Bates College will self-correct
Hathorn Hall at Bates College in 2015, featuring respective classes' Ivy stones, in celebration of the college's Ivy Day.
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
We need small rigorous liberal arts colleges that promote critical thinking and encourage their people to take the long view. The best ones, when they sometimes get carried away by practices and even fads that turn out not work well, self-correct — because of their fundamental respect for critical thinking.
Anyway, the public-relations and admissions people at Bates College, a small, well respected liberal-arts institution in the old factory town of Lewiston, Maine, must be very anxious now as they deal with Tyler Austin Harper’s piece “Confessions of a Token Black Professor,” in the September issue of The Atlantic magazine. He was an assistant professor of “environmental studies’’ (a murky-sounding discipline) at Bates before becoming a writer at The Atlantic.
In his essay, he reports on the college’s past, sometimes stultifying, hypocritical and even hilariously crazy climate of identity politics, DEI and political correctness, even as it has often ignored what might be a bigger issue – class and ever-widening income inequality, including at such “elite” schools as Bates. (The college, whose students come from households with a median household income of around $226,500, fought efforts to unionize faculty and staff.)
It should be noted that the college has since backed off from a bit of its DEI obsessions, largely for fear of being punished by the Trump regime. Will it overreact? Like other anxious colleges and universities, it might now try to ignore the socio-economic harms of past racial discrimination as it weakens or eliminates affirmative-action efforts to help marginalized groups -- enlightened self-interest efforts to ensure that it remains a national institution with students from widely different family backgrounds.
I was struck by Bates’s very self-conscious drive to uncover racial bias and “white privilege’’ in a setting where no one would openly express those things these days. The Orwellian attempt to discover those pathologies ignores the fact that no one can truly know what’s going on in someone else’s head. Judge people by their actions. A physics professor may harbor racist opinions but keep them to himself and be a superb teacher and researcher. Let the professor alone.
Anyway, Bates, founded in 1855 by Abolitionists, will self-correct from its current crisis.
Hit this link to read the article.
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Meanwhile, the University of Michigan will drop first-semester grades to address students’ “mental-health crisis’’. Sounds very humane, but how will students learn how to deal with life’s challenges if given such passes in college?