Illustrations by Erin JiaAs you cross the Androscoggin River into Lewiston, you pass on your left the waterfalls that once set the mills to humming. On your right, affixed to a pockmarked brick mill—now defunct, it had spun tens of thousands of bedspreads a week—a 30-foot-wide neon sign reads HOPEFUL.And so I was. My wife and I drove by that unlit sign on the hot May afternoon when we moved from New York to the interior of Maine. It was 2020. The 100,000th American was about to die of COVID. And I was starting my dream job.Arriving at Bates College, we passed the empty quad, took a left, and pulled our U-Haul up to our new home: a century-old colonial just off campus, ringed by a tangle of blooming lilacs and wild blackberries. Someone had just mowed the grass. As we began unpacking, alternating between unloading boxes and marveling at the house—twice the size and half the rent of our Queens apartment—an older man crossed the street and introduced himself as a retired faculty member. We made Norman Rockwell small talk. His wife, crouched in a shaded corner of her garden, waved with a pair of pruning shears.The setting was impossibly idyllic. And it was not the first time in my academic career that I’d had occasion to reflect on my good fortune. My path to the professoriat had been a fairy tale. In 2014, I went straight from my bachelor’s degree at Haverford to a fully funded Ph.D. program in comparative literature at NYU. Five years later, during my first season on the infamously brutal academic job market, I won a tenure-track position at Bates, teaching interdisciplinary humanities courses in the school’s popular environmental-studies program. I got the email on December 23, 2019, a Christmas miracle. Topping off this epic run of luck, I signed my contract mere weeks before the country reported its first case of the coronavirus, meaning I was spared from the pandemic freezes and rescinded job offers that would effectively shut down academic hiring.When I defended my dissertation on Zoom that spring, one of my advisers joked that seeing me with a tenure-track job in hand was like “watching the last dinosaur being born.” It was at once a compliment and a grim acknowledgment of reality. I had won the lottery in an apocalypse. I was going off to the kind of secure, prestigious, fairly remunerated academic job that was rapidly going extinct in a world where most people teaching college courses were stuck in the permanent underclass of contingent labor.The summer before my first semester of teaching was bliss. I went for long runs along the Androscoggin and the pine-studded Lake Auburn. I arranged books in my sunny campus office and bought snake plants for the windowsill. My wife, who had spent years working at Glacier National Park during college breaks, was thrilled to again be living in a place with real, capital-N Nature. We drank hard cider at a hilltop orchard with views of the White Mountains, made blackberry pie from our own bushes, and posed for photos on the giant boot in front of the L.L.Bean store. Every effort was made to push New York City, with its money lust and voguish pop-ups and puffy-vested financiers and pandemic chaos, far from our minds. We studiously applied ourselves to the task of becoming, if not true Mainers—that requires being born there—then at least credibly Maine-ish.I believed in American higher education with the dewy fervor of a young missionary. I came from a long line of people possessed by the unshakable faith that college was a ticket to a better life. My grandmother, holler-born in the mountains of West Virginia, didn’t finish high school. My mom made it through an associate’s degree before I came along and she had to abandon her education. I saw my academic success as the culmination of several generations of familial sacrifice, paid for by the deferred dreams of others. And I saw American colleges and universities as embodying what was best about this country: the belief that an education is liberating, civilizing, a democratic good for all rather than a luxury to be gatekept. I imagined myself teaching at Bates forever.Everywhere in Lewiston, the signs of ghostly wealth, long gone, were visible—the grand factories, endlessly repurposed in the latest revitalization scheme; the paint-peeling mansions on the hill and the cars rusting in formerly stately yards; the addicts on the corners dozing off or holding cardboard signs that pleaded their case. To all appearances, it was a town that had gone bust. That is, until you arrived at Bates, a 133-acre Eden of manicured greens and august buildings smack in the middle of postindustrial purgatory.Our neighborhood was an informal extension of campus: a mix of homes owned by current or former professors, as well as other properties, such as the faculty house we lived in, that the college owned and rented out. Another home on our street was occupied by a college administrator who was passionate about DEI issues, a woman of color whom I will call Ava. (I have elected not to name the faculty and staff in this story; my goal is not to single out individuals but rather to write about the problems I saw at Bates and in higher education more generally.)Ava was bighearted and fiery, and seemed to feel some combination of neighborly obligation and professional duty to make sure that her new Black colleague and his nice white wife felt welcome in Maine. These overtures mostly took the form of evening drinks at her house—chairs set a COVID-safe six feet apart, a bottle of chardonnay on the porch between us.As I got to know Ava, I was surprised to discover that she viewed central Maine as a Stephen King–esque hell, a place where ancient prejudices and violence lay just beneath the friendly college-town facade. She regaled my wife and me with stories of alleged racial offenses, both major and minor, and generally made it clear that she thought Lewiston—an island of diversity in an otherwise famously homogenous, if not notably reactionary, state—was a hub of white supremacy. One evening, Ava confessed to me that when she drove through town and spied the local “crackers” sitting on their porches (not unlike the very porch we were sitting on), she sometimes thought to herself that these townies would probably like to kill her.I didn’t know what to make of Ava’s views. I won’t pretend that my sensibilities were inflamed by the word cracker, but the epithet also didn’t seem like one that a college administrator should be using—especially at a school that admits a not-insignificant number of white, working-class Mainers. I also had a difficult time taking seriously the idea that I had moved to a place with would-be Klansmen around every corner. I grew up outside Harrisburg, Pennsylvania—another deindustrialized, permanently revitalizing urban center—and Lewiston felt familiar to me. The people I met were nice, hardworking; they minded their own business. I don’t think it ever occurred to Ava that I could have come from a similar place and similar people.But although I sometimes found the things she said classist and even offensive, I also genuinely liked Ava. She had a fast wit and a quick laugh. She watered our tomato plants when we traveled to Boston to visit family. We traded texts about the baby fox that scampered through the neighborhood’s yards in the morning and the oversize groundhog that pestered the dogs. I left freshly baked sourdough baguettes on her porch; we commiserated during power outages. Ava struck me as perhaps a touch paranoid, but she was also obviously smart. More important, she was a well-credentialed authority on racism, and I took such people seriously. Why wouldn’t I?I’d never had great enthusiasm for identity politics; I’d been a socialist since my early 20s, and it had generally been my experience that liberals were as eager to talk about race as they were uneager to talk about class. Yet I also assumed that conservative complaints about “wokeness,” a term just coming into vogue as a pejorative, were essentially Fox News hysteria. Until I got to Bates, I had little reason to suspect that they held any merit.