy, as I had idealized it, received its first blow.
Beyond the students to train, selecting tenure‑track faculty is one of the most serious responsibilities in higher education. In the United States, the academic world is one of the few places where people are hired for jobs meant to last until retirement. In small universities where departments shrink to a handful of professors, these decisions carry especially heavy consequences.
That year, after months of meetings, we settled on three candidates: two minority candidates and a White woman, let’s call them Sofia, Charlotte, and Sarah. All three visited in person to teach a mock class, present their research, meet students, and interview with the faculty. It was clear Sofia was the only one capable of delivering. She was finishing a remarkable postdoc, had an original research program, and worked on topics likely to appeal to students. The fact that she was of color was an asset. I was confident my colleagues agreed, and initially, most did.
The deliberations progressed, and the committee’s mood shifted. First objection: although Sofia was brilliant, she lacked interdisciplinary experience. Second objection: she was more research‑oriented than teaching‑focused—which is not trivial at Bates. Small liberal arts colleges favor teaching, and Sofia might have been better suited to a major research center. I understood the concerns and largely agreed, but it was the only way out of the deadlock.
The two other finalists had obvious flaws. Sarah’s main presentation was so dull it nearly disqualified her. Charlotte’s research in biology looked, even to me, frankly weak. “I have serious concerns about her ability to deliver advanced, rigorous teaching,” I noted after her session. Not to mention that, as far as I could tell, her work consisted of counting animals as she wandered about. As for her hypothetical course, it was at high school level. I recall a scientist, a specialist in her field, saying her work was simplistic and at least fifty years out of date, not to mention she’d published in second‑tier journals. He wondered whether she had any real qualifications at all.
Given our doubts about Sofia and the weaknesses of the other two, I thought we would return to our pool of candidates and perhaps retrieve someone we’d overlooked. But no. The majority on the committee began to feel that Charlotte was the right choice. Not only did she have extensive professional experience, but she’d taught interdisciplinary courses and implemented DEI programs where she’d worked. Indeed. But that didn’t fix the fact she was essentially a zero‑level academic. The only reason to consider hiring her was her skin color and her commitment to everything DEI.
The letter the committee sent to the dean, who had the final say, summarized the rationale for hiring Charlotte. It was a weave of nonsense explaining that her research was “primarily observational and focused on the distribution of species in different environmental contexts.” (In other words, she wandered and counted animals.) The Committee acknowledged that “we were not certain that her research program would evolve to use some of our most modern tools.” (In other words, we were not sure she would abandon a 1970s‑era methodology to align with 21st‑century science.) And it added that we were not convinced she could help our students leverage their most useful skills to adapt to an increasingly digital and computerised job market. (She might not be able to help them master the tools needed to land a job.) Nevertheless, we backed the idea that Charlotte should obtain a tenure‑track post at one of the nation’s most selective liberal arts colleges.
Luckily the dean proved a lifesaver. He may have been ingratiating himself for the DEI line on campus—and beset by a neurosis that would make the very white Rachel Dolezal blush—but he was a biologist and knew Charlotte did not belong at Bates. He had “serious concerns” about the quality of her research and doubted her ability to meet tenure‑promotion criteria. Finally, he was “very concerned” that we might hire someone deliberately incapable of preparing students for the job market of the new millennium.
In the end Charlotte did not get the job. But that episode shook me deeply because it revealed how many of my colleagues viewed scholars of color.
Did they truly, even in the deepest corners of their subconscious, believe the only way to welcome “marginalized” teachers was to lower standards to the ground? The idea angered me not only because it’s racist but because, selfishly, it made me feel like a bad professor. I wasn’t the campus star, but I did quite well; by any standard, I matched or exceeded Bates’ expectations for a professor seeking tenure. I published articles in esteemed journals. I had a book project that interested a major academic publisher. I had high evaluations from members of the tenure committee.
I’d spent my entire adult life in higher education; I was a professor, yet I’d never felt like a pure product of affirmative action. I believed that by working harder than others—reading more, attending more conferences, publishing more, in more prestigious journals—no one would question my merit. What I experienced on that committee opened my eyes. The campus culture pushed us to view Black professors as a means to serve diversity. I could hardly avoid the conclusion that I’d been hired first to be visible and Black, then because I was a scholar, and then more.
But there was something worse: how I was beginning to view new minority arrivals. I found myself wondering if Black professors were up to the task or if this was just a way to feed Bates’s social‑machinery. I became fixated on what I’d learned: that many elements of this small prestigious college were delighted not only to shift lines for people like me but to push them out entirely.
The dean obviously knew Charlotte’s research areas. But what if she’d been a sociologist or historian? Would he have relied on the committee’s expertise? How many Charlottes had Bates hired already? How did other universities fare? It seemed Bates wouldn’t be the only place where a determination to bring in minority scholars trumped traditional scholarly standards.
