STANFORD ALUMNI
FOR FREE SPEECH AND
CRITICAL THINKING

 

August 17, 2026​​

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Why I Quit the Tenure Track

 

Excerpts:

. . . .

“As I got to know [Bates College faculty colleague] Ava, I was surprised to discover that she viewed central Maine as a Stephen King-esque hell, a place where ancient prejudices and violence lay just beneath the friendly college-town facade....

 

“I’d never had great enthusiasm for identity politics; I’d been a socialist since my early 20s, and it had generally been my experience that liberals were as eager to talk about race as they were uneager to talk about class. Yet I also assumed that conservative complaints about ‘wokeness,’ a term just coming into vogue as a pejorative, were essentially Fox News hysteria. Until I got to Bates, I had little reason to suspect that they held any merit....

 

“That’s why, when Ava gave me anti-racist reading recommendations that first summer in Maine, I read them with an open mind. And when I found them disquietingly flimsy, politically bizarre, and, in their naked essentializing, even sort of racist, I assumed that I must be the problem. As a light-skinned Black guy who doesn’t speak African American English, I had rarely been subjected to acute prejudice in my life. I thought that perhaps I simply wasn’t Black enough -- ‘authentically’ Black enough -- to understand the kind of racial pessimism that had become so mainstream....

 

“The source of the most intense racial monomania on campus, I came to realize, was senior leadership. In one of my first encounters with the man who was then dean of the faculty, I mentioned how excited I was to be joining one of the few American colleges founded by abolitionists. At this, the dean -- a white biologist who was an expert on sponges -- frowned, as though my rosy view of the school’s antislavery history physically pained him. He conceded that, sure, it had been founded by the abolitionist minister Oren Burbank Cheney, but he pointed out that Benjamin Bates, the textile tycoon who had funded the college, had processed slave-picked cotton in his mills. I had come into Bates rather smitten with the idea that I was a Black academic joining the ranks of a faculty whose predecessors had agitated for Black freedom, but the dean seemed to feel that this was actually something to be faintly embarrassed of, a history that was best mentioned, if at all, only after layering on an array of caveats....

 

“That first year, I kept my head down and let the small oddities I noticed pass by without much reflection. Between teaching, grading, student advising, Zoom faculty meetings, twice-weekly COVID testing, wrangling a hyperactive rescue puppy, and trying to survive the Maine winter, I didn’t have much time to think about the college’s (or the country’s) cultural eccentricities. Ironically, that pandemic year turned out to be the sanest one I would experience at Bates....

 

[Followed by discussion of committee assignments, a dispute among white and black roommates and how the dispute was treated as a racist matter, etc.]

 

“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....

 

[Followed by discussion of various internal projects to address social issues.]

 

“The dean explained that every department and program at Bates was to complete a racism self-audit. The goal of this project, innocuously called Foundational Dialogues, was to identify areas where white supremacy, ‘colonial’ frameworks, and other forms of bias might be lurking in curricula and major requirements. To facilitate this work, departments were required to bring in an external consultant. Each major would produce a ‘curricular transformation plan’ and deliver the report to the dean’s office....

 

[Followed by discussion of mandatory reforms in the curriculum.]

 

"The committee even provided examples of hypothetical new courses that could fulfill the requirement, such as ‘Mathematics for Social Justice,’ which could help students understand ‘the role of mathematics as a gatekeeper and driver of injustice.’... The whole document struck me as an Orwellian masterpiece, by turns insane and sinister. The only thing that gave me solace was the certainty that the proposal was so self-evidently unhinged that it would never get past the rest of the faculty.

 

[Followed by discussion of committee recruitments and decisions regarding candidates for tenure-track positions.]

 

“In December 2022, the council circulated draft legislation for a version of the proposal that the Curricular Working Group had suggested back in 2021: the Race, Power, Privilege, and Colonialism requirement, or RPPC, as it came to be known. If the proposal passed a faculty vote, every major would be required to offer at least one course related to ‘race, power, privilege, colonialism, and their consequences.’ Students would be required to take two such courses, one of these in their major. That the council was composed of five white people, with nary a professor of color among its ranks, added a degree of bleak hilarity to the whole affair....

 

“When I said that I had no idea what a culture of repair meant (really, I just wanted to see [a faculty colleague] try to substantiate her hollow jabber), Sandra gave a helpful example of what ‘repair’ might look like in action. She suggested that perhaps there could be a system in which students of color could call out ‘oops’ or ‘ouch’ if somebody accidentally said something racist -- as though these were not young adults with basic human dignity paying minor fortunes to be taught by ostensible subject-matter experts, but toddlers learning not to bite their friends when someone grabbed their toy truck. It took every last ounce of my already threadbare professionalism not to lean into the mic and say ‘Oops.’

 

[Followed by discussion of divergent faculty views, followed by discussion of the rejection of a long-qualified teacher, followed by discussion of the postponement to 2029, and possibly the total abandonment, of the Race, Power, Privilege, and Colonialism requirement.]

