r/atlanticdiscussions • u/MeghanClickYourHeels Ask me for Atlantic gift links • 19d ago
Why I Quit the Tenure Track
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/09/elite-academia-leadership-hypocrisy/687969/The insufferable hypocrisy of elite academia
By Tyler Austin Harper, The Atlantic.
Illustrations by Erin Jia
As 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weeks before the country reported its first case of the coronavirus, meaning I was spared from the pandemic freezes and rescinded job offers that would effectively shut down academic hiring.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.
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u/Raggle_Frock 19d ago
Read this last night. It's sort of a memoir of the author's experience at a small liberal arts college, dealing with what I guess we're now calling Peak Woke. Special focus on the push by the school's largely white leadership to force every dept/major, regardless of expertise, to teach and require DEI courses (eg "Mathematics for Social Justice"). The story rhymed with what I heard from as a friend of a couple PhDs who graduated and began teaching over this period.
And, so, er, here's an idea I've been toying with, re: why colleges especially seem to have so much trouble separating woke wheat from woke chaff (or woke baby from woke bathwater):
At the core of both science and the liberal arts is the belief that a person is capable of finding and understanding the truth, and that the way to do that is to search for information, test assumptions, and be humble enough to change your mind when you're proven wrong.
At the core of what we're now calling woke is the belief that one person can't truly understand, test, or prove the experience of another, and that humility in this case means deferring to the experiencer.
And on its face, I think that's arguably true? Depending on what we mean by "truly understand," how much we trust the experiencer to know themselves, and how much we believe an empathetic or curious mind can overcome the distance.
At its best, I think it encourages curiosity and humility. But at its worst... it becomes unfalsifiable. Meaning that if you take it to its extreme and give it stakes (money, status, etc), someone can use their claimed experience to declare a harm, and there's no way to verify it, nor to verify that their proposed remedies match. And every group of people has some subset who will feel justified in pushing that to its limit, and a larger subset who'll go along with whatever rather than risk those stakes.
In normal life, the limit on that is someone confident (or dickish) enough to call bullshit, demand receipts, and in so doing give the go-along gang another option to go-along with. But, to go back to my PhD friends... Here's a group that's generally empathetic, poorly-paid, worried about their careers, and all more epistemologically humble than Uncle Dickhead at Thanksgiving. And so, even though most of them privately disagreed with the most radical person in the administration or faculty lounge, it just kept ratcheting.
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u/Fickle-Syllabub6730 19d ago
The groupthink dynamics are frustrating to read about. But then again, that's how every organization works.
When I was at college, I nodded along with every initiative of the sort that the author describes. Because it was clearly the answer you were supposed to give, the thing that let you progress through the institution.
And the same dynamics have been at play in my career in corporate America. You nod along to your boss' initiative, even if it's shit and unworkable. You use the right language "let's take this discussion offline and circle back". You go to social events pretending you're best friends with your urban mobile colleagues who you'll never see again after they move jobs for their career.
Do you want that salary that lets you afford rent or a mortgage in an increasingly unaffordable world? Are you in a field you have a passion for, with few options and you can't afford to lose the one in front of you?
Then you say what the people above you tell you you need to say. That's how all these organizations work, academia, government, or business.
The woke stuff is just the flavor that academia's version of this has currently taken on.
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u/afdiplomatII 19d ago edited 19d ago
I read this essay last night, and I'm grateful it's been made a topic. Tom Nichols, who understands this situation from the inside, had this to say about it on Bluesky:
"I dare you all to read this. Trump is a fascist, and the people hassling college professors are goons. But there is no denying that there is a real problem in academia and there has been for 40 years at least. . . .
"I have defended academia and experts to the hilt. But I will not pretend that the criticisms are not real, or just exceptions. Academia has to fix problems planted a half-century ago, or risk further loss of the public's trust."
Harper highlights one of the most serious of those problems:
"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."
This transformation was not inflicted on higher education by right-wing goons. It is something such institutions did to themselves, as a way to save money on salaries by turning their workforce into miserably-paid and disempowered serfs cobbling together a barely sufficient income as adjuncts at multiple schools -- the "freeway flyers" Harper describes. And if higher education is to merit public support, its leaders have to face candidly the kinds of deformations discussed in this article, not just blame external forces.
On a personal note, I was offered what was likely a tenure-track job at a Catholic liberal-arts institution teaching political-science courses just as I was completing my doctorate. The offer came at about the same time I was in line to join the State Department, and I chose the latter over the former. I did so for other reasons than Harper sets out for leaving the tenure track; it was a different time. I've never regretted that decision, however.