I’d always believed in the merits of positive discrimination, in theory, but in practice I began to doubt it. The aim is to recognize that people from underrepresented groups often face extra barriers and to insist that talented minorities—who may lack connections and outward polish—can do better when given a chance. Bates’s administration seemed to push for a two‑tier system of fairness, a woke Jim Crow with completely distinct norms for white and non‑white applicants. In short, I came to feel that Bates College, which styled itself as a pioneer of progress, was a racially entrenched institution, through and through.
I have a friend, a Black computer engineer, who has a theory about how to navigate the 2020s job market for Black Americans. He’s funny (in the dark way he can be), and he claims there are “Replaceable N—s” and “Irreplaceable N—s.” The idea is to become an “Irreplaceable Black”: someone who can’t be fired because he or she is so valuable, employed by a company with few Black people, so the company cannot afford to lose him—or, ideally, for both reasons.
In the spring of my third year at Bates, I came to the satisfying conclusion that I was an “Irreplaceable Black.” I’d published more than all the pre‑tenure English literature professors in my cohort. I taught courses students enjoyed. The university had just lost two Black pre‑tenure professors. Bates could not afford to lose another, and as I found the atmosphere increasingly strange and stifling, I decided to speak my mind.
The Bates culture drove me mad. I’d had it with being treated as a colorized toy rather than a professor, repeatedly being asked to participate in stupid or humiliating “Minority Work.” Not only had I sat on the MLK committee for years, but I’d been asked to join increasingly many diversity committees—work that was rarely assigned to my White colleagues.
Beyond symbolic violence, the gap between the campus’s well‑intentioned chatter and its hiring practices infuriated me. Environmental Studies had lost several non‑tenured faculty, all excellent. Meanwhile, the administration spent its time blathering about social justice, until one day the leadership took a caricatured step and I finally cracked.
One day I attended a recruitment committee meeting to review the many applicants for a tenure‑track position in the Environmental Studies department. Until then, colleagues from another department had mentioned a candidate whose work focused on the African diaspora. “I’m afraid his research is too close to Tyler’s,” I heard.
I was speechless. Too close to Tyler’s? The argument might be valid—it’s common to reject candidates whose interests align too closely with existing faculty—but my own research and teaching centered on nineteenth‑ and early twentieth‑century British literature, particularly science fiction and the history of science. Apparently, my colleague thought that because I am Black, I am the expert on the African diaspora.
I didn’t wait for the meeting to end to email a friend: “These well‑meaning white folks are mega‑racist.” Two minutes later I added, “We’ve just rejected a candidate who works on American environmental history and Edward Abbey because he couldn’t identify the profound whiteness of Edward Abbey.” The “profound whiteness”? What did it mean? (Were all Whites profoundly white, or could they, through hard work and moral conduct, become moderately white, or even slightly white?) Either way, it didn’t look good.
From the moment I joined Bates College, I’d understood I was what conservatives call a “DEI recruit”—that is, I would not have the position if I hadn’t been biracial. I’d nonetheless completed top‑tier PhD training, worked with superb supervisors, had above‑average teaching experience, and earned my degree with honors. I was more than qualified for the post. But perhaps not more qualified than all the other candidates. With so many PhDs and so few engaging jobs, the United States is crawling with researchers who’ve spent years cycling through temporary posts hoping for a tenure‑track role. The system places those who earned their PhD years earlier on the same footing as those fresh out of college. I fell into the latter group. I’m sure the day I applied to Bates I was up against candidates who had taught longer, earned one or two postdocs, even published a book.
I knew my skin color gave me an edge on the job market—universities have not hidden this fact for a decade now, they need to recruit minorities—but when I arrived at Bates I believed that advantage was justified and modest. Positive discrimination aimed to correct historical inequities, and I knew how it was supposed to work: imagine a white candidate with an A− and a strong student, and a minority candidate with a B+ who still shows real potential; you hire the latter. It took me two or three years to realize I had been dreaming.
By the end of 2022, while I served on the search committee for a lecturer in the sciences, meritocracy—and my conviction of how it should work—took a hit.
If you set aside the students to train, choosing tenure‑track faculty remains one of the most serious duties in higher education. In the United States, the university world is among the few places where people are hired for jobs expected to last as long as their health or age allows. In small universities where departments shrink to a handful of professors, these decisions carry heavy consequences.
That year, after months of meetings, we settled on three candidates: Sofia and Charlotte, both from minority backgrounds, and Sarah, a White woman. All three came to campus to teach a trial class, present their research, meet students, and interview with faculty. It was evident that Sofia stood out. She was finishing an impressive postdoc, had an original research program, and worked on topics likely to please students. Her being a person of color was a definite plus. I was sure my colleagues agreed, and initially most did.