[From the March 2026 issue: Tyler Austin Harper on the multibillion-dollar foundation that controls the humanities]At Haverford, the campus politics were of the earthy, stoner, peacenik variety—more focused on “late capitalism” and President Obama’s drone warfare than flamboyant identitarianism. At NYU, the students and faculty seemed more interested in enjoying the hedonistic riches of the city than anything that might reasonably be called “woke.” The new political correctness that was spreading on many elite campuses felt mostly like background noise, and seemed harmless besides.That’s why, when Ava gave me anti-racist reading recommendations that first summer in Maine, I read them with an open mind. And when I found them disquietingly flimsy, politically bizarre, and, in their naked essentializing, even sort of racist, I assumed that I must be the problem. As a light-skinned Black guy who doesn’t speak African American English, I had rarely been subjected to acute prejudice in my life. I thought that perhaps I simply wasn’t Black enough—“authentically” Black enough—to understand the kind of racial pessimism that had become so mainstream.Ava was hardly the only pessimist among my new co-workers. Around the start of the semester, 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 one of my first encounters with the man who was then dean of the faculty, I mentioned how excited I was to be joining one of the few American colleges founded by abolitionists. At this, the dean—a white biologist who was an expert on sponges—frowned, as though my rosy view of the school’s antislavery history physically pained him. He conceded that, sure, it had been founded by the abolitionist minister Oren Burbank Cheney, but he pointed out that Benjamin Bates, the textile tycoon who had funded the college, had processed slave-picked cotton in his mills. I had come into Bates rather smitten with the idea that I was a Black academic joining the ranks of a faculty whose predecessors had agitated for Black freedom, but the dean seemed to feel that this was actually something to be faintly embarrassed of, a history that was best mentioned, if at all, only after layering on an array of caveats.I found this kind of endemic self-flagellation to be eye-roll-worthy. But the charged atmosphere at Bates didn’t feel out of step with that of the country as a whole, at least initially. Yes, the college sponsored overearnest discussions of books such as White Fragility and How to Be an Antiracist. Yes, the president of the college bragged that 67 percent of new faculty hires that fall were “BIPOC-identified,” and, sure, it seemed likely that some racial-discrimination laws had been ignored to get that number so high. Yes, college leadership was constantly adding new letters to the sexuality acronym—LGBTQ became LGBTQAIP2+. And, yes, many of us in academia tacked pronouns onto our email signature with the righteous zeal of Martin Luther hammering his 95 theses to the church door. I certainly did. But none of this seemed all that unusual. Bates was weird in 2020. But America was weird in 2020.That first year, I kept my head down and let the small oddities I noticed pass by without much reflection. Between teaching, grading, student advising, Zoom faculty meetings, twice-weekly COVID testing, wrangling a hyperactive rescue puppy, and trying to survive the Maine winter, I didn’t have much time to think about the college’s (or the country’s) cultural eccentricities. Ironically, that pandemic year turned out to be the sanest one I would experience at Bates.The request came a couple of weeks into June 2021: Would I co-chair the task force that organized the college’s annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration?Before the start of their second year on the tenure track at Bates, professors are assigned service work by the Committee on Faculty Governance. Although they are technically handed their appointments, they can request assignments that align with their interests or aptitudes. I’d volunteered to serve on a committee that was focused on preparing Bates students for graduate school, which was something I really cared about. To make extra money while getting my Ph.D., I’d spent several years working as a freelance grad-school-admissions consultant, and I thought this experience would be an obvious boon. The committee, however, explained that my academic work in the environmental humanities would make me a good fit to lead the MLK Day celebration.You have got to be shitting me, I thought. I texted a friend and fellow academic in a huff. “Say no,” he shot back. “Or better, say ‘who?’ ”It was obvious to anyone with eyes that I’d been picked because I was one of the handful of Bates faculty members who didn’t need to wear SPF 50 sunscreen. I admired King as much as the next person, but that wasn’t really the point. The point was that I was getting saddled with Black-Guy Work for which I had no real qualifications. All I knew about MLK, I had learned at my Pennsylvania public high school a decade earlier—which is to say, not very much.I’d like to tell you that I responded indignantly. Instead, I said yes. I did not want to develop a reputation for being difficult, and I thought (or hoped, anyway) that by agreeing, I might earn some goodwill and eventually get rewarded with an assignment I was excited about. I even began to wonder if I was being too sensitive. Maybe the powers that be really did want me to bring a more ecological perspective to Bates’s annual celebration. And, anyway, was it really so bad if they needed a Black guy to be the face of America’s most famous minority day? In this censorious racial climate, who could blame them?A month after being asked to co-chair the committee, I received an email that left me further discomfited. This one, from a concerned faculty member, said that a white student of mine—let’s call him Mason—had tried to lynch a Black student.I read the email with my mouth agape. The professor who’d written it was someone whose academic work I thought highly of; surely she wouldn’t make such an extreme accusation if it had no basis in reality. But I was rather certain that Mason—a crunchy-granola environmentalist type outspoken about his progressive politics—was not a virulent racist. He had taken my Climate Fiction course and written a paper critiquing the “Western colonial empire” depicted in a feminist science-fiction novel I had assigned. How, exactly, had he attempted a lynching?Mason and several other white students had apparently gotten into a dispute with a Black friend they lived with. The white students had asked their Black housemate to leave, and had said they would call the Lewiston police and say he was threatening them if he