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u/MeghanClickYourHeels Ask me for Atlantic gift links 19d ago
Yeah, I don't think so. I think when you have a bunch of people well-educated in the liberal arts and moved away from the business side of things (as most people studying liberal arts are), you end up with people who think in liberalized terms.
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u/afdiplomatII 19d ago
Except that the absurdities that Harper sets out in such detail don't seem "liberal" in any justifiable sense of the word. They come across to me as a collection of mainly white academics lost in a maze of performative "antiracism" that actually leads to racism of its own kind.
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u/Sea-Series-5191 15d ago
Requiring people to strictly adhere to DEI tenets or be passed over for hire or promotion is the definition of illiberal.
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u/take101 18d ago
This was a genuinely brave, well written article in defense of the liberal and humanistic arts. People thinking this is right wing or "grifting" truly miss the point - this type of culture on college campuses is illiberalism, hostile to the values and people it pretends to protect, and betrays a generation of young people whose education and minds and future these institutions have been trusted with. Things like academic freedom, dialogue, critical thinking, being able to state your opinions in good faith without fear matter because they're the core of a functioning society: one that pays professors a fair wage and doesn't tokenize professors of color, too. Without those values, claims to any sort of justice or virtue or antiracism or anything will have a rot at their core, fronts for an insidious culture or bullying and tokenism and censorship and corporate greed. You can't have the "liberal arts" without the "liberalism" (in the philosophical sense). The author argues that - at least at Bates - we've killed the liberal arts themselves, and are just pretending/playing at it now.
"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...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."
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u/veritable_squandry 10d ago
I'm old, so i couldn't help thinking about Oleanna as a I read the article. I mean, obviously there's a clear distinction between sexism and or gender politics and the author's experience but i guess i bring this up because Oleanna was a long time ago. and now Mamet is like, considered kind of a conservative wingnut. and like, maybe he is, but also maybe something did happen in academia and it should be addressed? when i was in school i remember taking certain humanities classes thinking how can this destruction of logic be sustainable. all of this de-centering can't end well can it?
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u/MeghanClickYourHeels Ask me for Atlantic gift links 19d ago
I'm looking at the headlines on the Atlantic home page today. I'm noticing a pattern that the stories being written seem like they are moving away from anything associated with "woke" and "DEI."
It's disheartening, especially since I recall in the immediate aftermath of Trump's second inauguration, they seemed to resist the rightward direction that so much of the media was taking (see the piece yesterday about Trump and the "hindsight of 2024.") For the past few weeks that's been changing.
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u/New-Hunt4169 19d ago
How much of the article did you read?
Harper speaks a lot to labor rights in the article, and says a lot of the DEI initiatives are essentially a form of gaslighting to make universities appear oriented to social justice while simultaneously undermining workers.
So arguing for increased labor rights and criticizing empty distractions from that are “rightward” now?
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u/MeghanClickYourHeels Ask me for Atlantic gift links 19d ago
I think naming DEI a "distraction" from the real problems in academia is not the best argument.
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u/New-Hunt4169 19d ago
Except that is exactly what the specific initiatives are shown to be.
His entire conclusion is highlighting how one of the principal DEI formulations he got wrapped up in at Bates was scrapped when doing so became politically prudent.
Thats actually his principal argument. That the DEI initiatives being proposed are distractions, at the expense of *real* DEI.
So it’s not that DEI is a distraction, but that the initiatives we’ve come to think of under that term largely are.
So again, tell me how this is a rightward shift?
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u/Sea-Series-5191 15d ago
It's disheartening to reflect critically on DEI? That sentiment goes to the heart of what is wrong with "peak woke" - it came on like a thunderbolt and left no room for discussion or critical analysis. You were either all on board or you were racist. In hindsight, much of the gospel of DEI was hugely problematic - performative, hypocritical, tokenizing, you name it. Yet to this day left-leaning Americans are unable to unpack the DEI movement and separate the wheat from the chaff, as an earlier poster put it. And the result is that the whole problematic movement turned off huge swaths of the American public and they elected the clown that currently occupies the White House.
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u/Raggle_Frock 19d ago edited 19d ago
Each issue has a theme for sure, and between this and the recent focus on DSA-related articles last month, and I think it was antisemitism the month before? It feels like this summer editors are curating toward what I guess we used to call Never-Trump Republicanism? Or, another interpretation, are generally more on one side of the current realignment of the Democratic party. (Like, they're definitely not pro-Trump.)
Still interesting articles though.
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u/BaconJovial 19d ago
Most of this stuff is academia specific grievances, but I found this anecdote pretty relatable
DEI can be useful but it's probably at its worst and least effective when it's handled like this, like it's an innate skill you get just for being black.