The deliberations moved forward, and the committee’s mood shifted. First objection: despite being brilliant, Sofia lacked interdisciplinary experience. Second objection: she was more focused on research than teaching—something Bates, a small liberal arts college, naturally prioritized. I understood the concerns and agreed in many respects, but it was the only way out of the stalemate.
The two other finalists had obvious flaws. Sarah’s interview was so dull it nearly disqualified her. Charlotte’s work in biology looked, even to me, weak. “I have serious reservations about her ability to deliver sophisticated, rigorous courses,” I noted after her session. Not to mention that, as far as I could tell, her work consisted of wandering around counting animals. As for her mock course, it was high school level. I recall a scientist, a specialist in the field, who deemed her research simplistic and at least fifty years out of date, not to mention she had published in second‑tier journals. He wondered whether she possessed any real qualification at all.
Given our doubts about Sofia and the weaknesses of the two others, I anticipated we would return to our candidate pool and perhaps pull someone we’d overlooked. But not at all. A majority on the committee began to think Charlotte was the right choice. Not only did she have extensive professional experience, but she had conducted interdisciplinary teaching and implemented DEI programs where she’d worked. Indeed. But that did not change the fact that she was essentially a zero‑level academic. The only reason to consider hiring her was her skin color and her passion for all things DEI.
The letter the committee sent to the dean, who held the final word, was a tapestry of nonsense arguing that her research was “primarily observational and focused on the distribution of species in different environmental contexts.” (In other words, she strolled around and counted animals.) The committee admitted that “we were not certain that her research program would evolve to use some of our most modern tools.” (In other words, we weren’t sure she would drop an older methodology to align with 21st‑century science.) It added that we were not convinced she could help our students leverage their skills to thrive in a more digital job market. (She might not be able to help them master the tools necessary to land a job.) Nevertheless, we argued that Charlotte should obtain a tenure‑track post at one of the country’s most selective liberal arts colleges.
Fortunately the dean proved a lifeline. Although desiring to defend the DEI line on campus—and afflicted with a neurosis that could make even the white‑as‑paper Rachel Dolezal blush—he was a biologist and knew Charlotte did not fit Bates. He had “serious concerns” about the quality of her research and doubted her ability to satisfy tenure‑track criteria. Finally, he was “very concerned” about the prospect of hiring someone clearly incapable of preparing students for the work world of the new century.
In the end Charlotte was not granted the post. But that story unsettled me deeply because it revealed how many of my colleagues viewed researchers of color.
Did they really, even deep down, believe that the only way to accommodate marginalized scholars was to lower standards to the floor? The thought enraged me, not only because it was racist, but because, selfishly, it made me feel like a poor professor. I wasn’t the campus star, but I did well; by any measure I met or exceeded the university’s expectations for someone seeking tenure. I published in highly regarded journals. I had a book project that attracted a major academic publisher’s interest. I’d earned praise from the tenure committee.
All my adult life I’d been in higher education; I’d been a professor, yet I’d never felt like a pure product of affirmative action. I believed that by working harder than others—reading more, attending more conferences, publishing more, in more prestigious journals—no one would question my merit. The recruitment committee’s experience opened my eyes. The campus culture led us to treat minority scholars as a means to diversity. I could not help concluding that I’d been hired first to be visible—and Black—then because I was a scholar, and then more.
But there was something worse: how I viewed new minority hires was changing. I found myself wondering whether minority professors were up to the task or if they were a way to feed Bates’s social machine. I became fixated on what I’d learned: that many elements of this small prestigious campus welcomed not only to move the lines for people like me, but to push them out entirely.
The dean obviously knew Charlotte’s field. But if she’d been a sociologist or historian? Would he have trusted the committee’s expertise? How many Charlottes had Bates already hired? How did other universities perform? Bates didn’t seem likely to be the only place where the determination to bring in minority scholars would trump strict scholarly standards.
I’d always believed in the virtues of positive discrimination in theory, but in practice I ended up disbelieving it. The aim is to acknowledge that people from historically underrepresented groups often face extra barriers, and to assert that talented minorities—who can be less connected and outwardly less refined—can do better if given the chance. Bates’s administration appeared to press for a two‑tier system of justice, a woke Jim Crow, with entirely separate standards for white and non‑white applicants. In short, I came to think Bates College, which presented itself as the cutting edge of progress, was a deeply racist institution in need of serious reform.
I have a friend, a Black software engineer, who has a theory on how to ride the 2020s job market when you’re Black. He has humor (in a dark way) and says there are “Replaceable Blacks” and “Irreplaceable Blacks.” The idea is to become an “Irreplaceable Black”: someone who cannot be fired because he is too good, who works for a company with few or no Black people, so the company cannot risk losing him—or ideally for both reasons.