tried to get his things. According to my colleague, they had thus conspired to “weaponize state power to terrorize or kill” their Black classmate. “It is not an exaggeration to say their actions were an attempted lynching,” she added.The professor also accused several students who were evidently brought to tears during the unfolding drama of intentionally leveraging their “white womanhood” by crying. The email concluded by demanding that Mason and the other white students face serious consequences. It also demanded that professors of color be provided “protection” if any of the students involved in this “white supremacist incident” enrolled in their courses.Someone mentioned that the college might be investigating the incident, but if such an investigation happened, to my knowledge nothing ever came of it. Even so, the email stuck with me.Whatever had happened among those students, and whoever had been at fault, I was sure the conflict was not driven by racial hatred. I was also troubled by the evidence-free assumption that an encounter between a Black liberal-arts-college student and the police was so likely to end in death that calling 911 was tacitly homicidal. Although Black men are significantly more likely to be killed by the police than white men, the number of unarmed Black men who are fatally shot this way annually in America is minuscule—11 in 2021, for instance. And of course, most of those who are unjustly killed by the cops are not undergraduates at one of the most expensive colleges in the country.I came to understand the Mason affair as emblematic of the kind of “politics” that dominated at Bates, a place where current and future elites paid—or were paid—for the privilege of cosplaying as radicals, victims, or both. In this upside-down, 133-acre world, an “attempted lynching” was a graver threat to Black undergraduates than student debt, and faculty needed protection from their own students. Some of my colleagues, it seemed, were engaged in an Alice in Wonderland–style reenactment of civil-rights-era struggles, in which glancing racial faux pas and willfully misinterpreted private encounters were treated with the solemnity of nooses swinging from oak trees.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.Wokeness allowed elite higher ed to create a new model of inclusive exclusion: one in which tuition can continue to climb, acceptance rates can continue to plummet, endowments can continue to expand, and adjunct labor can continue to be exploited as long as the demographics of those paying the tuition and those being exploited continued to get browner, Blacker, more LGBTQAIP2+. It also helped nurture the delusion that elite college graduates were being prepared for lives of civic virtue, and that their highly priced education would be deployed in service of the public good. Never mind the fact that, during my time at Bates, roughly a quarter of the school’s graduates went on to jobs in tech, finance, or consulting—a startling figure that nonetheless pales in comparison to the nearly half of Harvard and Yale students who end up in these same career tracks.All of this was the backdrop of the dean’s announcement to faculty, in the fall of 2021, that the college’s next major project would be to napalm the strangling weeds of bigotry that were apparently rooted deep in its soil. “Racism, sexism, ableism, classism are deeply embedded in society, in our fields of study, and in the spaces we occupy,” he observed. “To eradicate these inhibitors, these retardants to progress and educational potential, these poisons,” we were told, would require setting aside “self-censorship” and “dogmatic positions.” Some of this “work” would focus on the individual: “Many of us, especially white faculty and staff, require explicit training.” But as with all cultural revolutions, the real change would involve collective struggle.The dean explained that every department and program at Bates was to complete a racism self-audit. The goal of this project, innocuously called Foundational Dialogues, was to identify areas where white supremacy, “colonial” frameworks, and other forms of bias might be lurking in curricula and major requirements. To facilitate this work, departments were required to bring in an external consultant. Each major would produce a “curricular transformation plan” and deliver the report to the dean’s office.To me, the whole initiative rang serious alarm bells for academic freedom: The faculty was being made to accept a highly contestable and expressly political conclusion—that racism was latent in every department and program on campus—and then sent on a treasure hunt to find evidence supporting that predetermined finding. Given that the transformation plan was mandatory, We didn’t unearth any white supremacy hidden in our astronomy courses clearly would not be an acceptable verdict.Even more disturbing was what the dean said would come next: “serious consideration” of a report from Bates’s Curricular Working Group, a committee composed of faculty and students, which proposed that all students be required to take at least two courses “centering” race, white supremacy, colonialism, and “intersecting experiences of power and privilege” within their major. In other words, the report recommended that every single major on campus—not just those in the humanities and social sciences, but also physics, chemistry, biology, and the like—offer and require two such courses.The report declared that enacting the proposal “will make our students of color feel safer,” but it didn’t say how or why. Moreover, much of the evidence it cited suggested that the proposal was acutely unnecessary. The committee noted that 94 percent of 2020 Bates graduates had taken at least one course that addressed race, power, privilege, colonialism, or white supremacy. It lamented, however, that “only” 21 percent of Bates courses overall touched on these topics.The committee also wrote that it had looked at 32 other colleges to see how many had DEI-related course requirements. Although slightly over half had at least one required course, none of the schools placed that requirement within a major—a discovery that the committee seemed to find positively titillating. In the committee’s view, the fact that no peer institution it surveyed had tried to force science majors to take chemistry courses on bigotry, for instance, was proof that the proposed requirement was “unique and transformative” (rather than, say, ill-advised and obviously deranged) and would help advance the goal of “distinguishing Bates from its peers.” The committee even provided examples of hypothetical new courses that could fulfill the requirement, such as “Mathematics for Social Justice,” which could help students understand “the role of mathematics as a gatekeeper and driver of injustice.”Yet even the report’s most absurd curricular recommendations seemed harmless compared with those found in its “Accountability” section. Outside consultants, it proposed, should be brought in to “train faculty” and enact “the cultural shift we now require”; course-development funds might be restricted to only those professors creating classes about approved topics; it was strongly implied that teaching evaluations, an important metric in the tenure process, should be based in part on demonstrated allegiance to the new norms.Most ominous was the committee’s argument that an “external oversight