Offline with Jon Favreau - Why College Was Too Woke For This Black Socialist Professor

Episode Date: August 29, 2026

Is the right wing’s depiction of academia NOT a complete caricature? Fromer Bates College professor—and current Atlantic staff writer—Tyler Austin Harper joins Offline to break down the legacy of Woke 1 in higher education. Tyler’s recent essay, "Confessions of a Token Black Professor" argues that academia’s social justice fixation is just a bandaid for much larger institutional problems; he and Jon discuss how campus wokeism is the same story as that of rising tuition costs, falling admission rates, and increasing exploitation of faculty and staff.Hate listening to ads? Become a Friends of the Pod subscriber for ad-free episodes of Pod Save America, Pod Save the World, Lovett or Leave It, Runaway Country, Offline with Jon Favreau, and more—plus exclusive content, including bonus episodes of Pod Save America. Subscribe now at crooked.com/friends, on Apple Podcasts, or through the Pod Save America YouTube channel.To watch this episode with subtitles, click here and turn on closed captions (CC).You can request a transcript by emailing [e-mail]. Include the podcast name, episode title, and air date. Please allow 48 hours for delivery.

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Out Thursdays wherever you get your podcasts. I think a lot of faculty members after Trump, they saw his election as an assault on expertise in this populist backlash and et cetera. And they saw it as their duty to defend liberal institutions with an emphasis on liberal in this moment. of consolidating authoritarianism. That's understandable, right? But that is not necessarily the ends to which a university is supposed to be put, right? I'm John Favreau, and you just heard from today's guest,

the Atlantic's Tyler Austin Harper. So AOC made some news the other week when she used the phrase, Woke One was crazy to laugh off some of the policy and language choices progressives made in the late 2010s, early 2020s, which led lots of people to ask, What exactly was woke one? Well, it was a lot of things.

Lefty policy positions, language that was used to replace certain words and phrases that had been deemed offensive. There's some public shaming and cancellations. But one fertile breeding ground for woke one was elite colleges and universities. Of course, the right has been saying this for a while, but mostly I thought it was a silly caricature,

like most of the rights, silly caricatures. But then I read Tyler's piece in the Atlantic called the Confessions of a Token Black Professor. Now, Tyler is a black self-proclaimed socialist who a few years back got a tenure track position at Bates College, a selective liberal arts college in Lewiston, Maine. It was his dream job. But after a few years, he quit. And the reason he gives is the faculty and administration's relentless pursuit of what he calls

performative progressive extremism. Faculty members accusing white students of attempting to lynch their black classmates because of a roommate dispute that led to the police being called, the college forcing math and science professors to teach racial justice courses, and hiring practices that made him question for the first time the value of affirmative action. Tyler joined me to talk about the piece and to break down the legacy of wokeism. We ended up having a great conversation about both, as well as why he believes the story of elite higher education's pursuit of woke is the same story as that of.

of rising tuition costs, falling admission rates, and increasing exploitation of faculty and staff. It was a fascinating conversation. We'll get to it a moment, but before we do, please consider becoming a paying subscriber to Friends of the Pod. As a subscriber, you'll get access to ad-free episodes of offline, Pod Save America, and all your favorite Cricket podcasts. Plus, you'll get access to our behind-the-paywall shows like Polar Coaster

and Pod Save America-only friends, all of our great substack newsletters and exclusive perks to Cricket Live events like this falls CricketCon. Plus, it's a great way to support your favorite pro-democracy independent media. So head on over to cricket.com slash friends to subscribe. Here's Tyler Austin Harper. Tyler, welcome to offline. Thanks for having me.

So I wanted to have you on to talk about your viral, much-debated essay about your experience as a tenure track professor at Bates College in Maine, an experience that was not good. I mean, there were parts of it. That were good. students were often good, but yeah, I mean, on balance, it wasn't so hot. Yeah. So I think one of the reasons the piece went viral is because you are a black socialist

who criticized the academic institution that once employed you for being overly and performatively woke. I got to say the first thing, it's the first thing I've read that made me think that the right-wing depiction of academia may not be a complete caricature. And that also my experience is a 2003 Holy Cross grad was just completely different from the experience of a 2023 Bates grad or in your case, professor. But I'm curious, like, what were your expectations when you showed up that first summer at Bates in Maine? Yeah, you know, I went to a small liberal arts college, Haverford College, and had a wonderful experience and got a really high quality education that changed my life in a number of really significant way. And so I just come out of NYU and knew for grad school and knew that I would love to be at a small college that is teaching-centric. As an academic, you often don't have a choice as to where you work because the job market's so bad.

But I lucked out and got a kind of dream job teaching at a small liberal arts college, not unlike the one I did my own undergraduate degree at. So I came in expecting a place devoted to really serious learning where the faculty were robust intellectuals. doing serious work, teaching serious courses, and having serious preoccupations. And it quickly became apparent that there was a extreme version of cultural mania that we had seen elsewhere, I think, in the American culture during those early years of the 2020s, but that was particularly acute at Bates for a bunch of reasons that were specific to the institution. Then I also think the higher ed sector writ large. Yeah, I'd love you to talk about some of the, some of the anecdotes you mentioned in the piece. Like, when was the first time you started noticing,

what you call the racial monomania among the faculty and administration. The first year I noticed small things, but it was also during a COVID year. A lot of teaching was remote, and I kind of had my head down. You know, the first year on the tenure track is just madness, and I wasn't spending a lot of time thinking about what my coworkers were doing or saying. But the first real eye-opening experience was after my first year on the tenure track, I received an email from a professor. I was C-Ced on this email along with some other folks,