By spring of my third year at Bates, I arrived at the happy conclusion that I was an “Irreplaceable Black.” I’d published more than all the pre‑tenure English literature professors in my class. I taught courses that students enjoyed. The university had just lost two Black pre‑tenure professors. Bates College could not afford to lose another, and as I found the atmosphere to be increasingly strange and suffocating, I decided to tell the truth.
The Bates culture drove me insane. I’d had enough of being treated as a colorized trinket rather than a professor, constantly being asked to participate in ridiculous or humiliating “Minority Work” or the like. Not only had I sat on the MLK committee for years, but I’d been asked to join a countless number of diversity commissions—work that was rarely demanded of my White colleagues.
Beyond symbolic violence, the gap between the rhetoric and real employment practices enraged me. Environmental Studies had lost several non‑tenured, excellent faculty. Meanwhile, the administration spent its time blathering about social justice until one day leadership made a caricatured move and I cracked.
One day I attended a meeting of Bates’s Faculty Council to examine the fate of a candidate who’d applied for a tenure‑track position in the Environmental Studies department. Until then, colleagues from another department had mentioned a candidate whose work revolved around the African diaspora. “I’m afraid his research is too close to that of Tyler,” I heard.
I was speechless. Too close to Tyler? The argument might have some truth to it—it’s common to avoid hiring someone whose interests resemble those of current faculty—but my own research and teaching concerned nineteenth‑ and early twentieth‑century British literature, especially science fiction and the history of science. Apparently, my colleague assumed that because I’m Black I must be the diaspora expert.
I didn’t wait for the meeting to end to text a friend: “These well‑meaning white folks are mega‑racist.” Two minutes later I added, “We’ve just sidelined a candidate who works on American environmental history and Edward Abbey because he couldn’t identify the profound whiteness of Edward Abbey.” The phrase “profound whiteness”? What did that even mean? Were all Whites profoundly white, or could they, through hard work and good conduct, become moderately white, or even slightly white? Either way, it looked bad.
Right after arriving at Bates College, I understood that I was what conservatives call a “DEI recruit”—in other words, I wouldn’t have the job if I hadn’t been of mixed race. I’d, however, completed top‑tier PhD work, worked with excellent supervisors, gained above‑average teaching experience, and earned my degree with honors. I was more than qualified for my position. But more qualified than all the other applicants? Probably not.
Given the number of tenured positions and the scarcity of more attractive posts, the United States is full of talented scholars who have spent years bouncing between temporary jobs hoping for a tenure‑track position. The system treats someone with a PhD earned years earlier and already published as equals someone who’s just finished college. I belonged to the latter group. I’m sure the day I applied to Bates I was competing with candidates who had taught longer, earned one or two postdocs, perhaps even published a book.
I knew my skin color gave me a market advantage—universities have not hidden this for ten years now; they need to recruit minorities. But when I arrived at Bates I believed this advantage was justified and modest. Positive discrimination sought to remedy historical inequities, and I knew how it was supposed to work: imagine a white candidate with an A− and a superb record, and a minority candidate with a B+ who still shows real potential; you hire the second. It took me two or three years at Bates to realize I had been dreaming.
In late 2022, while I was on the faculty search committee for a lecturer in the sciences, meritocracy as I had idealized it took a first blow.
Besides training the students, selecting tenure‑track faculty is among the most serious responsibilities in higher education. In the United States, the world of academia is one of the few places where people are hired for positions meant to last until retirement. In small universities, where departments shrink to a handful of professors, these decisions have heavy consequences.
That year, after months of meetings, we had shortlisted three candidates: two minority candidates and a White woman, Sofia, Charlotte, and Sarah. All three had come to campus to teach a sample course, present their research, meet students, and interview with faculty. It was obvious Sofia was the one who could really carry it. She was closing a strong post‑doc, had an original research program, and worked on subjects likely to appeal to students. Being a person of color was a plus. I was convinced that my colleagues shared this view, and initially most did.
But the deliberations grew tense. The first objection: Sofia, for all her brilliance, lacked interdisciplinary experience. The second: she was more oriented toward research than teaching—a big deal in Bates, where teaching is valued as much as research. I understood these concerns and agreed in many respects, but it was the only way to break the stalemate.
The other two finalists had clear flaws. Sarah’s grand oratory was so dull it nearly disqualified her. Charlotte’s work in biology looked, even to me, weak. “I have serious doubts about her ability to deliver elaborate and rigorous courses,” I had noted after her talk. And as for the course she proposed, it seemed to be high school level. There was a renowned scientist who insisted that her research was simplistic and at least fifty years out of date, not to mention she’d published in secondary journals. He wondered whether she had any real qualifications at all.