group” should be created, one composed of faculty experts from Bates and beyond; college staff, including DEI administrators; students who had taken approved courses; and “community leaders and activists.” The committee provided a list of outside organizations that could furnish the enforcers, including a social-justice-inflected arts nonprofit and a “virtual law firm” that appeared to specialize in selling online DEI seminars.The whole document struck me as an Orwellian masterpiece, by turns insane and sinister. The only thing that gave me solace was the certainty that the proposal was so self-evidently unhinged that it would never get past the rest of the faculty.All of this social-justice rhetoric also felt wildly hypocritical. The same October day that the dean promised to abolish “retardants to progress”—including classism—adjunct faculty and staff announced that they were starting a union drive, citing “low pay, and poor working conditions at the college.” The union was intended to be “wall-to-wall,” meaning that it would include not just non-tenure-track faculty but also people working in facilities, the dining hall, and other nonacademic roles on campus. The administration’s skulduggery started almost immediately.Just over a week after the unionization push became public, the student newspaper took down an article about it from its website when a college spokesperson requested that it do so, citing inaccuracies. (The student journalists denied being pressured by the college to remove the article and said that they wanted to ensure that it was accurate.) Shortly thereafter, a new version of the story appeared with talking points and edits suggested by said spokesperson. The college declared that it would not remain neutral during the unionization drive, and by November, Bates had hired the same consulting firm that was helping Amazon crush labor organizing on Staten Island.[Tyler Austin Harper: America’s colleges are reaping what they sowed]I began to develop a case of political vertigo. There I was, joining my colleagues in sifting through our curriculum like anti-racist truffle pigs; assigning an Afro-Caribbean graphic novel, Marshallese ecopoetry, and the like to diversify my syllabi; and organizing a “Decolonization and Liberation”–themed MLK Day celebration meant to honor a civil-rights leader who had been assassinated while supporting sanitation workers agitating for basic labor rights. Meanwhile, the college was paying ungodly sums to corporate mercenaries to ensure that it could continue exploiting its most vulnerable employees. But if administrators felt the least bit sheepish about their hypocrisy, they didn’t show it.Illustration by Erin JiaI was in a search-committee meeting, reviewing the scores of applicants who had applied for an open tenure-track position in the environmental-studies program, when a colleague from another department shared their thoughts on a candidate whose work focused on the African diaspora. “I’m worried his work will be too close to Tyler’s,” they said.The comment left me dumbstruck. Too close to Tyler’s? This would have been a good point—it is routine to pass on candidates whose interests are too similar to those of faculty already on campus—except that my research and teaching were about 19th- and early-20th-century British literature, with a focus on science fiction and the history of science. Apparently, my colleague had assumed that, because I am Black, I must be an expert on the African diaspora.Partway through the meeting, I sent an email to a friend recounting the incident. “All of these good white liberals are so racist,” I wrote. Minutes later, I sent another update. “Now we just nixed a candidate who works on American environmental history and Edward Abbey,” I said, “because he did not ‘even acknowledge the profound whiteness of Edward Abbey.’ ” I did not know what “profound whiteness” meant, exactly. (Were all white people profoundly white, or was it possible, through hard work and good behavior, to become merely moderately white, or even mildly white?) But I did know that, whatever “profound whiteness” meant, it wasn’t good.It had been obvious to me since my arrival at Bates that I was what conservatives like to call a “DEI hire”—that is, I likely wouldn’t have gotten the job were it not for the color of my skin. True, I’d gone to a top Ph.D. program, had prominent advisers, scraped together an above-average amount of teaching experience, and graduated with distinction. I was more than qualified for the job I was hired to do. But was I more qualified than every other candidate who’d applied? Probably not.Because of the volume of people earning doctorates and the paucity of good jobs available, the country is flooded with talented scholars who have spent years bouncing from gig to gig, contract to contract, hoping to win a tenure-track position. This system pits people several years out of their Ph.D. program, armed with substantial publication records, against those straight out of grad school. I was in the latter camp. When I applied to the Bates job, I am certain, I was competing against applicants with more teaching experience, a postdoctorate fellowship or two under their belt, perhaps even a published book.I knew being Black had given me an advantage on the job market—over the past decade, colleges and universities haven’t exactly hidden how desperate they are to hire minorities—but when I’d arrived at Bates I’d also assumed that this boost had been defensible and comparatively modest. I believed that affirmative action was about redressing historical inequalities, and I thought I knew how it was supposed to work: If you have an A– white candidate who is very polished, and a B+ minority candidate who has some rough edges but shows real potential, you hire the minority. After a few years at Bates, though, I began to see the version of affirmative action that I had defended in my head as a fantasy.One of the first blows to my idealism about the academic meritocracy came in late 2022, when I was serving on another search committee, for an assistant professor in the sciences.With the exception of educating young people, selecting new tenure-track faculty is arguably the most solemn responsibility professors have. Academia is one of the only fields in America where people are hired for jobs that are intended to be permanent, held until age or infirmity forces them to step aside. At small liberal-arts colleges, where each academic department might have only a handful of faculty members, these decisions are especially consequential.After a monthslong search, we’d narrowed down the pool of applicants to a trio of finalists, two minorities and one white candidate: I’ll call them Sofia, Charlotte, and Sarah. During their campus visits—in which each of the three candidates put on a teaching demonstration, gave a “job talk” about their research, met with students, and sat for interviews with faculty members—it became clear to me that only Sofia was viable. She was wrapping up an impressive postdoc, had an original research program, and worked on topics that would excite our students. The fact that Sofia also happened to be a woman of color didn’t hurt. She was indisputably the best choice, and I was sure my colleagues on the search committee would agree. Initially, most of them did.Yet as our deliberations wore on, the mood on the committee shifted. The objection emerged that