Bates College is a prestigious liberal arts college in Maine. Years ago, its leadership decided to go woke with a panoply of programs and policies to show its alignment with progressivism.
Austin Tyler Harper is a young black scholar equally aligned with progressivism, and when he was hired for a tenure track position at Bates, he was elated. Over the span of several years there, he became so disillusioned with the way the DEI mania was shoving aside concerns about educational quality, he chose to leave. He then penned an illuminating article for The Atlantic about his unhappy experience at Bates. In today’s Martin Center article, I write about it.
Among other things, Bates had diversity workshops and trainings where books such as How to be an Antiracist and White Fragility were read. Harper found them to be intellectually feeble, but learned that disagreement and debate weren’t on the menu.
The administration decreed that the college, already saturated in leftist courses, had to embark on a crusade to eliminate every possible vestige of colonialism, whiteness, etc. Harper dared to object that the added courses would not help students and the requirement of wokeness in everything interfered with academic freedom. He was told to stop thinking like a libertarian.
Harper’s observations about how faculty hiring is driven by the diversity obsession rather than concerns about competence are spot on.
My take on this is that it demonstrates how non-profit leaders often use their positions for personal (but non-monetary) gains, indulging in their own preferences, especially virtue-signaling, at the expense of quality.