Three samples.
From “Why I Quit the Tenure Track: The Insufferable Hypocrisy of Elite Academia” (The Atlantic , gift link):
I’d never had great enthusiasm for identity politics; I’d been a socialist since my early 20s, and it had generally been my experience that liberals were as eager to talk about race as they were uneager to talk about class. Yet I also assumed that conservative complaints about “wokeness,” a term just coming into vogue as a pejorative, were essentially Fox News hysteria. Until I got to Bates [College, in Lewiston, Maine], I had little reason to suspect that they held any merit.From “The Confessions of Tyler Austin Harper,” an interview (The Chronicle of Higher Education :
It really was being at Bates and slowly realizing that what we might call an intersectional version of progressivism was just a grand charade to mask real political and economic problems at both Bates specifically and higher education writ large. I did the work. I read a lot of alternative pedagogy. I quit using grades in my classes. I agreed with some of these critiques, and I still agree with some of them. But it became apparent that it was quite convenient to latch on to these things rather than confront the simmering class warfare on campus.From “The Truths That Failed Jason Arday” (The Atlantic , gift link):
To be a Black person in elite institutions, and particularly in elite academia, is to have the standards simultaneously set too low and too high: too low because only a Black person with Arday’s dubious qualifications and seemingly invented biography could have been elevated to the top of the mountain in academia and publishing; and too high because only a Black person could have been pushed off that mountain with such nakedly racist enthusiasm, his tumbling fall so ruthlessly documented, analyzed, and cheered. When a famous white man errs, people tend to rightly understand his mistakes or transgressions as an individual’s missteps. When a famous Black man does, the errors are typically turned into spectacle, characterized as proof of the inferiority, suspected all along, of his race.I look forward to reading much more from Tyler Austin Harper.
thank you for pointing to tyler austin harper. i found his viewpoint to be quite refreshing. had not heard the rather sad news about jason arday. this sentence in that article really stood out to me: "Arday was fetishized in his ascendancy by white liberals, for whom he served as a mirror in which they could see their own goodness." it is sad to say that i know someone who is doing that right now and i worry what happens if a fall comes..
ReplyDeletekirsten
Thanks-/interesting article.
ReplyDeleteAnd— this is weird—last Friday I was making the same point this article concludes with:
Miller Lite is a good beverage.
Someone had asked me if I liked good beer.
I said yes, but in the summer Miller Lite is more refreshing than a complex beer.
Funnily, I felt like I was speaking heresy.
(Whoops-/that was Fresca, currently drinking an IPA by Bent Paddle brewery in Duluth)
ReplyDeleteKirsten, I know the kind of situation you’re describing. That’s all I’ll say.
ReplyDeleteFresca, I’ve never had Miller Lite, but I can vouch for Hamm’s — cheap and remarkably refreshing.