basically accusing one of my students of white students of having done a lynching. And it emerged that there had been a dispute at some off-campus housing in which white students have threatened to call the police on a black student. And this was cast as, and this was not a metaphor. The professor made clear in this email that this was nothing less her language than an attempted lynching. And an attempt to, I believe the exact phrase was weaponized state power to terrorize or kill this student. right. And I don't know who was in the wrong. I don't know what exactly transpired in that apartment building, but I knew two things. One, that the student in question is one of my students and

was a very progressive kid. And then the second thing was that threatening to call the police, whatever the circumstances, is not an attempted lynching and that there is no epidemic of black undergraduates of fancy liberal arts colleges being murdered by the state. And so it was a moment when it became clear to me that, especially because there wasn't really any pushback to her saying this, that it became clear that there were some people who had really lost touch with the reality on that canvas. That one was so wild to me because, like, let's say you believed that race was a factor in that incident, right? Like, that's a completely fair thing to argue, plausible thing to argue, and you could have done that. It's, it was particularly wild to me that a professor

would use such hyperbolic language in a, like, professional setting like that. Because it obviously wasn't an attempted lynching, even if they called the police because it was for racist reasons, right? Like, that still has nothing to do with an attempted lynching. I just, were other, did you talk to other people, like at the time at Bates where we're like, what is this? or where other people thought were going along with it? Thankfully, I will say one person who was included on that email was like, who was a very progressive person, but it was like, I think we need to basically take a step back here and just let, if there's going to be an investigation, let it be investigated.

And I think that was the way of saying, like, this feels a little over the skis. It was really shocking. And I think nobody who has seen a hanging tree can think it's appropriate to use lynching as a metaphor in this way, right? I just sounded grotesque and insane, obviously. But that was just one of, there was the gateway drug into what I came to see is the madness of the small college in Lewiston.

Well, you write about the search for a new science professor as a pivotal moment for you. There were three finalists. The strongest, you say by a mile, is a woman of color. But there are real reservations about her fit. The other two are weak, but one of them whose research, you say, wasn't much more complicated than walking around and counting animals, becomes the committee's consensus pick, also a woman of color. How does that happen?

Yeah, I think the reasons we neglected to hire the first candidate or the reservations we had, is how I will put it, were ones I understood. She's extraordinarily impressive, super sharp, had a. really impressive pedigree and academic background. And she did seem like somebody who would be more at home at Princeton or Stanford or Michigan or an elite research university. And we were a small teaching center college. So the reservations made sense, even as I thought, it was obvious that she was the strongest candidate. The other candidate, though,'s work was described by one person who knows her field intimately, another expert, as being literally 50 years out of date. And yet there was still an effort to try to hire her. And this illustrated something really interesting to me, which is that

we had just seen a hyper-talented minority candidate, right? So it's obvious that these candidates do exist. It was that the academic talent wasn't the main thing, right? The main thing was that does this person do DEI work and are they brown? And this other candidate did DEI work and was also brown. And so it didn't matter that we had one candidate of color who's fabulously talented and another one whose work was half a century out of date because what was their role was to be visibly brown on campus. It was not to be a scholar first. It was to be a scholar second and to be a minority who does DEI work. That's that's what it felt like, at least to me. So let's talk about the RPPC at Bates. And for people for people who haven't read the piece, that's the race, power,

privilege, and colonialism requirement. What was the requirement? Why was it proposed? And maybe you can talk about what happened when you spoke out against it. Yeah, so it was a requirement to have every major on campus offer at least one course that would be required on race, power, privilege, or colonialism. And to be painfully clear, we were talking physics courses on white supremacy and chemistry courses on colonialism, literally every major on campus, right? You can imagine a version of this that might say, everyone who takes a course, or excuse me, attends this college, needs to take at least one course in their time there that deals with issues of American racism, right? That seems perfectly defensible. But to say, in each major, including the sciences, this has to happen, seemed obviously deranged.

And after a long and plotting process in which faculty were browbeaten by various constituencies on campus, eventually this measure gets passed. I objected throughout, for a number of reasons. I thought this was a clear violation of academic freedom, right, because this was a top-down effort to dictate course content to departments, when the physics department should be the ones deciding what good physics courses looks like, not some administrator or cabal of senior faculty members. I also thought it was a violation of the academic duty to have expertise in what you're teaching, right? We were asking scientists who had never taught on racially sensitive topics to suddenly become experts in this overnight, right? The example I always used was if I, the argument being made was that, well, racism is everywhere.

it's in every field of study, ergo, every field of study should acquaint students with racism in that field. And my argument was always computers are everywhere. We live in a digital society. Should every department on campus teach a computer science course? If I propose that, you would say, no, computer science is hard. And my argument against this was actually a kind of woke argument, which is that, like, race is complicated.

There are people who have real expertise in, like, issues around racism. And it's, like, kind of racist to just assume. that like a chemist can read a Wikipedia and then do a couple books and then teach courses on on racism and chemistry, you know. But anyway, the requirement, the requirement did end up passing over my objections, but, you know, it's the way the cookie crumbles. I mean, even what, like, I could, you could hear some like super lefty, liberal progressive professors propose stuff like this.

But like, even when you scratch the surface, like, what the hell is like white supremacy in physics or like what did people talk about like what they would teach in those courses? It's a good question. Yes. In every case, what they ended up describing was history of science, right? So they would say, well, there's a long history of eugenics and biology. And many of the most important biologists in the early 20th century were eugenicists. And it's important that students know that history. And a lot of my academic work actually overlap with the history of science. So I, in fact, knew quite a lot of this history. And my point was always, then have the the students take history of science courses. But what you are describing is biologists,

moonlighting as historians. And if you think the history of science and race should be taught to all students majoring the sciences, that's a defensible argument, right? But then have it taught by a historian, higher historians, right? And, but there was just this sense that, no, everyone must do the work and pitch in and the chemist must learn to teach the history of racism and chemistry or whatever. And I think you had proposed this at some point or someone had, which is like you weren't against having a requirement that all students take certain number of courses on race, power, privilege, and colonialism, but that within each major, like every major wouldn't have its own course on that, like connected to that subject matter. And then to basically

require every student in the whole college to take that. course. It all, I mean, it seems impractical. It also seems a bit like it's constraining academic freedom in a way. Yes. Yeah, for sure. I mean, one argument I got from a professor who supported the requirement, she said, you're making these academic freedom arguments and you sound a lot like libertarian professors on campus. And my response was to be like, well, one, a libertarian is a thing you're allowed to be. I am not one and don't particularly care for it. But that is like, that is not Naziism. Like, you're allowed to be a libertarian, you know? But like, it was this idea that like, do you know people with bad politics also support this?

