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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.
2 subscribers
Nov 6 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
I wrote about Joe Biden, who deserves much of the blame for Harris’ defeat. Biden likes to say he ran in 2020 to save democracy from Trump. By refusing to relinquish power until it was too late, he handed the country back to him on a silver platter. That will be his legacy. 🧵 During his 2019 run, Biden heavily implied to his advisers and to the public that he would be a one term president. At the time, those closest to him realized that campaigning at age 81 would be out of the question. But in a Shakespearean fit of hubris, Biden changed his mind. 2/
Nov 1 • 12 tweets • 3 min read
I wrote about the question on everyone’s mind: are black men really going to vote for Donald Trump? 

White Democrats imagine minorities as half-saints, half-superheroes who they team up with to fight fascism. But the pesky truth is many minority men have Trump-ish beliefs.🧵 For almost ten years, liberal politicians and pundits have spotlighted and relentlessly attacked Donald Trump’s open bigotry. And remarkably, these efforts didn’t just fail. They coincided with black and brown Americans moving in ever greater numbers toward the bigot’s party. 2/
Oct 9 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
The AAUP statement insisting that mandatory DEI statements are compatible with academic freedom—and not political litmus tests—is ridiculous. DEI is not a neutral framework dropped from the sky, it’s an ideology about which reasonable people—including people of color—disagree. 1/ Image I have benefited from and support affirmative action, and there are some things that fall under the rubric of DEI that I agree with. But pretending that DEI is not a political perspective or framework—when only people of one political persuasion support DEI—is a flagrant lie. 2/
Aug 19 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
I wrote about the choice before Kamala Harris: to fully embrace the populist turn, continuing down the path beaten by Joe Biden, or to listen to the punditry and succumb to Obama nostalgia, re-upping the kind of technocratic centrism that voters have spent a decade rejecting. 🧵 That Harris needs to moderate has congealed into common sense among the commentariat, who seem hell-bent on ignoring the last decade of American politics: the Sander insurgency, the Trump ascendancy, and Biden's presidency. The voters are done with neoliberal governance. 2/
Aug 14 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
The debates about whether the media is anti-Trump or wants him reelected mirror the debates about whether academia is liberal or conservative. Same basic dynamic: largely liberal workers nestled in institutions that often have financial incentives inimical to liberal aims. 1/ In academia's case, the right insists that academia is a "far left" hotbed, and they point to the ideas taught in certain departments + the relative absence of conservative profs. Meanwhile, those "far left" universities are debt machines that ruthlessly exploit their labor. 2/
Aug 11 • 18 tweets • 4 min read
It’s worth exploring why this line that dems are “anti-family” seems believable for so many people even as Republicans are doing shit like—literally—bringing back child labor. Vance has an interesting slip of the tongue here that sheds some light on what’s going on. Long 🧵 When Bash hits Vance for calling Harris a “childless cat lady” even though she has step-children, he says “I criticized Kamala Harris for being part of A SET OF IDEAS…that is anti-family.” He’s using Harris as a vehicle for an *idea*: standing in for a type of dem we all know 2/
Aug 9 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Dems got into a jam with Biden because journalists failed to exercise basic curiosity about the oldest President in history even as he visibly declined. Pushing Harris to outline a policy agenda isn’t “helping Trump.” That’s the same mindset that led to the mess with Biden. If journalists had done their jobs ages ago when Biden started showing obvious signs of being on the decline, and had done even a modicum of investigative reporting, we could have had a strong primary process. Journalists not doing journalism on dems they like is bad for dems!
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/