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Tyler Austin Harper Profile picture
Tyler Austin Harper
@Tyler_A_Harper
Contributing Writer @TheAtlantic. Teaching @BatesCollege. Professional Doom-Monger. Co-host of @ttsgpod podcast. Mayor Vaughn was right. Striped Bass in Bio.
Joshua Cypess Profile picture Djentleman Scholar 🤘🦊🤘🐸🍵 Profile picture 2 subscribed
Jul 23 • 16 tweets • 3 min read
I wrote about the woke style in American politics.

For months, talking heads have debated whether or not we are past so-called "peak woke." Many commentators seem to believe the hysteria of 2020 is settling into the rearview. But wokeness didn't peak, it became bipartisan. 🧵 If you see "wokeness" as a set of specific progressive beliefs about anti-racism, gender, masking, etc., it makes no sense to say the right became woke. But if you think of wokeness as a hermeneutics – a style of interpreting the political world – a different picture emerges. 2/
Jul 22 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
My layman's two cents re Kamala's pitch to America:

It's desperately important that her campaign understands that undecided voters don't believe the fascism talk. Those voters have a decade of evidence about Trump's inclinations. If they don't believe it by now, they won't. 1/ Kamala needs to campaign not on "threat to democracy" chatter – which undecided voters tune out – but actually provide a future-oriented vision for the country that offers voters a clear picture of what America will be like if she wins, that goes beyond "still a democracy." 2/
Jul 12 • 21 tweets • 4 min read
Here's a list of things Biden defenders expect us to believe. 🧵

1. The Biden we see on TV – rambling, exhausted, confused – has no relationship to the Biden that is running the country. He's too old to campaign vigorously but not too old to be president, which is less taxing. 2. Projecting competence and vitality on both the American and world stage is not part of the job of the president. It does not matter if he seems horribly frail and reminds you of a declining parent or grandparent. All that matters is that his administration gets results. 2/
May 29 • 17 tweets • 4 min read
The conversation we are currently having about affirmative action in faculty hiring is maddening. The critics of affirmative action are often racist, the defenders of affirmative action are often delusional, and both sides of this argument are full of gaslighting.

A 🧵. One side wants you to believe that affirmative action means that white male academics can't get jobs and that minorities who get jobs are less qualified or unqualified. That's a lie. White men are still getting tenure-track jobs. The minorities getting jobs aren't unqualified. 2/
May 23 • 15 tweets • 5 min read
Yesterday, the Newspaper of Record ran a piece about the victims of US nuclear testing. It focuses on the Americans — “downwinders" — who were irradiated by Cold War Era programs. But that piece neglects to mention the group most impacted by US nuclear testing.

Some history. 🧵 First, let me say: American victims of nuclear testing deserve better. I'm glad to see more attention given to downwinders and I don't think we need to play oppression olympics. However, the fact of the matter is that the main victims of US nuclear testing were not Americans. 2/
May 21 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
I wrote about the Bumble founder's dream of AI dating concierges.

We're entering a world of disabling algorithms: AI services that promise to empower us, but that actually make us anxious and inept, incapable of carrying out basic human activities sans algorithmic mediation. 1/ Earlier this month, Whitney Wolfe Herd told an interviewer that she hoped that AI-enhanced Bumble would "actually teach you how to date," describing a future where your AI surrogate goes on dates with other AI surrogates so as to narrow down your dating pool to a few people. 2/
May 11 • 12 tweets • 2 min read
MIT recently banned diversity statements. People opposed to this move argue that diversity statements are not ideological litmus tests. But this argument plainly obscures the difference between "diversity," "equity" and "inclusion" as VALUES, and DEI as a packet of ideologies. 1/ I think diversity, equity, and inclusion are important. My syllabi and approach to the classroom reflects that. (Many of you would find them very "woke"). Anyone who is not committed to cultivating a classroom where everyone can learn is not qualified to be a professor. 2/
May 2 • 18 tweets • 5 min read
I wrote about the crackdown on campus protests.

Universities like Columbia, Cornell and Emory trade on Vietnam Era protests to market themselves to student activists. Protest is part of their brand and sales pitch. Now they're punishing students for taking them at their word. 🧵 I'm disgusted by universities' draconian response to peaceful protests and their efforts to sanction legitimate political speech. Reasonable people can disagree about the protesters' message or strategy.