And it's like, well, that's what academic freedom is, actually. You're describing academic freedom. Sometimes unpleasant people disagree with you and they're just allowed to. Yeah, well, this is like what I kept thinking. I always tell people, look, so I was a polysci major at Holy Cross and I was a, then I loved sociology so much that I became like a polysci psychology double major. And you can imagine that the sociology department was like, you know, left. to the point of being like Marxist, right? Sure.

And I love my social teachers. They were like fantastic. But a lot of the Polyside department was like fairly conservative. And one of my favorite things about school was about college was like taking a class in PolySci that was like with a where you could tell the professor was like a little more conservative slanted. And then taking my sociology course and then thinking and then comparing the two and thinking. And like it helped me argue better. It helps me debate better. it helped me think more. I ended up still being very progressive. Like, it's not like I was brainwashed.

And I just don't understand the fear of exposing students, particularly students who are learning to think about the world, to different points of view so they can know, even if they don't disagree with them, how to argue against them or why they're against them. I think there are two things going on there. One is that increasingly, I think academic progressive culture of the last. decade or so has been committed to this idea that words can be violence and that any questions about anything that could be construed as like saying asking questions about immigration, right? Well, that could be construed as saying immigrants don't have a right and that is a kind of violence, right? And so I think part of the problem is there is this metaphorization of violence that has gone on where offensive speech is literally understood as causing harm. I think you see that too in the like lynching example where it's like clear that this

simultaneously be invoked as like literally dangerous, but also like a metaphor for historical violence. So I think that metaphorization is a big part of what's going on here. But I also think it's that there's a real belief, as the phrase goes, that reality has a liberal bias. And I think the smarter version, or at least the more sophisticated version, I'm not sure if it's smarter, of arguments against, if you want to call it, viewpoint diversity is like, oh, what? So we're supposed to, you know, teach people, teach courses on fly. flat eartherism, because there are flat earthers or like that biology, you know, that evolution isn't real. And it's, it relies on this slipperiness between questions that are empirical in

nature and questions that are centered around value judgments, right? The earth is round, is empirically true, right? The sun rises in the east and sets in the west that is empirically true. Carbon is making the atmosphere warmer is empirically true. What you think about gender, that it's like a value-based argument. It's not something that is empirically true or not, right? And I think that is part of the issue is that a lot of progressive academics believe that their arguments, which are in fact value-based arguments, are just are true in the way that the sun rises in the east is true, you know?

Where do you think this came from? And where do you think this like, like, how did we get to this point? Because it feels like this is a relatively recent phenomenon, and maybe just, I'm talking again, about my own, my own experience in college. But, like, is it, I mean, I would imagine the internet and social media has fueled a lot of this, but I can't imagine that's everything. So where do you think it comes from and like, why did it start? Yeah, I mean, I think there's one way you could say the progressive bias in academia has a really long history. Conservatives have been making versions of this complaint, some reasonable and some unreasonable for almost 75 years now.

So, but I think more acutely, particularly post-2016, there has been a, well, two things. I would say post-2016, there has been a real understandable hysteria around conservative ideas because of Trump, part of which I understand, right? But I think a lot of faculty members after Trump, they saw his election as an assault on expertise in this populist backlash and, et cetera, and they saw it as their duty to defend liberal. institutions with an emphasis on liberal in this moment of consolidating authoritarianism. That's understandable, right? But that is not necessarily the ends to which a university is supposed to be put, right? I also think one of the reasons this kind of progressivism attained a bigger stranglehold was because of a long shadow of 2008, right? After 2008, you have this moment of financial crisis belt tightening. A lot of students have paid quite a lot of money for college,

and then they're entering a job market where they can't get jobs. that will enable them to pay back their often quite considerable loans. We often kind of forget this, but Occupy Wall Street and the Bernie Sanders campaign both placed a laser focus on the question of student debt. A lot of the students, a lot of the people at the park in Occupy Wall Street were student debtors who were agitating for debt relief, basically. And I think the 2010s were this moment where universities were under fire and were being painted by the left and elements of the right as essentially debt lords who were charging

tuition amounts that bordered on extortionate. and that their value proposition and ability to offer social mobility to graduates was really in free fall. And I think because of that, they needed to figure out a response, right? Their reputation was taking a hit. Well, they can't really lower the tuition. They can't fix the student debt crisis. And they can't really fix the job market. But what can they do?

