This response from president Jenkins was sent to families today:
Dear members of the Bates community,
I have read Tyler Austin Harper’s article in The Atlantic, “Confessions of a Token Black Professor,” and know that it has caused considerable concern and prompted many conversations within the Bates community. It is unfortunate that Tyler was unhappy during his time in academia. I will always be sorry to learn that a member of our community — faculty, student, or staff — hasn’t felt fully valued. But, I am certainly not a token and have never felt so, and we do not have any token faculty or staff at Bates.
Because this was a focus of the article, let me be clear about our faculty hiring process: If you are a faculty member at Bates, you belong here. Every year, Bates receives hundreds of applications and CVs for each open faculty position. Every year, dedicated search committee members spend countless hours poring over candidates’ materials, building clear, consistent rubrics, crafting and asking difficult questions, identifying strengths and weaknesses, and deciding which candidate ultimately will bring the most to Bates and our students. This is a careful process, always consistent with applicable state and federal law. A similar process yields our talented staff colleagues. The implication that this is not the case is understandably infuriating.
This intentional work ensures that all Bates faculty are outstanding scholars and teachers. Accordingly, our faculty make leading-edge discoveries, publish widely, collaborate with each other, and work side-by-side with students in our classroom, labs, and studios. It is my hope that every faculty and staff member here knows how much their contributions matter.
Not surprisingly, many on campus are disappointed by thinly veiled personas and object to many of the characterizations, innuendos, and conclusions drawn in the article. My colleagues and I have received multiple requests to submit a rebuttal to the article, and while we will continue to monitor this matter, we are more interested in providing care for our community than intensifying or prolonging a media cycle.
The presented narrative does not reflect the Bates I have come to know. The overwhelming majority of the initiatives and anecdotes he recounts pre-date my arrival at the college, but I know they came at a complicated time when our faculty and the broader community were wrestling with tough questions about what should be part of the core liberal arts education. This is what colleges and universities do — we examine and evolve our curriculum, we reflect, we experiment, we create. Sometimes we get it right the first time, sometimes we have to go back to the drawing board. But we always learn and we use those learnings to continuously build a better Bates.
Certainly, critiques like these can provide a chance for reflection, discussion, and improvement. Bates broadly supports the right of all individuals to share their experiences, knowing that they may experience the same events with different perspectives, lessons, conclusions, and recollections. How they are gathered into an overarching narrative, whether purely positive, negative or, more realistically, mixed, also varies from storyteller to storyteller. The article presents a single narrative about Bates and, as we know, far from a definitive one.
There is so much excellence here and so many reasons to celebrate what we do at Bates. I am confident in the faculty and staff who are here today, working together to shape the future of the college. I am confident that our alumni, so many of whom know the college well and love Bates, will continue to share their experiences. And I also am confident in the willingness of others — especially those audiences we care about most — to learn about Bates as it is today and all that we endeavor to become.
My very best,
Garry
(I love being NESCAC by association thanks to my daughter the Eph.)