Considering our doubts about Sofia and the shortcomings of the other two, I assumed we would re‑visit the candidate pool and perhaps pull someone we’d overlooked. But no. The majority of the committee began insisting that Charlotte was the right choice. Not only did she have extensive professional experience, but she had taught interdisciplinary courses and put in place DEI programs where she’d worked. And yet, this did not change the fact that she was essentially a zero‑level academic. The only reason to hire her was her skin color and her devotion to all things DEI.
The letter the committee sent to the dean, who had the final say, was a tapestry of praise for Charlotte. It described her research as “primarily observational and focused on the distribution of species in various environments.” (In other words, she wandered around counting animals.) It noted that “we were not sure her program would evolve to incorporate our most modern tools.” (In other words, we weren’t sure she’d adopt a modern toolkit.) And it added that we were not convinced she could help our students develop skills suited to a digital world. (She might not be able to help them master the tools needed to get a job.) Regardless, we argued that Charlotte should be offered a tenure‑track position at a leading liberal arts college.
Fortunately the dean proved a rare beacon. He, though pandering to the DEI stance on campus and suffering a nervous breakdown that would put even the white savior‑type Rachel Dolezal to shame, was a biologist and knew Charlotte had no business at Bates. He had “serious concerns” about the quality of her research and doubted her ability to meet tenure‑track criteria. He was also “very worried” about the prospect of hiring someone who could not prepare students for the job market of the new century.
In the end Charlotte did not get the job. But the episode left me deeply unsettled because it revealed how many of my colleagues viewed scholars of color.
Did they truly believe, even deep down, that the only way to accommodate marginalized teachers was to lower the bar to the floor? The idea infuriated me not only because it’s racist but because it made me feel like a bad professor. I wasn’t a campus star, but I did well; by any measure I met—or exceeded—the university’s expectations for someone seeking tenure. I published in prestigious journals. I had a book project that attracted the interest of a major academic house. I’d received glowing assessments from members of the tenure committee.
I’d spent my entire adult life in higher education; I was a professor, yet I had never felt like a pure product of affirmative action. I believed that by working harder than others—reading more, attending more conferences, publishing more, in more prestigious journals—no one would question my merit. What I experienced on that recruitment committee opened my eyes. The campus culture pushed us to view minority scholars as a means to serve diversity. I could hardly avoid concluding that I’d been hired first to be visible and Black, then because I was a scholar, and then more.
But there was something worse: how I viewed new minority arrivals was changing. I found myself asking whether minority professors were up to the task or if they were simply a way to feed Bates’s social machine. I became fixated on what I’d learned: that many elements of this small, prestigious college were not only pleased to move the lines for people like me but to push them out altogether.
The dean obviously knew Charlotte’s field. But if she’d been a sociologist or a historian? Would he have counted on the committee’s expertise? How many Charlottes had Bates already hired? What did other universities do? There seemed little chance Bates was the only institution whose determination to bring in minority scholars outran adherence to scholarly standards.
I’d always believed in the virtues of positive discrimination in theory, but in practice I ended up not believing in it anymore. The aim is to acknowledge that people from historically underrepresented groups often face extra obstacles, and to insist that talented minorities, who may be less connected and, on the surface, less refined, are capable of doing more if given the chance. Bates’s administration pushed to diversify at all costs, to the point where some of my colleagues had internalized the opposite idea: after all, it wasn’t so important to find minority candidates who could meet conventional criteria. Justice and the fight against racism demanded a two‑tier system, a Jim Crow‑tinted woke regime, with separate standards for White and non‑White candidates. In short, I began to think Bates College, which presented itself as the avant‑garde of progress, was a deeply and irreparably racist institution.
I have a friend, a Black software engineer, who has a theory about navigating the late‑2020s job market for Black people. He’s clever (often black humor) and maintains there are “Replaceable Blacks” and “Irreplaceable Blacks.” The idea is to become an “Irreplaceable Black”: someone who cannot be fired because he or she is too good, who works for a company that has few Black people, so it cannot afford to lose him, or ideally for both reasons.
In the spring of my third year at Bates, I came to a gratifying conclusion: I was an “Irreplaceable Black.” I’d published more than all the pre‑tenure English literature professors in my cohort. I gave courses that students liked. The university had just lost two Black pre‑tenure professors. Bates College could not afford to lose another, and as I found the increasingly strange, suffocating atmosphere, I decided to speak my mind.
The Bates culture drove me wild. I’d had enough of being treated as a colorful toy rather than a professor, being asked to take part in mindless or humiliating “Minority Work.” Not only had I sat on the MLK committee for years, but I’d also been asked to serve on an endless number of diversity commissions that multiplied like metastases—a kind of labor rarely demanded of my White colleagues.