Well, they can portray themselves as bastions of progress and justice and so on and so forth. And I think that's one of the reasons in the 2010s. At the same moment, universities were under assault for their financial model. they began leaning into this cultural rhetoric of, we are the home of abolitionists and freedom and justice and so on. How conscious do you think that was? I mean, like, you know, you make the argument in the piece that, you know, this is, it's no coincidence that wokeness blossomed during this time

where students were dealing with tuition costs and debt. And then you say that, that wokeness is cheap. How intentional do you think it was? I don't think there's a conspiracy theory. I don't think there was a smoke-filled room of college administrators. that we're saying, well, we really like charging $90,000 a year for tuition, but people don't like that. So we should be super woke. I do think this happens kind of organically as people, in kind of good faith, are looking for a solution, right? There are college administrators who are

saying our margins aren't that great, actually. We're over leveraged on real estate. And the students are constantly demanding nicer dorms, so they're going to go over to the other college that has state-of-the-art dorms with air conditioning. And so what can we do? Well, we can't fix all these structural problems, but we really can emphasize our function of bending the arc of the universe towards justice and anti-racism and so on and so forth. So I think it was a kind of process of elimination, right? They had to do something. And I think leaning into this cultural rhetoric was the easiest thing for them to do. So I don't, again, I don't think it was scheming. I don't think it was a conspiracy. I think something that's really important to understand in that is at least

important to me is that I think foundational to my worldview is that most people want to think of themselves as good people, right? They don't, they're not scheming. They're not twirling their mustache. The way I often saw this unfold, just to give you an example at Bates, was you would have faculty members who were not especially, they weren't social justice warriors, right? But then say there be an initiative where, hey, if you want to propose a course on social justice related topics, we'll give you a course release so you can prepare for it. And you can teach one less course that year and we'll also give you some development money as well. And suddenly those professors had previously been a little skeptical. We're like, well, you know, I actually could think about my curriculum in

different ways, right? And it was because you provided this incentive and then they're going to figure out retroactively a justification structure that allows them to keep their sense of themselves as intellectually coherent and having some degree of rigor while also doing the thing that they're incentivized to do. And I think it's the same thing with administrators, right? It's like, oh, well, actually You know, our real function is to indoctrinate people with these liberal cultural values and a moment of increasing racism, right? And so, yeah, I think they just did the easiest available thing. And the easiest and cheapest available thing was social justice nonsense. Well, and also, that's not at the time, that's not just happening in academia.

It's happening in corporate America. It's obviously happening in politics. And I always thought about it as real social and political change is very difficult. it takes a lot of work, it takes a lot of focus. You can't bring it about by just like posting and tweeting and a lot of symbolism. But like if you want to feel like you are doing something, then the more performative wokeness is a way of feeling like that you are somehow contributing to changing the world, even if you aren't.

And then it becomes if you don't do it, then you feel shamed. So even if you do think that what you're doing is not necessarily changing the world and is not the work that needs to be done, you kind of feel pressure to do it anyway. And so then everyone gets caught up in it. And of course, this is where I think sort of the internet and social media really sort of, you know, make this dynamic even worse. But I don't know what you think about that. Yeah, I am a big fan of Christopher Lash who wrote a number of great books, but two of my favorites are the culture of narcissism, and then the even better book in my view that he followed that up with, which was called the minimal self. And one of the things he argued is that during the course of the Cold War, as everyone is beset by this apocalyptic fear, as American politics feels dysfunctional, that nothing is getting done. Corruption is everywhere, right? The outer world and its problems don't seem especially fixable. And so there is this inward turn, which he called narcissism, toward Trump. trying to improve the self, thinking about feelings, focusing on rhetoric and language, right?

And he kind of portrays it as a survival response, right? Or this response of people who no longer believe in outer change. And so everything becomes about interchange. And I think we can see a lot of what happened in academia as this part of this sort of like therapeutic narcissism that people like Lash and Philip Reef talked about many decades ago because you can't fix the outer problems, right? So we can turn inward. We can talk about how we feel.

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Yeah. So I think it's important to note that these two things started unfolding at the exact same time. It was the fall of 2021. The dean of the faculty announces a process that was called the foundational dialogues, which was basically in preparation for the RPPC. It was asking every major department program on campus to essentially do a racism self-audit where you examine your curriculum and see places where there might be hidden racism that you want to expunge. And at the exact same time, this sweeping and racism self-audit was announced. The people involved in the union effort essentially announced that they're doing a unionization drive in response to poor working conditions, etc.

Right. And so this unionization push was unfolding in parallel with this racism self-audit and a lot of these like very caricature-ish progressive DEI measures, right? And watching the college hire people who were crushing that Amazon was using to crush labor at the same time that they're spouting all this clap trap about justice. It really gave up the game for me, I think, where I was like, oh, this is not merely silly. And this is not merely hypocritical, actually.

think that's an important point. Yes, it's hypocritical, but it's beyond hypocritical that this progressive rhetoric actually serves a function, and that function is to distract from the labor crisis within the college, right? And this simmering labor dispute. That's what its function was, right? It wasn't simply that, oh, they say one thing and do another thing, but it's that saying the one thing helps distract in important ways from the other thing. But in terms of tenure faculty, look, people felt a variety of ways about the unionization effort, some pro, some against. But I do think, look, the reality is that tenured faculty are some of the most secure workers in this country. They have jobs from which it's almost impossible to get fired that also gives them an

unprecedented amount of autonomy. And yet perversely, they are some of the most cowardly and terrified people you will ever encounter. They are extraordinarily risk-averse. And some faculty members absolutely went to bat for folks involved in the union, and that's definitely worth saying. But I think the prevailing mood was hunkering into a crouch, right? And sort of just trying not to notice the labor exploitation that was going on on one hand and, you know, the justice projects were all involved on and on the other. Why do you think it's so much easier and also there's more pressure to be on the right side of the racial justice, social justice fights that were going on at Bates than labor disputes than, you know, economic justice.

I think when push comes to shove, and this goes beyond academia, I think there are segments of the American left, and I might even say the largest parts, that yes, they are progressive on economic issues, and yes, they are progressive on cultural issues. But if they have to pick one, it's going to be the cultural stuff, right? And I think that is the core problem. I think at the end of the day, the identity issues, the issues around race, the gender stuff, immigration, these are all the issues that I think a lot of progressives care more about than economic justice, which isn't to say they don't care about economic justice. But like I said, if they have to pick one, they can make peace with, well, things are getting black or brown or more LGBTQAI. but labor conditions aren't so good. Well, that's just the way it is. And so I think, but that's not just specific to academia. I think we're seeing this in races across the country where you have candidates who have good sort of left populist economic values, but are unwilling to compromise on some of these fraught social questions that they don't want to moderate on, even as that might help them make

inroads with a working class, right? So in that way, I see academic left culture as a microcosm of a broader our left culture that has increasingly put culture before economy. Do you think that's because, you know, political polarization sort of it falls along the lines of identity now more and the, at least on the left, the coalition has become more professional, more middle to upper income. And so while a wealthier progressive might care about economic issues and be to the left on a lot of economic issues, it is not necessarily the most important thing to them because they don't have that experience. They don't live that life. I think there's something to that for sure.

