The Bates Motel of Higher Education

For decades, serious scholars of all races have been saying that the  obsession with diversity, equity, and inclusion that grips so many of our colleges has adverse consequences. Although it seems benign and helpful to insist on hiring and promoting people from certain backgrounds—the so-called marginalized groups—doing so has unintended and harmful consequences. To cite just one example, that is Thomas Sowell’s argument in his 1991 book Preferential Policies. 

Adverse consequences usually cause people to stop and reconsider their actions when they directly suffer those consequences. In non-profit organizations, however, the leaders rarely feel any harm from having made poor decisions. There is no “bottom line” as in a business enterprise, and this lack of pressure allows non-profit leaders to manage the organization largely for their own satisfaction. 

Nowhere is that more evident than in the decision making of college officials. They can happily indulge in ideological zealotry even though doing so degrades the quality of the school’s education. A recent article published in The Atlantic, “Why I Quite the Tenure Track,” by Tyler Austin Harper, shows how college leaders can become so wrapped up in a political agenda that they can’t see the damage they’re doing. 

Harper landed his “dream job” at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine in 2020. He had earned his Ph.D. from New York University and was delighted when Bates offered him a tenure-track position in its Environmental Studies program. “I had won the lottery in an apocalypse. I was going off to the kind of secure, prestigious, fairly remunerated academic job rapidly going extinct,” he said. Harper, who is black, approached his job with “missionary fervor” because his family had always believed that higher education was the way to a better life. 

Amazingly, his experience at Bates was so unhappy that, after several years, he decided to quit. Harper’s article explains why—the leadership at Bates was so immersed in DEI grandstanding that it failed to actually educate their students. 

Harper’s disaffection began early and escalated slowly from there. Upon moving to Lewiston, he was immediately befriended by an administrator, Ava, who was “passionate about DEI issues.” That didn’t bother Harper, but he was surprised to learn that she thought central Maine was a hub of white supremacy and used racially disparaging terms for its inhabitants. He found it hard to believe that the area was populated by bigots. When he asked for evidence about this, all he heard was that a student of color had once had a bad experience working in a local restaurant. In sum, the ill-will she had for the white residents was just simmering animosity. 

Ava was not alone in that. As Harper writes, “The source of the intense racial monomania on campus, I came to realize, was senior leadership.”  For the next several years, that would build up to the breaking point for him.

The college sponsored earnest discussions about books that excite “progressives,” such as White Fragility and How to be an Antiracist, but Harper found them to be embarrassingly weak. The college’s president crowed about the fact that 67 percent of new faculty hires that year were “BIPOC-identified” as though that figure was of paramount concern for the school. And Harper was also irked that, because of his race, he was saddled with “black guy work” for which he had no qualifications apart from the happenstance of his ancestry. 

Even more distressing for Harper was hearing that a white student of his had been accused of “trying to lynch a Black student.” He read the email in disbelief. The student in question was a dedicated “crunchy-granola environmentalist type” who was outspoken about his progressive political commitments. How could he have done anything like an attempted lynching? The facts, Harper learned, were that a few white students had gotten into a dispute with a black housemate and told him to leave—or else they would call the police. In the minds of the racially obsessed Bates leadership, calling the police meant that the students were conspiring “to weaponize state power to terrorize or kill” the black student. 

According to the Bates administrator, it was not an exaggeration to call this kerfuffle “an attempted lynching.” Furthermore, if the accused white students enrolled in courses taught by faculty members of color, they should demand “protection” from the school.  

Harper thought the assumption that any encounter between a black student and the Lewiston police was apt to end in homicide was absurd. He found the episode emblematic of the racial politics that engulfed the campus, where students and administrators enjoyed “the privilege of cosplaying as radicals, victims, or both.”

Next in the string of events at Bates that disillusioned Harper was an announcement by the dean that the college was going to undertake a program called “Foundational Dialogues” designed to eliminate all vestiges of bigotry from the curriculum. The dean declared, “Racism, sexism, ableism, classism are deeply embedded in society, in our fields of study, and in the spaces we occupy.”  To accomplish this crucial task, every academic department would be compelled to do a “self-audit” to identify forms of bias that might lurk in their courses. Moreover, many on the Bates staff would require “explicit training” to overcome their residual feelings of white supremacy.

Why do all of that? Because it would supposedly make the school’s students of color “feel safer.”

Before we consider Harper’s thoughts about this, let’s reflect on what it tells us about the college’s leadership. Bates is a famously “liberal” (in the contemporary political meaning) institution and has been for decades. It is as dedicated to DEI as any college in America, but that is not enough. To those in charge at Bates, virtue is never sufficiently signaled. Launching a costly crusade against the bete noire of white supremacy is a source of bragging rights among their academic peers. Making some students feel safer is the pretext, but the real benefit is the emotional satisfaction this crusade gives campus leadership. 

When Harper heard about Foundational Dialogues, he was aghast, writing, “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.” His scholarly mind rebelled at this effort at gilding the college’s ideological lily. It was a pointless sacrifice of academic integrity.

When Harper expressed his opposition, his woke colleagues were dismayed at his apostasy. One rebuked him, saying that his arguments were ones she’d expect to hear from libertarians, to which he replied that his arguments were just as valid no matter who might agree with them. Unlike many on the left, Harper insists on thinking for himself rather than being pressured into going along with the tribe.

Another illuminating story Harper tells is about the faculty search committee he served on in 2022. Bates was looking to hire an assistant professor in science. The committee narrowed down the field of applicants to three women who were invited to campus. 

One was an excellent scholar, who Harper thought clearly the best, but she was rejected as perhaps being too research-oriented for Bates. But the other two candidates had not been at all impressive. One’s performance had been “lackluster to the point of disqualifying,” while the other had been simply embarrassing. Her research in biology was shockingly unsophisticated. As Harper comments, “her work didn’t seem more complicated than walking around and counting animals.” Her demonstration class was at a high school level. 

Let’s pause for a moment to reflect on the fact that some university had awarded this woman a Ph.D. for such simplistic “research.” So great is the pressure to make academic science more “diverse” that a woman who had no business being on a college faculty had her doctorate. The supposition among progressives is that they’re advancing “social justice” by boosting women into a male-dominated field. The problem is that it does nothing for women as a whole to elevate one woman who is poorly qualified into the ranks of professors-wannabe. 

Harper was shocked that his fellow committee members were ready to give this weak candidate the nod. He writes, “The episode left me distressed by what it seemed to suggest about the way many of my colleagues viewed scholars of color. Did they really believe…that the only way to get ‘marginalized’ faculty on campus was to lower academic standards to the subbasement?” Evidently, yes. 

It occurred to Harper that the Bates leadership saw “professors of color as vehicles for achieving the college’s diversity goals.” And that got him wondering about his own position. Had he been just a “diversity hire”?   

Bates College, which projects a glowing image of Progressivism alienated an energetic black scholar who saw through its glittering rhetoric to the truth: “Bates, self-styled beacon of progress, was an institution that was deeply, incorrigibly racist.” He decided to leave even though tenure was all but certain.

Zealotry for the DEI agenda has turned Bates College into a school where the education of students is secondary to ideological virtue signaling by its  leaders. The same thing has occurred at many other colleges and universities. Bravo to Tyler Austin Harper for pulling back the curtain so Americans who believe that college is supposed to be about student learning can see what is really going on.

George Leef is director of external relations for the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.