Sofia, although a brilliant scholar, did not have much experience working across disciplines. There was also some worry that she seemed more focused on research than teaching—not a trivial matter. A small liberal-arts college like Bates is teaching-centric by design, and it did seem like Sofia would have been more at home at a high-powered research institution. I understood these reservations, and in fact shared some of them, but I also thought this put us in a bind.The other two finalists had clear flaws. Sarah’s trip to Bates had been lackluster to the point of disqualifying, while Charlotte’s had been borderline embarrassing. The latter’s research in biology was, even to my untrained eye, shockingly unsophisticated. “I have substantial reservations about Charlotte’s ability to teach complex, rigorous courses,” I said in my notes from her campus visit. I added that, as far as I could tell, her work didn’t seem much more complicated than walking around and counting animals. As for the mock course she showcased for her teaching demo, it struck me as being pitched at the level of a high-school class. A scientist who had knowledge of her field told the committee that Charlotte’s research was simplistic and 50 years out of date, and that her published work had appeared in middling journals. He questioned whether she was qualified at all.Given our uncertainty about Sofia and the weakness of our two alternatives, I assumed we would return to our pool of applicants in the hopes of finding a candidate we might have overlooked. Instead, something incredible happened. The majority of the committee members slowly began to convince themselves that Charlotte was the right choice. She had extensive work experience, had a history of teaching interdisciplinary courses, and had developed DEI programs at her current institution. This was all true. But it also did not change the fundamental fact that Charlotte was a remarkably low-wattage academic. The fact that we would entertain giving her a job seemed mostly due to her pigmentation and her enthusiasm for DEI bureaucracy.The committee’s letter to the dean, who had final say over the decision, summarized the rationale for hiring Charlotte. It was a marvel of sugarcoating, describing her research as “primarily observational and centered on the distribution of species in different kinds of environments.” (In other words, she walked around and counted animals.) It confessed that “we were uncertain whether her research program would develop into something that used some of the most modern tools.” (Which is to say, we weren’t sure if she was capable of abandoning her 1970s methodologies and joining 21st-century science.) And it noted that we were not confident she had the “ability to help our students develop skills that would be most helpful for going into the increasingly digital and computational workplace.” (She might not be able to help our students develop the kinds of proficiencies that would make them employable.) Still, we made the case for giving Charlotte a tenure-track job at one of the most selective liberal-arts colleges in the country.Thankfully, the dean saved us from ourselves. Although he was a primary cheerleader for DEI on campus—and although he was afflicted with a degree of racial neurosis that would have made Rachel Dolezal blush—the dean was also a biologist, and he must have known that Charlotte had no business at Bates. He voiced “significant concerns” about her research quality, questioned whether she could meet tenure standards, and said he was “very concerned” by the idea that we would knowingly hire someone who lacked the ability to prepare our students for this millennium’s job market.In the end, Charlotte did not get the offer. But the entire episode left me distressed by what it seemed to suggest about the way many of my colleagues at Bates viewed scholars of color.Did they really believe, however deeply in the recesses of their subconscious, that the only way to get “marginalized” faculty on campus was to lower academic standards to the subbasement? The idea made me irate, not only because it was racist, but because, selfishly, it made me look bad. Maybe I was not an academic rock star, but I thought I was doing quite respectably at Bates; by any reasonable metric, I was meeting, even exceeding, the college’s expectations for tenure-track faculty. I was placing articles in well-respected journals. An editor at one of the top university presses was interested in my book project. I’d received glowing internal reviews from members of my tenure committee.I had spent my entire adult life at college, in grad school, and now working as a professor, and I had never before been self-conscious about being a beneficiary of affirmative action. I had always assumed that if I simply worked harder than the people around me—if I read more, went to more conferences, published more and in better venues—then nobody would question whether I deserved to be there. My experience on that search committee, though, disabused me of the notion that any of this mattered at Bates. The school’s culture encouraged us to see professors of color as vehicles for achieving the college’s diversity goals. The inescapable conclusion I arrived at was that I had been hired to be visibly Black first and a scholar second, if at all.Even more upsetting, my experience on that committee changed how I viewed other newly hired minorities on campus. I sometimes found myself reflexively wondering whether Bates’s professors of color were up to the job, or whether they were underqualified fodder for the school’s social-engineering regime. I could not unlearn what I had discovered: that more than a few people at this elite little college seemed happy not just to move the goalposts for people like me, but to take them down entirely.The dean, of course, happened to be familiar with Charlotte’s research areas. But if she had been a sociologist or a historian, would he have deferred to the expertise of the faculty on the committee? How many other Charlottes had already been hired at Bates? And how common was this kind of thing at other colleges around the country? It seemed highly unlikely that I had landed at the only school in America so hell-bent on getting minorities through the door that it would make a mockery of academic standards if need be.I never stopped believing in affirmative action in principle, but I slowly stopped believing in it in practice. I’d understood the spirit of affirmative action to be about recognizing that people from historically underrepresented groups often face additional barriers, about affirming that talented minorities who may be less connected and superficially less refined can nonetheless rise to the occasion if given the opportunity. It seemed to me that the Bates administration’s push to diversify at all costs had led some of my colleagues on the faculty to internalize the opposite idea: that it is not especially important to find minority candidates who are capable of being held to traditional academic norms. Justice and anti-racism required a two-tiered system, a sort of woke Jim Crow, in which radically separate standards were applied to white and nonwhite candidates. In short, I came to see Bates College, self-styled beacon of progress, as an institution that was deeply, incorrigibly racist.One of my friends, a Black software engineer, has a theory about navigating the 2020s