 

Full op-ed by former Bates Prof. Tyler Austin Harper at The Atlantic.

 

See also interview at Chronicle of Higher Education: “The Confessions of Tyler Austin Harper -- A Critic of the Academy on Professorial Cowardice, Racial Tokenism, and Righteous Hypocrisy.”

 

Should AI Fluency Be a Graduation Requirement? 

 

Excerpts (link in the original):

 

“Since the advent of generative AI, some college leaders have argued that the entire college curriculum needs a reboot.

 

“The idea is that learning to work with AI has become a core skill expected of college graduates.

 

“But AI is a different animal than traditional core skills taught at colleges, like reading, writing, or math, since AI to many seems like a hindrance to the kind of deep thinking and learning necessary to acquire those skills.

 

“To try to understand this issue, I reached out to two colleges -- one old and one new -- that are working to infuse AI across the curriculum. [Followed by discussion of changes in various undergraduate programs at Purdue.]

 

“Meanwhile, a new online for-profit two-year college called  Campus is integrating AI into its curriculum from the start. (OpenAI’s co-founder, Sam Altman, is an investor in the effort.)

 

“Last month Campus announced that all of its degrees will require students to take a six-week applied-AI concentration....

 

“‘We jokingly call ourselves pracademics,’ he told me, a mix of practical and academic knowledge. He argues that tenured professors at traditional universities like Berkeley don’t have much incentive to refresh their teaching for the AI age.” ... 

 

Full article at Chronicle of Higher Education. 

 

See also UC Berkeley Law School plans to restrict and even prohibit student use of AI. See also similar policy updates at University of Chicago Law School. 

 

See also “AI Agents Are Taking Entire Online Courses on Behalf of Students Who Are Cheating” at NY Times.

 

College Sports Are Unsustainable

 

The GAO’s latest report shows that even Division I athletics are becoming an increasingly expensive proposition for universities

Excerpts (links in the original):

 

“America’s colleges and universities are facing severe financial pressures, leading to staff layoffs and reduced real compensation

-- achieved by keeping salary increases below inflation -- for many employees, even at wealthy, elite private schools. School closures have risen, and some schools are dropping traditionally important majors such as physics or history. Amid all this, the highly respected Government Accountability Office (GAO) has released a report detailing significant financial losses in intercollegiate athletics even at highly successful NCAA Division 1 programs.... I suspect the average funding gap at D1 schools is now approaching $30 million annually, possibly more, and that many schools have a per-student burden that substantially exceeds $1,000 annually. The GAO itself has estimated the ‘median college contribution per undergraduate student’ over four years at $8,500....

 

“Supporters of the status quo have historically argued that intercollegiate athletic success strengthens school loyalty and leads to bigger contributions from alumni and other fans. (See the recent college sports debate at Minding the Campus.) Yet the facts suggest that argument is very weak. I looked at the 10 universities with the largest endowments, and a majority were schools with little intercollegiate sports presence or prowess: schools like Harvard, Yale, M.I.T., and Johns Hopkins. Only a few had both some athletic reputation and considerable wealth -- Stanford, Notre Dame, Northwestern. Students do not go to Caltech or the University of Chicago because of their sports, yet they subsequently do well in life. The correlation between academic reputation and athletic success is, at best, extremely weak. Part of the problem is what I call the Iron Law of Sports: every time someone wins a ballgame, someone else loses. The win-loss percentage for all teams is just .500 (50 percent).” ...

 

Full op-ed by Ohio U Prof. Emeritus Richard Veder at Minding the Campus.

 

See also the Stanford student-athlete op-ed in our Newsletter last week, “College Athletics Faces Crisis Without National Rules in Place,” as originally published at The Hill.

 

Some Highlights from Chronicle of Higher Education’s 2026-2027 Annual Almanac

 

Links in the original:

 

• “Higher education was expected to receive $42.7 billion in federal support in the 2025 fiscal year, which is a decline of $1.7 billion, or 4 percent, from the year before. The Department of Energy accounts for most of this loss.”

 

• “This was the first year that comprehensive enrollment data was able to give a sense of the impact of the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. Most institution types saw an increase in underrepresented minorities.... Nationwide, underrepresented minority enrollment increased 11 percent from the fall of 2022 to the fall of 2024. But nearly 70 percent of the most selective colleges -- those that admitted fewer than 15 percent of applicants -- saw the number of underrepresented minority students decline.”

   

Other items of note:

 

• Stanford is not listed as among the top ten private universities in terms of its freshman retention rate – that is, the percent of freshmen who return the next year as sophomores (page 12 of the Almanac). By comparison, the ten schools with the highest retention rates are Chicago at 99.3%, Notre Dame and MIT both at 99.1%, Penn at 98.9%, Brown and Yale both at 98.8%, Dartmouth and Cornell both at 98.4% and Princeton and Harvard both at 98.3%.