But even among members of the professional class that are more downwardly mobile, I think you do see a lot of unwillingness to compromise on any cultural questions, even if it might help get some movement on economic issues. But I definitely think the demographic composition of the American left, which is more college-educated, more upwardly mobile, wealthier, in general, even as there are these downwardly mobile sectors, is certainly part of it. I mean, I'm a big fan of the French socialist Jean-Cla Michia, who a lot of his work hasn't been translated, but makes a really great point about what he calls the unity of liberalism. And he says, the right is dominated by neoliberalism and economics, where there's market fundamentalism, where there's an effort to sort of remove any barriers on what

corporations can do on the economy, et cetera. But he says that is paired with a progressive libertarianism that is the mere image of this economic libertarianism that also wants to remove any barriers on things like immigration, on questions around social life, et cetera, right? And this functions as a kind of pinceregrip where you have right-wing libertarianism on the economy and left-wing libertarianism on culture. And what happens is you just keep ratcheting up the both forms of libertarianism because the left cares about the progress, you know, the cultural stuff, the right cares about the economic stuff. And we just end up in this death grip. And I think universities are the places where you see this most acutely, right, where you have all of this crazy progressive extremism that I think is rightly

understood as libertarian on cultural issues coupled with one of the most exploitative right-wing economic models in all of the American economy, right? Like nowhere else in the American economy Do you pay adjuncts or do you pay people pennies demand they move across the country every year in the hopes of one day eventually getting a better job? It's profoundly exploitative. And these two things, the right-wing economics and the left-wing cultural politics don't simply coexist. I think they're mutually reinforcing. The economic model for academic institutions is insane to me. I mean, like, you had a couple of jaw-dropping stats in the piece.

One in three non-tenure track college professors earns under $25,000. a year. One in four is on public assistance. Like, that is just nuts to me. And so you have, you have that going on. And then on the other side, you have the tuition that is just, just rising and rising every single year. And to the extent that someone, students get help with tuition, it has to be from the government. And it just seems like there's this inability for colleges to ever hold cost down. And I don't understand why that is. Yeah, I think something that's important is that universities have stopped being a, having one mission, right? Universities and colleges today, they're not all colleges, are increasingly hospital systems, sports franchises, real estate

ventures, and hedge funds. And then they are also a library and an educational apparatus. And each of those parts of the business have their own incentive structures and their own needs and their own priorities, right? And the unfortunate fact of the matter is that education is not always the most lucrative part of that comprehensive university or college system that is at once a giant landholder in a town. It is also, you know, in the business of bilking people for various fees and running a sports empire, right? And so it's just, it's not that easy to fix any of these problems. I think you would have to disentangle these parts of colleges that have nothing to do with the educational mission from the educational mission. But the reality is colleges don't

to do mass layoffs, which they would need to to get cost down because these places are filled with administrators who basically do nothing useful all day or at least nothing that has anything to do with educating students, right? They would have to start selling off buildings that are superfluous that don't directly relate to the educational mission, right? But they don't want to do any of that. And so there's no other feasible way to get costs down. So instead, they get more and more and more expensive and colleges turn more every year into a finishing school for the rich, again, which is what it used to be. So the final straw. for you was a search committee you were part of that decided to pass over a diverse non-tenure

track professor for a tenure track job, even though everyone agreed she was qualified, because there was another diverse candidate who did more to the way you said it is expand the college's curricular offerings. What was it about that decision after everything else that you had been through that made you finally decide to leave Bates? Yeah, you know, one thing I realized increasingly over my time, and maybe that should have been obvious and I was simply naive. But when you become a professor when you go to grad school with a dream of one day becoming a professor. You assume that the job is inspiring young people and teaching courses that are exciting and introducing students to texts that you care about and then doing research that's interesting. And that is part

of the job, but it's definitely not the biggest part of the job. A lot of it is meetings, hiring, running the college bureaucracy, which would be fine if the college bureaucracy weren't often so ugly. My final year at Bates, the year that I decided would be my final year, I was on a hiring committee where we had in front of us a very well-qualified, talented minority woman who was not on the tenure track, who had been at Bates for a few semesters. And we had another candidate from outside of Bates, also very qualified, who, yes, you could make a case that could teach some things that we weren't able to teach. And yes, that's absolutely a benefit, right? But here was a person we had who was, we all agree was a fantastic candidate, well qualified, had taught at the college,

was a known quantity, and was a part of the community. And instead of giving this person a lifeline who was in this basically exploitative relationship with regards to the college, we decided to go another direction. And after years of all of this social justice clap trap, to be in this on this committee in which we basically trade up one minority for a slightly shiny or newer model of minority with who did marginally more for us. I just found it grotesque beyond measure. And the reality was my family was not going to starve. I was doing a lot of freelance writing at this point. And I was just like, I don't, being a tenure professor, I realized, is increasingly presiding over a collapsing system that runs on

very, very brutal labor exploitation. And you are a manager within that system, right? If you're on the tenure track, you're not eligible for unionization because you're a manager. And managing that decline and making these decisions about whose dreams to crush on an annual basis in a hunger games-like scenario was not especially appealing. And my family was not going to be put on food stamps if I stopped doing it. And I was like, you know what, I don't want to do this anymore. I'm going to do something else. It's just a job at the end of the day. For a lot of academic, they can't see that it's just a job, but it is it is just a job. You can switch careers, so that's why I decided to do. Yeah. You write that it was obvious to you from day one that you were

what conservatives call a DEI hire more than qualified for the job, but probably not the most qualified applicant. By the end, you say that you still believe in affirmative action in principle, but you stopped believing it in practice. What's the difference? Is there a difference? Yeah, I think the rationale in a vacuum, that animates affirmative action is sound, right? That rationale is that we have, you cannot simply undo centuries of discrimination and oppression with the wave of the want, right?

