Why I quit the tenure track? Some quotes

Why I quit the tenure track?   Some quotes

Tyler Austin Harper    September, 2026, The Atlantic

liberals were as eager to talk about race as they were uneager to talk about class.

it is no coincidence that wokeness blossomed at prestigious American colleges at the very moment when those schools were facing rising discontent over student debt and tuition costs. For the academic aristocracy, touting fealty to Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, trans rights, and other progressive movements served as a convenient distraction from the intractable economic and social issues that the colleges themselves were perpetuating. This allowed higher education to reclaim the moral high ground after Occupy Wall Street and the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign—to say nothing of the anti-elite fury that gave rise to Donald Trump—had kicked mud all over academia’s ivy-twined walls. Even better, embracing social-justice rhetoric and adopting schemes to boost faculty diversity were cheap. Cheaper, anyway, than lowering tuition or hiring more tenure-track professors.

Wokeness allowed elite higher ed to create a new model of inclusive exclusion: one in which tuition can continue to climb, acceptance rates can continue to plummet, endowments can continue to expand, and adjunct labor can continue to be exploited as long as the demographics of those paying the tuition and those being exploited continued to get browner, Blacker, more LGBTQAIP2+. It also helped nurture the delusion that elite college graduates were being prepared for lives of civic virtue, and that their highly priced education would be deployed in service of the public good.

the college’s next major project would be to napalm the strangling weeds of bigotry that were apparently rooted deep in its soil. “Racism, sexism, ableism, classism are deeply embedded in society, in our fields of study, and in the spaces we occupy,” he observed. “To eradicate these inhibitors, these retardants to progress and educational potential, these poisons,” we were told, would require setting aside “self-censorship” and “dogmatic positions.” Some of this “work” would focus on the individual: “Many of us, especially white faculty and staff, require explicit training.”