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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 Time to Say Goodbye @ttsgpod. Red-Blooded Lacanian Male.
Joshua Cypess Profile picture Djentleman Scholar 🤘🦊🤘🐸🍵 Profile picture 2 subscribed
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/
Jan 3 • 15 tweets • 4 min read
I wrote about the Claudine Gay fiasco.

Harvard’s president is not the real story. The real story is that academics and journalists have spent the last few weeks debasing our professions by insisting that plagiarism isn’t plagiarism. That it doesn’t matter. That we all do it. 🧵 My reaction to the first wave of allegations was that they were weak. Easily explained as a copy-paste mishap or shoddy paraphrasing. As I said on @jaycaspiankang’s podcast the day after the allegations dropped: Gay was clearly the target of a conservative smear campaign. 2/
Dec 24, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
“30 Rock” provides a fascinating window into changes in progressivism over the last decade. When the series ended in 2013, Ta-Nehesi Coates observed, “One thing that I don't think 30 Rock gets enough credit for is how it handles race.” He said no show had “handled race better” 1/ The great black film critic Wesley Morris wrote a long, hagiographical review of the show upon its conclusion and praised Tracy’s character in particular as a daring satire of black experience and exploitation in Hollywood. Today, of course, Tracy’s character is “problematic” 2/
Dec 21, 2023 • 14 tweets • 3 min read
I'm flattered by how many people read and reached out about this piece, from colleagues at other institutions to former English majors. But I thought I'd also respond to a few criticisms, one of which I do take seriously (I'll get to that last). Here we go: 1. "I teach at a lesser known public school and this doesn't match my experiences!": The article is about the humanities at elite universities. I *explicitly* make the case that most state schools aren't like this and face unfair backlash due to the antics of their rich peers.
Dec 19, 2023 • 15 tweets • 3 min read
I wrote about everyone’s favorite topic: the crisis in the humanities.

Here’s the truth: the humanities aren’t being wrecked by woke professors. They’re being wrecked by woke university bureaucrats and a debt-driven financial model that pushes students into “useful” majors. 🧵 Conservatives correctly note that the humanities are increasingly woke and that the humanities are in decline. The problem with the right-wing narrative is that it gets the causality all wrong: wokeness is not the cause of the collapse of the humanities. It’s a symptom of it 2/
Dec 18, 2023 • 15 tweets • 3 min read
This (good) point gets to a broader problem within admissions chatter: everyone pretends that merit is neutral and self-evident, but the idea of "merit" is weighed down with ideology and incoherence. Thankfully Socrates sorted out the "merit" question for us in The Republic.

🧵 Adeimantus: It is plain that colleges must prioritize merit and only merit when selecting undergraduates for admission! A university is a center for excellence; it is not a charity for weak-minded beggars!

Socrates: But what is this thing you call "merit," my dear Adeimantus? 2/
Nov 27, 2023 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
Since some folks assume I’m a rightist scold I’ll reiterate: I’m opposed to the push toward activism-oriented trends in the humanities, and university antiracist BS more broadly, because as a scholar of color these developments have consistently made my life worse, not better 1/ I’ll say it again: as a black guy who doesn’t work on race (I do British lit + history of science) I’ve fought tooth & nail for the right to study what I want at every stage of my career. Doubly so on the job market where committees/deans want black scholars doing black stuff 2/