Beyond symbolic violence, the gap between the faculty’s platitudes and its employment practices irritated me. The environmental studies program had lost several non‑tenured faculty, all of them excellent. Meanwhile, the administration spent its time blathering about social justice, until leadership took a caricatured move and I cracked.
Bates’s Studies Council is a small but influential committee that brought together the dean and four senior professors from humanities, social sciences, hard sciences, and interdisciplinary studies. In December 2022, this same Council released a draft of a text that matched the proposal the Curriculum Working Group had submitted in 2021: an obligatory module now called “Race, Power, Privilege, and Colonialism,” or RPPC. If the proposal was approved by the faculty, every department would be required to offer at least one course devoted to one of the four biases, along with their consequences. Students would be required to take two of these courses, one of which would be within their major. As if by chance, the Council was composed of five White members and no people of color; it was not hard to mock this setup.
But what struck me as less funny was the Council’s determination to impose its will, apparently without considering the opinions of the faculty, which, according to early polls, was deeply skeptical. Thus, in March 2023, the day a meeting of the invited professors to discuss and comment on RPPC took place, I spoke up.
Standing at the microphone in a crowded lecture hall, I explained why I opposed this module: because it violated academic freedom. The teaching of these new courses would be entrusted to minority faculty, who would be even more boxed in and constrained to questions of race, even if they wanted to study something else. Moreover, asking scientists to offer courses on race and colonialism was catastrophic. Most lacked the expertise to do so, and very little experience dealing with such delicate social issues in a classroom. Forcing them to pretend to master the matters of sectarianism was not only pedagogically dubious, but could do more harm than good, especially for students of color who would bear the brunt of their awkwardness with such sensitive topics.
I pressed this point hard. If there is one thing Bates had taught me, I said, it’s that the best way to persuade white, well‑meaning scholars to do what you want is to adopt a reassuring rhetoric that centers on “racial bias.” Embarrassed, a woman I’ll call Sandra, a Council member, immediately reassured me: she was fully aware of the potential trauma for minority students. There were ways to ensure that course dynamics wouldn’t be too punishing for them. The essential thing, she argued, was to encourage a “culture of repair.”
I replied that I had no idea what the “culture of repair” was (just to see if she could back up her bluster). She gave me a vivid example of what “repair” could look like: imagine a mechanism where students of color would cry “oops” or “ouch” every time someone made a racist remark—as if we were dealing with children learning not to bite their playmates who’d just knocked over their toy truck. I had to reach deep into my own, already threadbare, professional reserves to avoid leaning toward the microphone and shouting “Oops!”
For a long time I believed the wide spectrum of student demands was an ideal pretext for enacting laws that only senior administrators and a few activated tenure‑track professors would cheer. In March 2023, just days before a gathering of faculty, I received a strange email—perhaps confirming the suspicion—that came from a student on the council. It urged me to advocate for the module. I told her why I was against it; she confessed that the Council had asked students to try to persuade professors to support it. I was unsettled by the idea that students were being recruited to lobby. She also said that her and her colleagues had been “caught by surprise” by how broadly professors were inclined to support the issue.
After the meeting, I received another email, this time from “Poor‑Pain,” anxious that a young Black professor with left‑leaning sympathies might oppose the committee’s views. We had a chat in which she argued that my notion of academic freedom wasn’t far from the “libertarian‑leaning” educators—implying that my agreement with professors who aren’t progressive or benevolent would undermine my legitimacy. “I tend to distrust Whites who use that kind of argument to avoid confronting systemic racism,” she wrote. In other words, she was telling me that a Black man might actually want to be part of a group that wouldn’t side with those who oppose it.
I replied that I believed Bates’s new project represented the inverse of what occurs in states like Florida, where the government monitors school curricula to promote a racist and homophobic agenda. “I have no intention of defending an attack on academic freedom in higher education just because it’s my side doing it,” I wrote.
She was stuck: several minority professors supported the plan, while others—including me—opposed it. To my knowledge, woke White professors—most of whom were trained to lean on the “lived experience” of their Black or mixed‑race colleagues—could not decide when confronted with minorities who disagreed among themselves. The spectacle of “marginalized” people with opposing views tended to trigger cognitive paralysis among some, who followed the last minority voice they’d spoken to. My friends and I called it the “last Black person I spoke to” problem.
But the problem, the real problem, was the opportunity: all one needed to do was be the last spokesperson of a minority that a white professor or administrator had listened to before making a major decision, and you could sway the outcome. That’s what I did with Sandra. My counterarguments finally carried the day, and she asked me to defend a version of the proposal that would require students to take two courses on racism, but without requiring every field to offer such a course.