   

  It's possible that Stanford students are pursuing other opportunities, but another possible factor, which has been noted continually in our past Newsletters and by numerous alumni, is Stanford’s discombobulated and worsening housing situation for undergraduates -- aging and significantly overcrowded dorms, a system that throws undergraduates into the unpredictable Draw at the end of every year, and mind-numbing rules and procedures that defy rationality (see a PDF copy of the current policies and procedures for the Draw at our Stanford Concerns webpage, “The Bureaucratization of Student Life at Stanford”). And yet Stanford is now adding at least another 1,000 undergraduates without first addressing its long-existing housing problem.

   

  We also again note the extremely low participation rate of Stanford alumni as donors (see the alumni donor chart at our Stanford Concerns webpage) and where a major factor could very well be Stanford’s serious housing deficiencies in the past 20-plus years, and especially when compared with the high donor rates of schools that have long put a priority on their undergraduate residential education programs (for example, 46% alumni donor participation at Princeton, 36% at Dartmouth, 34% at West Point, 33.1% at Harvard and 28.3% at Yale versus an estimated 16% to 18% at Stanford). 

   

• Stanford is 38th out of 40 private schools in terms of 6-year graduation rates for Pell students. The top three are Princeton at 97%, Northwestern at 96.9% and Harvard at 96.8% versus Stanford at 90.3% (page 15).

 

• At $320,529, Stanford has the highest average pay for full professors for all private colleges and universities and as compared to $314,734 at Princeton, $294,972 at MIT, $293,619 at Harvard and $288,239 at Yale (page 28). 

 

• With 1,498 business and finance managers, Stanford has the highest number of any such managers at both public and private schools and at an average pay of $133,286. Stanford also has the third highest average pay for research managers at $169,540 for 397 such managers, and again the highest number of such managers of any of the schools (page 36).

 

• At 3.6%, Stanford had the second highest admissions selectivity of private schools in 2024-25 as compared to 2.6% for Caltech, 3.7% for Harvard, 3.9% for Yale, 4.0% for Columbia, 4.5% for Chicago and 4.6% for both MIT and Princeton (page 46).

 

• At 81.9%, Stanford had the fifth highest admissions yield in 2024-25 as compared to 91% for Mississippi College, 88.3% for Chicago, 85.8% for MIT, 83.6% for Harvard, 75.5% for Princeton and 69.8% for Yale (page 47).

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• As compared to all other private U.S. colleges and universities, Stanford had the second-highest ratio of the amount spent on instruction as compared to the revenue it received from tuition and fees. Based on the Almanac charts, Stanford spent $4.90 on instruction for every $1.00 it received in tuition and fees. At $6.31 per $1.00, only WashU of St. Louis had a higher ratio than Stanford. The Johns Hopkins ratio was $3.41 per $1.00, Chicago was $2.78 per $1.00 and Columbia was $2.46 per $1.00 (page 49).

 

• At $40,786,000, Stanford had the third largest endowment in FY 2025 as compared to $55,670,339 for Harvard, $44,149,800 for Yale, $36,415,027 for Princeton and $27,366,239 for MIT (page 57).

 

Summary article and basic charts at Chronicle of Higher Education (the more detailed charts are available to paid subscribers only).

 

See also our Stanford Concerns webpage which has other current and past numbers and charts from various sources.

 

Other Articles of Interest

 

Free Speech Study Finds Surprising Similarities Between 'Very Liberal' and 'Very Conservative' Americans

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Full article along with survey results and charts at FIRE: “The latest edition of the National Speech Index, a recurring survey that tracks Americans’ views on free speech, finds that the most partisan among us are much more comfortable discussing controversial topics without fear of reprimand than liberals, moderates, or conservatives.”

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Harvard Lays Off Nearly One-Third of Its Social Sciences Staff as Part of Its Latest Restructuring

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Full article at Harvard Crimson. See also College Fix: “This comes amid thousands of recent layoffs across higher education. In 2025, higher education saw 9,000 total jobs being cut, The Fix previously reported.” See also the graphs and charts at our Stanford Concerns webpage showing the explosive growth of Stanford’s managerial and supervisory personnel in the past 20 years and where Stanford continues to have the highest administrative cost per student of any public or private university in the country, in many/most cases double and up to quintuple that of Stanford’s peer institutions.

 

When AI Cheating Goes Viral, Colleges Face Hard Questions

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Full article by U Maryland Lecturer Jamaal Abdul-Alim at EDU Ledger.

 

U Michigan Will Switch to Pass/Fail Grades for Most First-Semester Students

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Full article at Michigan Advance. See also “University of Michigan to Hide Grades Amid Mental Health Crisis” at Daily Mail and as also linked at Real Clear Education.

  

Why We Care -- Samples of Current Teaching, Research and Other Activities

at Stanford

 

Click on each article for direct access; selections are from Stanford Report and other Stanford websites

 

What Earthquake Sensors Can Tell Us About Hurricanes

 

Companies That Buy and Sell Your Data Are Not Following California’s Strict Privacy Laws

 

AI Designs a Novel E. coli Killer

 

Meet Biomni -- an AI-Powered Biomedical Co-Scientist

 

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