The Confessions of Tyler Austin Harper
Tyler Austin Harper, a former tenure-track professor in environmental studies at Bates College who is now a staff writer at The Atlantic, is one of the most reliably interesting — and in some precincts, polarizing — observers of academic politics. A special interest: the bespoke monoculture he saw engulfing places like Bates, where administrators eager to appease the activist wing of their campuses institutionalized a highly moralized version of progressive politics, often to the detriment of academic freedom and other values integral to higher learning.