job market as an African American. He jokes (but it is not really a joke) that there are “replaceable negroes” and “irreplaceable negroes.” The goal, he says, is to become an irreplaceable negro: someone who is unfireable because they are too good at their job, because they work for a company that doesn’t have a lot of Black people and can’t afford to lose any, or, ideally, both.By the spring of my third year at Bates, I’d come to the happy conclusion that I was an irreplaceable negro. I’m pretty sure that I had published more than any other tenure-track humanities professor in my cohort. I taught courses that were popular with students, and, most important, two other Black, pre-tenure male professors had recently left the college. I reasoned that Bates couldn’t afford to bleed any more Black guys, and because I was finding the atmosphere at the college more bizarre and stifling by the day, I resolved to begin speaking my mind.I was angry about the culture at Bates. I was sick of being treated like a racial prop rather than a professor, which included being continually recruited to do Minority Work I found silly or degrading. In addition to serving on the MLK committee, which I did for several years, I had been asked to be on multiple committees related to the college’s metastasizing diversity bureaucracy—work it seemed that my white faculty friends were rarely asked to do.But more than this tokenizing, it was the disconnect between the college’s progressive patter and its labor practices that was pushing me toward a breaking point. Environmental studies had lost several non-tenure-track faculty members since I’d arrived, each a fantastic professor. Watching this happen as the administration continued to spend most of its time bleating about social justice left me considerably less patient when college leadership made its next cartoonishly progressive move.Bates’s Academic Affairs Council was a small but powerful committee composed of the dean and four senior faculty members drawn from the humanities, social sciences, sciences, and interdisciplinary studies. In December 2022, the council circulated draft legislation for a version of the proposal that the Curricular Working Group had suggested back in 2021: the Race, Power, Privilege, and Colonialism requirement, or RPPC, as it came to be known. If the proposal passed a faculty vote, every major would be required to offer at least one course related to “race, power, privilege, colonialism, and their consequences.” Students would be required to take two such courses, one of these in their major. That the council was composed of five white people, with nary a professor of color among its ranks, added a degree of bleak hilarity to the whole affair.I found it less funny, though, that the council was determined to have its way seemingly regardless of broader faculty sentiment, which early polling had shown was thoroughly skeptical of such a plan. At a March 2023 faculty meeting, the RPPC requirement was put up for debate and comment. I commented.Standing at the mic in a cramped auditorium, I laid out my case against the requirement: It was a clear violation of academic freedom. The burden for teaching these new courses would probably default to minority faculty members, who would be further pigeonholed into race work that they may not want to do. And asking professors in the sciences to teach courses on race and colonialism would likely be a disaster. Most Bates science faculty lacked any expertise in these areas, nor did they have much experience discussing fraught social issues in the classroom. I argued that pushing them to act as bigotry experts not only was of dubious educational value, but would likely do more harm than good, especially to students of color who would be subject to their fumbling attempts at teaching racially sensitive topics.I leaned on this last point especially hard. If my time at Bates had taught me anything, it was that the most reliable way to get progressive white academics to do what you wanted was to translate your concerns into the therapeutic language of racial harm. As if on cue, a professor on the council whom I will call Sandra hastened to assure me that she took potential trauma to minority students very seriously. She insisted that there would be ways to ensure that classroom dynamics did not become unpleasant for them; the key, she explained, would be to foster a “culture of repair.”When I said that I had no idea what a culture of repair meant (really, I just wanted to see her try to substantiate her hollow jabber), Sandra gave a helpful example of what “repair” might look like in action. She suggested that perhaps there could be a system in which students of color could call out “oops” or “ouch” if somebody accidentally said something racist—as though these were not young adults with basic human dignity paying minor fortunes to be taught by ostensible subject-matter experts, but toddlers learning not to bite their friends when someone grabbed their toy truck. It took every last ounce of my already threadbare professionalism not to lean into the mic and say “Oops.”I had long privately believed that the specter of student demand was being used as justification to pass legislation that only senior administrators and a few tenured radicals were excited to see put in place. A strange email I received a few days before the March 2023 faculty meeting appeared to confirm this. In it, a member of the student government not so subtly nudged me to support the requirement. When I wrote back explaining the various reasons I did not, she confessed that she and her peers had been asked by the council to encourage (read: guilt-trip) their professors to endorse it. I was disturbed that students were apparently being recruited for an influence campaign. The student told me, too, that she and her peers had been “blindsided” by the proposed requirement, but had been presented with an almost uniformly favorable faculty view of it.I also got an email, after the meeting, from “oops, ouch” Sandra, who seemed quite anxious that a young Black professor with leftist politics objected to the committee’s vision. During our exchange, she noted that my views on academic freedom were also found among “faculty with libertarian leanings”—as though the mere fact that my opinion was shared by professors who were not liberal progressives was proof that the opinion was illegitimate. She added, “I do have some suspicion about white people using arguments like this to avoid addressing systemic racisms.” To me, it seemed obvious what she meant: Did I, a Black man, really want to be on the same side as people who didn’t want to Do the Work?I told her that I saw Bates’s new scheme as simply the liberal mirror image of what was already happening in places like Florida, where the state government was policing curricula to advance a racist, homophobic agenda. “I’m not willing to support violating intellectual freedom in higher education just because it happens to be my team that’s doing it,” I wrote.Sandra seemed stuck: Some minority professors supported the requirement, while others, like me, did not. In my observation, woke white academics—who are largely acculturated to defer to the “lived experience” of their Black and brown students and colleagues—had next to no ability to make decisions when confronted with minorities who disagreed with one another. Encountering “marginalized” people