And that things that happen in the 19th century and in the 20th century under Jim Crow have lingering tail effects that still impact black communities and other minorities and that put obstacles in front of them that make it harder for them to get into these kinds of institutions or to be in a place where they're ready to apply to these sorts of institutions on a perfectly level playing field. And because of that history of injustice, it is right and reasonable to say, well, if we have a B-plus minority candidate, say,

for an academic job, who went to a state school for their PhD and maybe has one less publication than somebody else, but also was working a second job at the time they're writing their dissertation. And then we have someone else who was shot out of Harvard like a canon and is a slightly better candidate with one more publication. You might say, you know what, actually we're going to take this minority candidate, right, because they've, they've overcome some things and we see some promise there. That's how the system is supposed to work. But I think what has happened over the last 10 or 20 years is a slide into a more extremist version of affirmative action that is very different than how the public understands affirmative action, right? Again, the spirit,

the public thinks for affirmative action is giving a slight boost to these disadvantaged groups. It is not saying, okay, here's one standard for white candidates and Asian candidates. And then here's a totally different standard for other kinds of candidates. Now, the reason I stopped believing in affirmative action in practice is that I came to realize over my time at Bates that affirmative action requires good judgment. There are no, it requires human judgment. There are no hard and fast rules you can apply to, right? You have to try to have reasonable standards about like, okay, we're going to accept slightly different standards for these two groups, but what does slight mean, right? And how do we navigate that? And I lost the faith.

that academics could make sensible judgments distinguishing cases where, okay, we're going to give a little boost here in an effort to diversify in an effort to lift up these historically marginalized groups versus, okay, we have created this system in which the gap between minority candidates and non-minority candidates, what we expect from them is just radically distinct. And because this is a matter of human judgment, I'm not sure we can get back to a place with academic institutions as they currently are where that better kind of judgment prevails, right? And I think it raises serious questions, which on the one hand, yeah, I think there are historical redresses that in the perfect world should happen and that affirmative action is a good mechanism to do that.

But then when you look at the reality of what this has looked like, at least at hyper-selective institutions, it definitely gives pause. Yeah, the subjectivity makes it really difficult. Exactly, yes. Offline is brought to you by the new podcast, Burden of Proof, Luigi Mangione. Listeners of this show are no strangers to the discourse around Luigi Mangione, but our friends at ABC Audio in 2020 have launched a new show that takes a more critical examination of the details. You already know the story, or you think you do. In December 2024, shots rang out on a Manhattan sidewalk,

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Or listen ad-free on Apple Podcasts by subscribing to 2020 True Crime Plus. Again, that's Burden of Proof, Luigi Mangione. You know, unsurprisingly, your piece sparked quite a bit of discourse on the old internet. Some people were very mad online. The criticism I'd love for you to respond to is from Andrew Baker, who was the other blackmail professor at Bates who left pre-tenure. And you wrote about that. And also he served on the committee that proposed the race, power, privilege, and colonialism requirement as well. And basically his argument, which I'll partially quote from his piece in the drift, is that this wasn't a DEI fever dream.

cooked up by senior leadership. It was a response to protest by students of color who felt unsafe and undervalued at a time when the college was using their faces to fundraise. And that the proposal to require these social justice courses across every major came from students and academics of color who didn't want to place all the burden on under-resourced Africana and ethnic studies departments. He also says your argument that racial grievances overshadowed the college's anti-labor repression during the union effort is nonsense. and that the same people advocating for racial justice were also advocating for labor justice. So that's a lot, but I'll just, I'll let you respond to that. Yeah, I mean, the first thing I would say,

I knew Andrew Baker slightly, and he was a smart and sensible person. And so I, you know, I have no ill will there. I will say that I think his read, I think this, his article is a total dodge as to the questions I actually raised in the piece. You could read his entire very long response and not know, for example,

does he think it's a good thing or a bad thing for chemists to be teaching courses on white supremacy. The curricular working group, he took part in, literally advocates, this is not a Fox News fever dream, literally advocates an oversight body that would basically surveil faculty and curriculum, et cetera, to make sure that it was appropriately social justiceified, right? And that curricular working group literally advocated outside community activists to be part of this oversight group. So literally outside political actors, basically, to be involved on this oversight group for faculty and campus ongoings, is that a good thing or a bad thing, right? You would

not know from reading Andrew Baker's response whether he thinks it was appropriate or inappropriate for the group he served on to advocate an external oversight committee composed and part of community activists, right? And so, look, again, he's parts of the article, I thought were thoughtful, But I think it was a long way of not rendering a judgment. And I think it speaks to a broader, there's been some very smart and interesting criticisms I've seen of the piece. But I do think there has been a tendency in a lot of the criticism where you have people who have enough intellectual integrity that they're not willing to actually defend the things I criticize. They're not willing to say, no, it's good that astronomers are forced to teach courses on white supremacy. But at the same time, they don't think I should have said anything because they're like, well,

universities are under assault. Why are you wearing our dirty laundry, et cetera? And so instead of simply saying, hey, look, I think this stuff was, and they also don't want to get yelled at, right? So they also aren't willing to say, no, the white supremacy astronomy courses are insane. Obviously, that was deranged. So instead, they end up in this position where they won't say it was good, they won't say it was bad. And instead, they take recourse to these meta arguments about, well, is now the appropriate time to be having this conversation? And actually, the spirit of this requirement was animated by all of these progressive of things that are harder to disagree with. So, yeah, I don't know. I thought parts of his response were thoughtful, but the way I feel overall to much of this criticism is like, okay, but do you think what