I could, easily. Even if privately I criticized what looked like a blatant politicization of our programs, what gnawed at me most was academic freedom and the absurd notion of chemists teaching white supremacy. If we could be satisfied with existing courses, or pre‑approved additions, it might be worth compromising, especially if students would be less likely to be fed nonsense like Mathematics for Social Justice. Sandra promised to present this modification at the next Faculty Council meeting. Two weeks later, a revised version of the project circulated, without department names. The vote on whether to adopt the bill would take place at the April faculty meeting.
At first I thought my side had won. A week later, a counterproposal emerged, supported by a smaller but vocal faction of the same department, deeply concerned with social justice issues. The requirement that every department create mandatory courses on racism was added.
A miracle occurred: a personal problem popped up just before the vote, meaning I would be absent that dreaded April Monday. I warned several colleagues who opposed the proposal. “I won’t be at the meeting,” I whispered to one of them, “honestly, I’d rather not because my head would explode.”
Later I learned that scholars from the Africana program, a bastion of Bates’s performative radicalism, were in the meeting room distributing flyers declaring they would seize the curriculum if they didn’t get their way. They refused to allow their courses to count toward meeting the new criteria if the less radical version of the plan were adopted. It was even more cynical: a number of students—many of them minorities—had been invited to the meeting by a white instructor, apparently to serve as visual props. They loudly applauded the counterproposal.
Perhaps some professors were uneasy rejecting an anti‑racist prerequisite in front of students. Or perhaps they realized that the Africana threat put everyone in a bind. Or perhaps they were touched by the light of truth and progress. Either way, Bates’s faculty caved and voted 73% in favor of a measure that a bare minority had originally supported.
The vote, and the theater that preceded it, compelled me to speak publicly—not just in a faculty meeting. A few weeks earlier the unionization attempt had failed, which didn’t bode well for my spirits. So in June of that year I published an op‑ed in the Boston Globe titled “I Am Not the Good Black Professor.”
I had taken on so much that it felt like a catharsis. I was also preparing for a one‑year sabbatical‑parental leave. I believed I’d endure the break and come back. I adored my students; debating books and films with them was a joy. Even though I rarely agreed with my environmental studies colleagues, I found them thoughtful and open‑minded.
That year I tried to see things with humor, even when it cut a bit cruelly, when glimpses of Bates College’s madness surfaced. One day an email to the entire faculty claimed that a campus Scholar Tea was “appropriating Black, queer, and Southern traditions.” Another time, a Martin Luther King Day meeting, in which a White social scientist explained that putting a silhouette of a farmer on a poster caused a problem—the theme that year was “Food Justice”—knowing that farmers “are white by default” and that “tractors are the image of whiteness.” Or the Inclusive Education Center’s “Festival De‑stress” for teachers, including a “Munch & Play” session (Play-Doh, Legos, and other “fun games”), crafts, and a plush bunny to cuddle in the adjoining room. Incredible! I worked in a big‑kid daycare.
Alas, upon returning to campus, nothing was funny anymore.
My leave began shortly after ChatGPT—OpenAI’s creation—surfaced. Professors and administrators were struck with panic at an instrument that could render any paper utterly pointless. I assumed that a year later, in fall 2024, the university would have crafted a strategy to counter the existential threat to higher education.
Not at all. Professors panicked about cheating that AI enabled, but there was little collective drive to address it. The administration didn’t seem very worried that students now had a machine capable of reading, writing, and thinking on their behalf. I was dismayed to see that preserving the core principles of so‑called liberal arts, or offering students what could still be called an education, had become a secondary concern.
Shortly after, I joined a recruitment committee that only made things worse. I was at a point where I could no longer feign indignation at Bates’s DEI politics and their deep contradictions with the university’s working conditions. The recruitment process went on, but I could not bury my head in the sand. Among the many diversity candidates was a woman who wasn’t aiming for tenure and had taught at Bates for several semesters—let’s call her Mia. She was a serious, thoughtful colleague who worked on compelling topics, and her courses were in high demand.
It’s common for universities to offer tenure‑track jobs to professors who aren’t aiming for tenure. They are internal candidates with the advantage of being a known quantity. Departments may also want to reward someone who’s been stuck in a professional impasse for years. The tenure track path is not easy: the best years of your life can be spent moving from one post to another and from one state to another in the hope that one day you’ll land a job for an indefinite period. Since many universities cap adjunct teaching hours to avoid federal health‑care requirements, these instructors have half a dozen courses per semester shared among various institutions—freeway flying to make ends meet. One in four faculty members outside tenure are dependent on welfare; one in three earn less than $25,000 a year.
Mia’s contract was due to expire. I thought this was the chance to hire her on tenure‑track. Once again, the committee self‑defeated the obvious course.
