Why I Quit the Tenure Track
In retrospect, it is no coincidence that wokeness blossomed at prestigious American colleges at the very moment when those schools were facing rising discontent over student debt and tuition costs. For the academic aristocracy, touting fealty to Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, trans rights, and other progressive movements served as a convenient distraction from the intractable economic and social issues that the colleges themselves were perpetuating. This allowed higher education to reclaim the moral high ground after Occupy Wall Street and the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign—to say nothing of the anti-elite fury that gave rise to Donald Trump—had kicked mud all over academia’s ivy-twined walls. Even better, embracing social-justice rhetoric and adopting schemes to boost faculty diversity were cheap. Cheaper, anyway, than lowering tuition or hiring more tenure-track professors.
Wokeness allowed elite higher ed to create a new model of inclusive exclusion: one in which tuition can continue to climb, acceptance rates can continue to plummet, endowments can continue to expand, and adjunct labor can continue to be exploited as long as the demographics of those paying the tuition and those being exploited continued to get browner, Blacker, more LGBTQAIP2+. It also helped nurture the delusion that elite college graduates were being prepared for lives of civic virtue, and that their highly priced education would be deployed in service of the public good. Never mind the fact that, during my time at Bates, roughly a quarter of the school’s graduates went on to jobs in tech, finance, or consulting—a startling figure that nonetheless pales in comparison to the nearly half of Harvard and Yale students who end up in these same career tracks.
All of this was the backdrop of the dean’s announcement to faculty, in the fall of 2021, that the college’s next major project would be to napalm the strangling weeds of bigotry that were apparently rooted deep in its soil. “Racism, sexism, ableism, classism are deeply embedded in society, in our fields of study, and in the spaces we occupy,” he observed. “To eradicate these inhibitors, these retardants to progress and educational potential, these poisons,” we were told, would require setting aside “self-censorship” and “dogmatic positions.” Some of this “work” would focus on the individual: “Many of us, especially white faculty and staff, require explicit training.” But as with all cultural revolutions, the real change would involve collective struggle.
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For the cover of the September issue, I wrote about why I left Bates College, the tenure track, and academia entirely. Come for the attempted lynching, stay for the union-busting, decolonial chemistry, and soft rabbits.
Amazingly, legacy media are not only extremely reluctant to acknowledge Cofnas’s role in exposing this scandal, but some of them (@nytimes) are even harsher on the whistleblower than they are on the fraudster himself.
The Times reporters @samueljlovett and @EmilyPrescott30 also did not credit me as having identified in real time on X last week as three Cambridge academics removed their names from the Good Law Project letter backing Arday. I also reported those details for the Free Beacon, on Friday. And yet The Times claims that it is the one that “can reveal” this news.
I would like Times to credit my reporting immediately, along with the proper hyperlinks, including to both Substack and the Free Beacon, and add an editor’s note indicating that they failed to do so in the first place. (See the thread for those.)
This is just an incredible sound bite. She is truly an idiot. Totally detached from reality. https://t.co/QvffciI9aw
— Rob Schmitt (@SchmittNYC) August 10, 2026
In 2019 AOC was happy to peddle the lie that the world would end in 12 years.
Now she’s planning a family for the 2030s.
I’m glad she expects a future. I just wish she’d told the twenty-somethings who believed her.
I have decided to become the President of Cambridge University. Over the weekend I updated my CV with suppressed memories that returned to me once I realized how useful they would be for my career.
1965 – Born to a black single mother in Harlem (I have a rare pigment condition, which is why I appear white). I was born profoundly disabled, far more disabled than Jason Arday.
1981 – Sent to a Soviet labor camp where I contracted syphilis. I escaped by befriending a wolf over two years, tying a sled to him, and crossing Siberia while surviving on bark and moose meat.
The tactic of AOC and her allies to giggle away the ‘craziness’ of Woke-era abuses should not be tolerated. The so-called “Woke 1” period is not something to laugh off. It was a repressive and destructive mob rule which unjustly destroyed careers and requires a reckoning.
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But the worst trait in leaders is obeying social pressure to spout deranged ideas:
This piece is as maddening and fantastic as everyone says (no surprise, @Tyler_A_Harper has a gift for storytelling), but the best part might be this sense-making bit at the end; the hollowing of journalism and the arts flows at least in part from this same dynamic