happened at this college was bad? Just answer that. Like, were these things good or were they bad, right? And for the most part, you would have no way of knowing one way or the other how these people actually feel about it. It did make me wonder, and I wonder this just reading your piece, like, where the students were and all this. Like, what was the dynamic there? We're. were students driving this? Did it come from senior leadership? Were students sort of agnostic about the whole thing? Like, what was the, where were like the bulk of the student body in all this? Great question. I think there is one of the reasons the students don't show up much in this piece is I'm really allergic to what I see as a kind of conservative strain in higher ed criticism that

wants to think the dysfunction in higher education is cause, is a bottom up problem. It's the students who are wackos and their social justice warriors and they're screeching. And then it's the faculty in the Gender Studies Department with their septum piercings and blue hair. And those people are the people causing the problems. Right. And the story I'm trying to tell is the exact opposite, actually, that it is tenured senior leadership. It is the dean's office. It is the boards of trustees, et cetera, who actually are the cause of a lot of this dysfunction on campus. And that trickles down from the top. It is the people with power. The gender studies professor has no power on campus, right? The students have very little power, right? The school has them over a barrel. It's the leadership

that has power. So one of the reasons why I under-emphasize the student pieces for that reason. I overwhelmingly found Bates students to be smart, thoughtful, earnest, and kind. Were some of them extremely progressive, sure. But I will also tell you, I taught, for example, Heart of Darkness, many semesters, which is one of these books that is quote-unquote canceled because it has the N-word, and I've never had a single complaint about it. Students read it. They understood. why we were reading it. They understood that some of the language was old-fashioned. They understood why that was. And so I, yes, did I encounter some students that were a little over their skis on social justice rhetoric? Sure. But I would say the median-based student was smart, earnest, thoughtful,

yes, progressive, but basically had their head fully on their shoulders. And I think a lot of this was really, again, top down. One of the things I discuss is I received an email during the RPC debates from a student saying, I really hope you're going to support this requirement. And I found that really confusing. And I said, well, I actually don't support it for these reasons. And she wrote back to say, oh, wow. So we had actually been asked by this faculty advisory committee to reach out to our professors to encourage them essentially to support this requirement. We didn't even know this was coming, right? The first we heard about it is when we heard from this faculty committee, which gave the lie to this whole narrative that, oh, this was

the students. The students want this. The students demand it. The students had no idea this was happening, right? And the students were being wheeled out as props to provide a justification for a fever dream that had been cooked up by faculty in the dean's office. How widespread do you think this dynamic is in higher education? Like, is this a, obviously you've experienced it at Bates, but like, is this happening all across the country? Is it happening? Is it to get other elite institutions, liberal arts colleges. Like, what have you learned about that? Yeah, I'll talk about briefly some conditions that I think made Bates uniquely deranged

and then also how widespread I think this is. I think it's important to understand that Bates is one of three small colleges in Maine, the other being Bowdoin and Colby, other elite colleges. But we were the only one founded by abolitionists. And I think, and we're also slightly lower ranked. And I think at a certain point, there was a recognition that that was, that was a way we could distinguish ourselves in a competitive market for elite universities. Like, we are the College of Abolitionists.

We are the College of Social Justice that has this radical anti-racist history, which is, by the way, very commendable history. And so I think Bates was uniquely extreme in part because it was hard to distinguish what was earnest progressivism from partly a branding exercise as the only college that had this abolitionist history in that region. But I do think this kind of mania is relatively widespread across elite institutions. I have heard and been simply inundated in my inbox from hearing things from other faculty members. Some similar to why I heard of debates, a few stories that were substantially crazier, actually. But that made me think, you know, okay, like this. And I've heard these stories for years. As I've spoken out about higher education, I frequently have become a kind of confidant for people who don't want to

anything publicly, but just have to simply tell somebody something crazy that happened at their institution. I do think it's important to recognize, though, that elite institutions, part of my thesis, right, is that wokeness is a survival strategy for institutions that are under assault for their labor model, for their explosive increases in tuition, for the role they play in reproducing the elite and sending everyone to Wall Street, right? And so I think the higher you get up the food chain, right? Elite universities feel the pressures more. They're the one charging the most, et cetera. And I think correspondingly, they leaned into social justice and quote-unquote wokeness the most.

As you get further down the ladder to state schools, particularly state schools and red states, the mania is certainly different. It's much more attenuated. There are certainly schools in this country that are far more leaning toward conservative or that professors can't even use the word gender in a class because they have to worry about a state legislature coming after them. So we absolutely shouldn't generalize. But what I would like to say, though, is that it is significant that many of the most powerful educational enterprises in this country were overtaken by this mania in this way, right? They have a great deal of influence. Even if you just confine yourself to the top schools, say the top 50 schools, that is still

hundreds of thousands of people moving through those systems that have, you know, direct contact with these kinds of places that have gotten really out of step. And so I think it matters for America. I think it matters for American culture. And it's important to remember not all schools are this way, but it's also not insignificant that some of the best schools in the country are. There's a whole discourse now about Woke 1. AOC, you know, laughed off things she said in 2020 and quoted Chiosay and said, Woke 1 is crazy. Woke 1 was crazy. You know, Democrats have quietly sort of retired a lot of the vocabulary in November. Your former colleagues at Bates voted unanimously to suspend the requirement that we've been talking about that they had fought so hard to pass