What is not debatable is that these universities are mired in hypocrisy. 2/
Apr 23 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
I’m horrified by the events at NYU and Columbia. The naked, fluorescent hypocrisy of institutions that have spent the last four years bleating about anti-racism and police reform sending in cops in riot gear to round up students the moment it’s convenient is appalling. 1/ Civil disobedience comes with consequences. My view isn’t that the police can never be called on students in any situation. This is about reckoning with the fact that elite higher ed stands for nothing, its values are for sale and determined by sticking a finger to the wind. 2/
Apr 20 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Yes, advocating calling the National Guard on students, as Davidai has done, is vile. And this is vile too: people like Davidai would have you forget that Jewish students are at the heart of these protests. But their safety doesn't count because they no longer count as Jewish. 1/ Those cheering on the NYPD and Columbia's crack down like to invoke the safety of Jewish students and combating anti-semitism. Strangely, almost no mention is ever made of the many Jewish student protesters and their safety. Such as the 20 Jewish students arrested at Brown. 2/
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Apr 19 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
This isn’t just a contradiction coming to a head, it’s an intractable problem that may well light elite academia on fire. You have a customer base that demands social justice and a donor base that is concerned with elite reproduction. The financial model requires both groups. 1/ The social justice model is deeply entrenched. Universities have loaded up on pseudo-radical faculty at places like Columbia—faculty notably silent about those student arrests, by the way—and you can’t get rid of them. There’s no magic wand to simply “de-woke” the university. 2/
Apr 15 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
The public humanities vs. traditional scholarship debate is downstream from the fact that our work is threatened by adjunctification and research defunding. But I ALSO think this debate is inextricable from physics envy: humanists pretending their fields are like the sciences. 🧵 A common objection to those who suggest SOME humanities work should be more public facing is a version of "But people don't expect scientists to produce work that can be conveyed to the public!" This is true! But I also think that's because the sciences are...well...different. 2/
Apr 13 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
The prestige economy of academia — which rewards you for publishing books or articles read by several dozen people, but not public books or articles read by thousands or tens of thousands — is part of the crisis of the humanities. It’s both an intellectual AND a labor issue. 1/ First, let me say that I don’t think audience size is the measure of a work’s scholarly importance. Many important topics are not of public interest. Peter J. Bowler has produced incredible work on niche debates in the history of biology. It’s foundational. It’s also…boring. 2/
Apr 10 • 15 tweets • 3 min read
I've been thinking about "viewpoint diversity" in media and academia for a while, most recently because of yesterday's NPR story. The problem isn't an absence of viewpoint diversity, but the presence of viewpoint stratification or viewpoint siloing within elite institutions. 🧵 We desperately need more ideological diversity, but how we talk about viewpoint diversity obfuscates more than it illuminates. Many supposedly left-wing institutions DO have both conservative and liberal factions, but they're quarantined to different spheres of the operation. 2/
Apr 6 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
The fantasy that rural places are hotbeds of right-wing violence doesn’t just tap into old fears of scary hillbillies. It appeals because it allows suburbanites to imagine that the threat is over yonder, ignoring the scarier truth: the right-wing extremists are their neighbors 1/ One scholar told me: “The number of votes Trump received in Los Angeles County was equivalent to the number of votes he received in the 633 most rural US counties combined.” Coastal liberals like to imagine the scary Trump voters are in middle America, not good places like LA. 2/
Apr 4 • 28 tweets • 6 min read
I wrote about the book White Rural Rage and the scapegoating of rural people.

I talked to over 20 experts in the field of rural studies and found a pattern of errors, distortions, and misleading uses of scholarship in Schaller and Waldman’s book. It’s egregious.

Buckle up. 🧵 If you’re not familiar with the book — which spent weeks on the NYT bestseller list — White Rural Rage claims that white rural Americans are a “threat to democracy,” and rural America is a hotbed of racism, xenophobia, potential violence, homophobia, and general dirt-baggery. 2/
Feb 19 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
The reason people scoff is that, at least in academia, "indigeneity" has become a magic word that is evacuated of both historical and cultural specificity, flattens all differences between indigenous groups, and is accompanied by exoticizing appeals to pre-rational "wisdom" 1/ Indigenous people are reduced to vehicles for timeless, pre-historical knowledge – wish fulfillment for white progressives dreaming of a prelapsarian age before capital and industry – a form of sentimental racism that excludes indigenous people from both history and modernity. 2/
Feb 8 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
This entire essay is worth reading, but this is a crucial point that normies really don’t understand about Silicon Valley culture and desperately need to: many tech bros think creating AI is about ushering into being humanity’s successor species, and that this is a good thing. 1/
Image Notice the quote from Sutton here: the focus is not on humanity, but *intelligence*. This idea — that human extinction doesn’t matter so long as some successor being continues to bear the light of intelligence — is a deeply misanthropic claim with a long history. 2/ Image
Feb 3 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Since people are asking "why do the dumb hicks love the coal companies that exploit them?!?" I'll recommend two brilliant, nuanced books about the economic, environmental, and political realities of rural places: @KerriArsenault's "Mill Town" and Alex Blanchette's "Porkopolis" 1/ Mill Town is part family memoir, part history of the milling industry in Maine. One of the key questions it explores is how and why people end up attached to the very companies that destroy their health and environment in exchange for (some) dignity and economic stability. 2/ Image
Jan 18 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
This objection points to a real problem: there's little evidence that grades motivate/assess learning effectively, BUT the alternatives ("ungrading," grading for growth, etc.) requires TONS of time/labor, a luxury that only profs with security and light teaching loads possess 1/ This is why adjunctification and academic precarity aren't just bad for faculty, they're bad for students too. There's plenty of evidence that traditional letter grading doesn't work well, but so few of us have the time (and freedom) to pursue more labor-intensive alternatives 2/
Jan 17 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Here’s what I’m trying to get at about the new polyamory discourse: I’m not interested in whether polyamory is “ethical.” I *do* think that the normalization of polyamory that is currently underway isn’t a threat to, but is the ultimate expression of, bourgeois individualism 1/ The point isn’t that polyamory is/isn’t immoral. Rather, polyamory is a *symptom.* It’s downstream from a culture that is allergic to limits and personal sacrifice and that embraces the idea that human beings are fungible commodities to whom no permanent attachment is owed 2/