with opposing views tended to create a kind of cognitive paralysis in some of my white co-workers, and I noticed that, in such cases, they usually followed the recommendation of the most recent minority they’d spoken with about the issue. With my friends, I jokingly called this the “last Black person I talked to” problem.But this problem was also an opportunity: If you could manage to be the last minority voice that a white professor or administrator heard before they made an important decision, they’d often just do what you told them to. With Sandra, apparently, it worked. My rebuttals to the RPPC started to land, and she asked if I could support a version of the proposal that would still force students to take two courses on racism without requiring every major on campus to furnish these courses.I told her that I could. Although I still privately disliked what seemed to me a naked politicalization of our curriculum, my core objections had always centered on the faculty’s academic freedom, and the absurdity of making chemists teach courses on white supremacy. If the requirement could be fulfilled with classes that were already being taught, or voluntarily added, that compromise seemed worth making, especially if it meant that students would be less likely to be subjected to “Mathematics for Social Justice” slop. Sandra said she would suggest this modification at the next Academic Affairs Council meeting. Less than two weeks later, a new version of the legislation was distributed, now with the major requirement removed. The vote to pass or kill the legislation would take place at the April faculty meeting.I thought, briefly, that my side had won. Yet a week later, a counterproposal came across the transom, this one buoyed by a small but vocal corner of the faculty that was especially militant about social justice. It restored the original demand that every major create required courses on racism.By some act of cosmic mercy, I had an unexpected personal matter crop up days before the vote, which meant I would be out of town on that fateful April Monday. I alerted a few colleagues who also opposed the legislation. “I won’t be at the meeting,” I told one, “but honestly that’s good, as I think my head would explode.”I later learned that professors in the Africana program, one of the centers of performative radicalism at Bates, stood outside the meeting distributing flyers that announced they would effectively hold the curriculum captive if they didn’t get their way. They informed the rest of the faculty that they would not allow their classes to count for the requirement if the less aggressive version of the legislation passed. This would have made any implementation logistically challenging, leaving students to fight over spots in a smaller number of courses that could fulfill their obligations. In what seemed to be an even more cynical manipulation, a number of students—many of them minorities—were brought to the meeting by a white faculty member, apparently as visual aids; they audibly cheered for the counterproposal.Perhaps some professors were uncomfortable striking down an anti-racism requirement in front of the students, or maybe they recognized that Africana’s threat had put everyone in a difficult spot. It’s possible, I suppose, that the light of truth and progress had simply warmed their frigid hearts. Whatever the reason, Bates’s faculty relented: The vote was 73 percent in favor of a measure that only a small minority had originally supported.The vote and all that preceded it finally pushed me to speak up in a forum that was more public than a faculty meeting. It didn’t help my less-than-rosy outlook that, just a couple of weeks before the April faculty meeting, the union effort had officially failed. That June, I published an op-ed in The Boston Globe titled “I Am the Wrong Kind of Black Professor.”Voicing the frustrations that I had long kept mostly private was cathartic. I was also about to begin a yearlong break from Bates, a combined research sabbatical and parental leave. I convinced myself that I could stick it out when I got back. I still adored my students, and loved sharing books and films I cared about with them. And even if my views frequently differed from those of my colleagues in environmental studies, they were kind and open-minded people.The year that I was away, I tried to find humor, sometimes dark, in the glimpses of Bates madness that blipped on my radar: an email sent to the entire faculty to complain that a campus “Scholar Tea” event was appropriating “Black Queer Southern traditions.” A Martin Luther King Jr. Day meeting I attended where a white social scientist argued that putting a silhouette of a farmer on a poster was problematic—that year’s MLK theme was “Food Justice”—because farmers “default to whiteness” and “tractors reflect whiteness.” The Center for Inclusive Teaching and Learning hosting a “DeStress Fest” for faculty featuring a “Lunch & Play” (Play-Doh, LEGO, “other fun ‘toys’ ”), arts and crafts, and “a soft bunny in the next room to pet.” It was incredible to learn that I worked at an adult day care.But nothing seemed as humorous after I came back to campus.My leave had started just a few months after OpenAI’s breakthrough model of ChatGPT was released, leaving dazed professors and administrators flailing in their response to a technology that seemed poised to make the college essay obsolete. I assumed that by the time I came back in the fall of 2024, Bates would have a strategy for dealing with this existential threat to American higher education.Yet upon my return, I found that, even as Bates faculty panicked about AI-enabled cheating, many of my colleagues seemed to have little collective will to do anything about it. Nor did the administration seem especially concerned that our students now had at their disposal a tool that could do their reading, writing, and thinking for them. I was distressed to find that safeguarding the basic tenets of liberal arts, or providing students with an experience that might still be recognizable as an education, seemed to be a low priority at Bates.A search committee I joined that fall compounded my disillusionment. By this point, I had mostly lost the capacity to be scandalized by the administration’s questionable DEI policies, or by those policies’ deep tension with the college’s labor conditions. During this search, however, that tension became impossible to ignore. One of the many “diverse” candidates in our search pool was a non-tenure-track professor—I’ll call her Mia—who had been teaching at Bates for multiple semesters. Her research was exciting, her courses were compelling, and she was a hardworking and thoughtful colleague.Further, it is routine for colleges to give tenure-track jobs to non-tenure-track faculty members: These “internal candidates” have the advantage of being a known quantity, and departments are often eager to do right by a co-worker who has been stuck in career limbo. The path to becoming a tenure-track professor can be grueling—the system asks people to spend the prime of their life moving from low-paying job to low-paying job, from one state to another to another, all in the hopes of one day getting a permanent position. Because many universities cap the number of courses that adjuncts can teach (to avoid having to comply with federal health-care mandates), many of them have to teach half a dozen or more