Early 2025, the morning was cold when the decision was made: Mia would not be hired. It would be her last Bates semester, or perhaps her last semester as a teaching‑scholar. If she were mediocre, so be it. Not at all: the committee unanimously recognized that she was perfectly qualified. It turned out there was a “diversity candidate” who fit the bill a bit better, contributing more to broadening the range of courses. I’d seen the university grind and spit out enough non‑tenured professors that Mia’s fate did not surprise me, but I was stunned.
What should have been obvious from the start was now clear. Bates College was not a desirable workplace, not by a long shot. But the problem was larger: Bates was a link in a long chain of higher education that promises a precarious future to young people in exchange for debts often impossible to repay, and asks scholars—tempted by the dream of a tweed‑clad professor’s life—to keep waiting for a real job after a string of temporary posts.
I’d been fortunate to escape. I was on the cusp of getting exactly what I’d wanted since I was 21, back when I was an English literature student proud to be in the lamplit office of a modernist expert to whom I’d said I wanted to do the same job. For my Environmental Studies colleagues who’d been around longer, tenure‑level appointment was a given. I was next in line to become director of the program. The day we decided not to hire Mia, Bates’s president announced that I would be among four professors—and the only non‑tenured one—chosen to sit on the university’s powerful Strategic Planning Committee, a group that included the president himself, several vice presidents, and a board member. I’d reached the inner sanctum, but… what was the point?
I sat at the last meeting of Bates’s recruitment committee to decide the fate of someone who, like me, had spent years pursuing a calling. Then suddenly there was no longer any doubt. Enough. No more Stockholm syndrome of academia—“no one leaves the tenure track.” Five years after my thesis supervisor’s remark about being the last dinosaur, I decided to bury my career rather than keep waiting for meteors. As soon as the meeting ended, I jumped in my car and sent a message to a close friend explaining that I was leaving Bates.
The history of hiring and working practices at elite higher education, and its long drift toward extreme progressivism, are interconnected and coherent stories—two narratives that form a single whole. In 1969, a survey of 60,000 professors found that 27% identified as moderate, 28% as conservative, and 46% as left or ultra‑liberal. Today, on several of the United States’ finest universities, only 1–9% identify as conservative. A 2025 Harvard survey put that figure at 9%.
What happened? It’s not a mystery: the system, originally designed to protect the right to free thought for professors, collapsed. In 1980 two‑thirds of American university professors held lifetime appointments. Today, barely a quarter do. We’ve shifted from a world in which most teachers spoke freely without fear of losing their jobs to a world in which the majority must guard against a contract being terminated for a “crime of thought.” It’s no wonder a faculty dominated by contractually employed teachers is highly susceptible to groupthink when it comes to thinking clearly.
I recall a meeting led by a consultant toward the end of my time there, about a month into Donald Trump’s second term. The small group of professors and administrators present were asked to identify Bates’s main strengths and weaknesses. Its greatest strength, said one colleague, was its commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Another thought its greatest weakness was precisely its lack of DEI engagement. A third lamented that our ties with the Wabanaki nations were not stronger.
Outside, the snow was melting as I passed under a multicolored banner on a campus building announcing the “Sex Week” at the college. There would be ring‑tossing on dildos and “Exploration Tables” full of sex toys. In the past I would have seen this as a symptom of a university’s misused money, lavishly indulged by functionaries whose exact roles are unclear. Today, oddly enough, it makes me smile. Bates College, what is it but a sanctuary of ideological masturbation with protection? We had a week to admit it was so, and that was something.
A few months later I was hired by The Atlantic as a full‑time editor. I enjoyed my first return to civilian life when I learned the following: in November Bates faculty would vote on whether to suspend the mandatory module “Race, Power, Privilege, and Colonialism” scheduled for 2026. The sharpest minds clearly understood that given the political climate, this was not the moment to impose courses on “the physics of white supremacy” or “the chemistry of colonialism.” A curriculum so explicitly political risked turning the university into a target for a new government. The plan was to suspend the implementation of this compulsory module until 2029—coinciding with the next presidential election.
I thought I’d been vindicated in my view. I’d argued from the start the RPPC module was futile, unworkable, and delirious… Now it was dead. Strangely, I was disappointed. As if it were last remnant of a jest. The dean’s discomfort when I first told him I was proud to teach at an abolitionist-founded institution resurfaced in my memory. I know we can’t resurrect the dead, but I imagine his discomfort is twofold.
Bates College was founded in 1855 on this principle: a man is a man, wherever he is and regardless of skin color. From 1855 to 1865 the university trained 173 students—young abolitionists ready to shed blood for national unity and emancipation. Among them was Holman S. Melcher, who left Bates to join the 20th Maine Regiment. A year later, at Gettysburg, he was part of the bayonet charge up Little Round Top, plunging straight into the face of the Confederates.
Alas, it is the same Bates College that could not summon the courage to defend a modification that teachers and administrators who were sincere believed imperative. It was nothing less than justice.
The vote was unanimous.