until 2029, which just so happens to be after the next presidential election. Do you think it's possible that this was an era and that we're moving past the woke era? Or how do you see that? I think at a macro level, I think we are moving past the woke era. I think there are a lot people who have come to realize that a lot of what happened in that moment, while maybe in some instances motivated by good faith was both ineffective and performative and ultimately really empty and got nothing done, right? We ended up with Trump again. I do think, though, in media and politics, et cetera, it is easy to say, okay, look, we got swept up in this moment. Now we're moving on. Here's the new things we believe. Here's why we changed our mind. You can tell that kind of story

and it can be persuasive. The problem with higher education is that it's like turning a battleship. We have spent 10 years hiring people who are very, very committed to a particular understanding of what the role of a college is, who are extremely progressive, who do believe that universities and colleges should be these liberalizing spaces that do have this function in society of doing justice work and anti-racist work, et cetera. And those people are hired into permanent positions, right? And it's not so easy to change things. It's not so easy. to change curriculum. There are schools all over the country that change their curriculum after 2020. And that stuff takes a long time to about face, even if you had the will. And at a lot of institutions,

there are a lot of faculty in this country, and there are a lot of administrators who don't think they've done anything wrong, who think the reason the public doesn't trust higher education is all right-wing propaganda, that Fox News has shined a spotlight on them, and that's why they've lost trust. And that ignores the fact that Democrats have lost trust in higher education by 20 points as well, right? This is not just Fox News propaganda. There were real issues happening in higher education. And I really don't feel like a lot of people have learned their lesson. They don't think they did anything wrong.

And when you combine the thinking that we didn't do anything wrong with the preexisting difficulty of changing anything quickly in higher education, I'm not super optimistic that things will shift anytime soon. Well, and like, you know, we could spend another hour talking about AI and how that's going to change higher education. But it's like it's sometimes, do you sometimes think that AI is actually like the more existential problem than some of the woke social justice stuff? Oh, wokeness pales in comparison. So first of all, I say the big problem in higher education is the political economy and lack of social mobility in the tuition. Politics are also a big problem because it. It is lost half of this country's trust in higher education and then some blue folks as well.

But in terms of an existential threat to the university, I think AI is the greatest threat. And colleges and universities are overwhelmingly doing nothing. At institutions like the one I taught at and institutions around the country, including the IVs, etc, they are giving their students free premium access to AI models, right? They are students are being given this message that like, oh, AI is the future. You have to learn to integrate it. And it is students are cheating at horrifying levels. And they're coming into college half illiterate besides, right? And I really think administrators around the country and senior leadership in many universities and colleges have drastically underpriced that we are driving off a cliff.

If you are a parent right now, what is, and you are looking at $400,000, $200,000, $100,000 total for a four-year degree for your kids. kids and that kid you know is going to go to college and cheat their way through half their courses because all their friends are doing it, right? Why are you paying for that? If you were an employer, you cannot look at a 2026 college graduate and say, yeah, I have a faith that this degree means the same thing it did in 2021 before college, before everyone was cheating their way through college, right? This is unsustainable. The value proposition of college is collapsing, and administrators have no will to do anything about it, partly because, they're punched drunk on technology and have been for decades where they're constantly trying

to incorporate new ed tech, as it's called, into the classroom, but also because they're cowards and they're very risk-averse, right? And they're not going to be the first mover. There would be a huge advantage for any regional small college, say, that says, you know what, we are the anti-AI college. If you were a young person and you want to actually read books, there's no Wi-Fi on campus. If you learn about AI, it'll be in a computer lab. Come on down. There are people that will pay for that, right? But no one wants to be the first mover. No one wants to stick their neck out.

And instead, everyone is sleepwalking to a disaster. And if I may make a prediction, if things don't change, I think the wheels could come off a lot faster than people bargain for. Because again, why should anyone pay for this? And I think it's going to get to a point where parents are going to say, no, I won't pay for you to go enjoy a lazy river and sheet through school for four years to the tune of $300,000. That's a pass for me. you can go become an electrician. Well, and like, what jobs and industries is higher education preparing these kids for? I mean, like, right now that's not as much of an issue, although it is.

But like in three, four, five years, when the labor market is upended and we haven't fixed all the other issues in higher education, then it becomes even less of a value proposition. 100%. Last question. Maybe we can end on a hopeful note. like if a if you had a kid who was going to college or looking at colleges for next year like what questions would you have the mask what would you tell them to look for so that they have maybe the best possible experience yeah i would look for institutions where um i would see how go to the college webpage and do a search for artificial intelligence and see how they talk

about it right if you go to harvard you will see web pages that say integrate AI into your curriculum. Here's how you can use AI as an assistant in your teaching, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, right? Is the university, the big public university you're interested in, are they telling all faculty members that they have to integrate, find ways to integrate AI into their curriculum as some big state schools around the country are doing, right? So I would look at that really seriously. How does the institution talk about technology? What kind of courses is it offering, right? And also, is there a realistic prospect that you're going to be able to pay back this debt?

If I was advising anyone going to college right now, I would tell them to go to Great Books Program. There are great books programs housed within big, big universities, and there are also places like St. John's, obviously, right? But something that is going to be a commodity in this labor market is being illiterate, knowing how to read and knowing how to write, right? And so I don't think you can undervalue that, and that would be my encouragement. Now, the downside is that that is not a model for mass education in this country, right? Saying everyone should go to great books, programs. It's good for individual students, and that's what I would encourage any young person to do. But that's not a scalable model for mass education, which we enjoyed for most of the 20th century.

And I'm worried is in its death throes at the moment. Yeah. Well, Tyler, thank you so much for chatting. And, man, hell of an essay. Everyone should go to the Atlantic and check it out because it'll make you think. And this conversation made me think. So thanks for having it. Thanks, man. Take care. Offline with John Favro is a Crooked Media production. Our show is produced by Austin Fisher, Emma Ilich-Frank, and Anisha Bannergy. Our team includes Dilan Vilaueva, Mia Kelman, Charlotte Landis, Eric Schute,

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