per semester spread across different local colleges—a practice known as “freeway flying”—to cobble together a living. One in four non-tenure-track college educators relies on public assistance. One in three earns less than $25,000 a year.Mia’s position at Bates was about to expire, and so I assumed that we would take the rare opportunity to hire her onto the tenure track. Once again, I watched a committee talk itself out of an obvious choice.On a cold morning a few days into 2025, the group arrived at its final decision: We would not be hiring Mia, a result that made it likely that this would be her last semester at Bates, and perhaps her last semester as an academic. If Mia had been a mediocre teacher or scholar, that would be one thing. But the committee agreed that she was absolutely qualified. There just happened to be another “diverse” candidate who was judged to be a marginally better fit, and who did more to expand our curricular offerings. I had watched the college chew up and spit out enough non-tenure-track professors that Mia’s fate shouldn’t have come as a surprise, but it did.I saw clearly now what should have been obvious all along. Bates was not a good place to work, nor a moral one. And the problem went beyond a single college: Bates was a node in a higher-education system that offered teenagers an uncertain future in exchange for often unpayable debt, and that asked scholars—enticed by the tweedy dream of a kind of faculty life that has long since been clubbed to death—to keep waiting for the real job that would surely come after the temporary job, and the next temporary job, and the next.I had been spared all that. And I was on the cusp of getting the very thing I had wanted since I was a 21-year-old English major in my modernism professor’s wood-lined office, declaring that I would like to do her job one day. My senior colleagues in environmental studies talked about my tenure as if it were a foregone conclusion and openly discussed how I was next in line for program chair. The same January morning we decided not to hire Mia, Bates’s president announced that I was one of four professors—and the only non-tenured faculty member—whom my colleagues had voted onto the powerful Strategic Planning Steering Committee, a body composed of the president himself, various vice presidents, and a member of the board of trustees. I was on the inside track of an inside track, but it felt hollow.Sitting in that last search-committee meeting, deliberating the fate of a person who, like me, had spent years chasing after a career that felt more like a calling, I was unexpectedly gripped by a granite certainty. I did not want to keep doing this. My academic Stockholm syndrome—You do not leave the tenure track—subsided in a rush. Five years after my adviser had likened me to the last dinosaur, I decided to walk my academic career into a tar pit rather than wait for the asteroid. I sat in my car after the deliberation about Mia ended and sent an email to a confidant explaining that I intended to leave Bates.The story of elite higher education’s hiring and labor practices and the story of its decades-long creep toward progressive extremism are not separate or even contradictory. They are the same story. In 1969, a survey of 60,000 professors found that 27 percent identified as moderate, 28 percent as conservative, and 46 percent as liberal or left. Now, at some of this country’s top universities, only single-digit percentages of faculty identify as conservative. A 2025 survey of Harvard faculty placed that number at 9 percent.How this happened is no mystery: The very system that was designed to protect the faculty’s right to free thought collapsed. By 1980, as many as two-thirds of American college professors were tenured. Today, only about a quarter are. We went from a world where most faculty members could say what they think without fear of being fired to one where most people teaching college courses have to worry that their contract won’t be renewed if they cause intellectual offense. It is not surprising that a professoriat disproportionately composed of contract workers would also be one that could be pressured into groupthink.In a consultant-led meeting I attended near the end of my time at the college, one month into Donald Trump’s second term, the small group of professors and senior administrators present was asked to share what it saw as Bates’s greatest strengths and weaknesses. One of my colleagues said that the college’s greatest strength was its commitment to DEI. Another said that the college’s greatest weakness was that it could be even more committed to DEI. Someone lamented that our ties to the Wabanaki Nations could have been stronger.As snow turned into slush, I walked by a flyer pasted to a campus building announcing the college’s annual sex week. The technicolor poster proclaimed that Bates would be hosting a game of “dildo ring toss” and would provide “exploration tables” replete with sex toys. Once, I might have seen in that poster a symptom of everything wrong with the college—money wasted on weird bullshit, organized by bureaucrats whose jobs nobody could explain. Now I found it all oddly refreshing. What was Bates if not a place devoted to risk-free ideological masturbation? For a week, at least, we could be honest about it.Months later, I joined The Atlantic as a full-time staff writer. I was busy enjoying my first fall free from academia when I heard the news: At the November faculty meeting, Bates professors would vote on whether to suspend the Race, Power, Privilege, and Colonialism requirement, which was set to begin in 2026. Cooler minds at the college had evidently judged that, given the political climate, now was not exactly the best time for mandatory courses on the physics of white supremacy or the chemistry of colonialism; such a nakedly politicized curriculum, in fact, could make Bates a target of the current administration. The new legislation proposed that implementation of the requirement be paused until 2029—not coincidentally, after the next presidential election.I thought I’d feel vindicated. I had argued all along that the RPPC was pointless, unworkable, mad. Now it was dead. Yet, unexpectedly, I was disappointed. Here was one last sign that it had all meant nothing. I recalled the dean’s faint embarrassment, years earlier, when I’d said that I was proud to join a school with an abolitionist past. Although the dead cannot speak, I must assume that embarrassment runs both ways.Bates was founded in 1855 on the principle that a man is a man wherever he is found and whatever color his skin. In the decade that followed, the college furnished from its ranks 173 students willing to spill their blood for the cause of the Union and human liberation. One of these abolitionist-educated men was Holman S. Melcher, who left Bates to join the 20th Maine Regiment. A year later, at Gettysburg, he helped lead the bayonet charge down the hill at Little Round Top and into the maw of an advancing Confederate force.Now this same college could not find the spine required to simply stand by a curricular change that its faculty and administrators had breathlessly, earnestly, performatively insisted was an imperative because it was nothing less than a matter of justice.The vote was unanimous.This article appears in the September 2026 print edition with the headline “Confessions of a Token Black Professor.”