I imagine many readers of Christian Scholars Review are aware of Tyler Austin Harper’s Atlantic essay, “Confessions of a Token Black Professor.” Harper writes about the five years he spent as a tenure-track professor of environmental studies at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. During his years at Bates, he says he was treated more as a “racial prop” than a scholar. The college administration asked him to chair the MLK Day committee, even though he knew very little about King beyond what he gleaned in a high school history class. Harper watched hiring committees favor diversity candidates over candidates with much stronger academic credentials. When he opposed a curriculum change requiring students to take two courses on a DEI-related subject, including one in their major (“Mathematics for Social Justice” anyone?), he got little support among colleagues of color. Harper’s neighbor, an administrator at Bates, warned him that Lewiston was a “hub of white supremacy,” a claim that led to “eyerolls” from Harper, who never experienced such hate. None of this, on its own, is dramatic, but it was the accumulation of these things that led Harper to quit his job at Bates and leave academia altogether.
I do not doubt that Harper is right about most of what he describes. I appreciate his honesty. It would have been easier for him to write something more hedged. He wrote about what it felt like to be used by an institution that seems to have wanted the appearance of a commitment more than the commitment itself.
Some, perhaps those in the conservative-leaning wing of Christian higher education, will read Harper’s essay as yet another victory against diversity initiatives on campus. This is unfortunate, because diversity is important. The Kingdom of God is made up of Christians of all races, ethnicities, genders, political persuasions, and denominations. Christian colleges and universities should not abandon efforts to celebrate the diversity of the Kingdom.
But I’ve also watched parts of Harper’s story play out at the Christian college where I taught for more than two decades. During those years, I supported a form of affirmative action. As Harper puts it, the “spirit of affirmative action” recognizes talented “people from historically underrepresented groups” who commonly face barriers to academic success. I learned that there is a fine line between lifting marginalized voices in our diversity statements and campus programming, and reducing men and women created in the image of God to merely what they represent. The latter might serve our offices of public relations, marketing, and institutional research, but it does not serve faculty and students.
Today, Christian universities can offer visible, comparatively inexpensive, signs of institutional seriousness on diversity issues: a lecture series, a strategic-plan commitment, retreats, or a new office with a diversity mandate attached to its title. This is all well and good. But these projects are happening within the same budget cycles that quietly let go of the more expensive, more permanent kinds of commitments to diversity: a language program, a philosophy line, a humanities position not refilled when its holder retires. These decisions are described to the faculty as “prioritization.”
I don’t believe anyone in Christian higher education is sitting in a room and consciously deciding that visible commitments to diversity matter more than students’ intellectual formation and their exposure to the life-transforming ideas the humanities and related disciplines exist to provide. But I don’t think it’s a coincidence either. Diversity photographs well. The unglamorous tenure line does not advertise itself nearly as effectively. We can end up, without ever intending it, more outwardly committed to diversity in our public language, while at the very moment we are less committed to the actual departments — history, literature, philosophy, theology, Biblical studies, modern languages — where sustained, serious thinking about race, power, and justice (and many other issues as well, including freedom, virtue, Christian faith, and human flourishing) actually happen as part of the day-to-day intellectual rhythms of campus life.
Universities are not social justice camps. Universities are places for learning, and true learning only happens when students are confronted with a text or an idea that pulls them outside their comfort zone and forces them to consider becoming more inclusive in their thinking. This happens every day in humanities classrooms. If we, as educators and organizations, really care about diversity, we will prioritize longer lasting changes in our institutions and invest heavily in faculty who can bring this learning to life.
So, let’s reconsider the common practice of tackling diversity, equity, and inclusion through offices disconnected from the classroom and the curriculum writ large. If Christian college administrators and boards of trustees really care about these issues, they will build back the humanities and liberal arts programs that they have spent the last decade or more decimating. Let’s let faculty teach their disciplines, including Tyler Austin Harper’s field of environmental humanities and British literature. For it is in the multifaceted ways of knowing offered by the humanities and liberal arts where the best kind of diversity education is found.
I am not optimistic that Christian colleges can pull this off, and I am sure that many reading this piece will conclude that I am tilting at windmills. Perhaps the only future possible is a world where Christian college humanities and liberal arts professors function as servants of general education core curriculums, many of which are already getting watered down by the accreditation demands of professional programs. Yet, if Christian colleges and universities are series about the big questions, such as “who is my neighbor and how do I love them” or “what are the social and cultural implications of Imago Dei?, they will invest in full-time, face-to-face professors who are deeply committed to mission, ever-present in students’ lives, and able to teach their disciplines well. Only then will Christian colleges begin to train men and women toward the kind of intellect, character, and social intelligence necessary to sustain the church, American democratic life, and the world.
