The Professor Who Walked Away

When Tyler Austin Harper arrived at Bates College in the summer of 2020, he believed he was living out a family's multigenerational dream. A first-generation success story with a comparative-literature Ph.D. from NYU, he had landed a rare tenure-track job in American academia—an achievement described to him as "watching the last dinosaur being born." Six years later, Harper quit that job, and in the September issue of The Atlantic, he explained why in an essay that has become one of the year's most talked-about pieces of higher-education writing.

In "Why I Quit the Tenure Track," Harper argues that the contemporary academic system has become increasingly dysfunctional: a combination of ideological conformity, bureaucratic demands, diversity initiatives, and perverse professional incentives has left professors with less time and freedom to pursue serious intellectual work. He describes a culture in which scholars are expected to participate in political and institutional causes that may have little to do with their academic expertise, while genuine disagreement can carry professional and social costs.

One of the most striking aspects of Harper's account, however, is his description of tokenism. Harper, who is black, says he was repeatedly treated as a racial symbol rather than as a scholar. He was asked to chair the college's MLK Day committee despite having no particular expertise in Martin Luther King Jr.; assumed by a colleague to be knowledgeable about the African diaspora despite his research focus on nineteenth-century British literature; and generally drafted into what he calls "Minority Work" that his white colleagues were rarely asked to perform. For Harper, these experiences exposed a particularly uncomfortable contradiction: colleagues who considered themselves progressive and committed to racial inclusion subjected him to a form of racism he says he rarely encountered elsewhere.

A Failure of Empathy

"Love your fellow as yourself" is a well-known biblical tenet that spread far beyond Judaism long ago. Few people, even among the irreligious, are unfamiliar with some formulation of this commandment. But do we all know what it actually means? Maimonides, in Sefer Ha-Mitzvot, Positive Commandment 206, explains the commandment as follows: "The commandment with which we have been charged is to love one another as we love ourselves, and that my compassion and love for my brother in faith should be like my love and compassion for myself, with regard to his money, his body, and everything he possesses or desires. And whatever I desire for myself, I should desire for him in the same way; and whatever I would not desire for myself or for my friend, I should not desire for him either."

Harper's academic colleagues surely saw themselves as good, enlightened, and compassionate people. There is little doubt that they would have been willing to swear under oath, even under a polygraph test, that they harbored not the slightest trace of racism. And yet the young, talented professor they had hired for a tenure-track position soon came to see himself as a DEI hire—not only because of what he understood about the college's decision-making process, but also because of the way he was treated.

The college's failure was, first and foremost, a failure of empathy. Its administrators and faculty undoubtedly believed they were demonstrating extraordinary empathy when they aggressively prioritized hiring minority faculty members (so long as they were the "right" minorities), required all students to take courses on racism, and seemed to look for racism under every rock. And yet they failed to live up to the Jewish understanding of "Love your fellow as yourself."

Had they simply stopped to ask themselves, "What would I want for myself?" it is hard to imagine any of them concluding that they would want to be treated primarily as representatives of their race rather than as individuals with personalities, interests, and strengths of their own.

Harper's story is troubling on many levels, and there is no doubt that we will continue to see debate over the problems he has exposed in academia and how best to address them. But the failure of empathy it reveals is not unique to elite American colleges. Almost all of us, in fact, sometimes find ourselves thinking of ourselves as the good guys—the considerate, compassionate ones—while inadvertently causing harm to others.

Harper's experience during his brief academic career reminds us of the essence of the obligation to love our fellow human beings: it begins with a willingness to imagine ourselves in another person's shoes and then to want for them only what we would want for ourselves if we were in the same position. Anything else is ultimately more about making ourselves feel good than about looking out for others.