Everyone should read @Tyler_A_Harper’s extraordinary Atlantic cover story, “Confessions of a Token Black Professor.” It is one of the best accounts yet of how bad American campuses became between roughly 2015 and 2025, peaking from 2020 to 2023. It was a disaster for academic freedom, free speech, and higher education’s credibility. It also helped destroy trust in shared facts, because people stopped believing that our supposed referees would scrutinize claims that fit their own ideology as aggressively as claims from the other side. Now there is a concerted effort to pretend either that none of this happened, or that it was merely a strange youthful indiscretion we can laugh off, much as people tried to do with the first great age of political correctness. We must not let them wish it away. If you experienced the quasi-religious groupthink that overtook institutions supposedly devoted to inquiry, write about it. Record what happened, what people were afraid to say, and why. Otherwise, this period will be rewritten by many of the same people who defended the status quo while casting themselves as brave underdogs. Looking at you, @rottenindenmark, among others. Doing PR work for a $1 trillion industry is not exactly fighting for social justice. I also have always seen this through a class lens. Elite higher education is a gigantic industry that disproportionately benefits people who are already well-off. Yes, people like me can get through it and have our lives transformed. But we are a small part of the story. There is an older intellectual history here. Thinkers such as Herbert Marcuse confronted a frustrating problem: the working class often failed to behave as intellectuals expected and an awful lot of working people hated intellectuals. Ordinary Americans liked their country, distrusted elites, and seemed perfectly capable of living without philosopher-kings directing them. The solution was an newideology that allowed highly educated elites to regard working-class people with contempt while still seeing themselves as champions of the oppressed. That became academia’s problem when universities built departments, bureaucracies, hiring systems, and professional cultures that treated deeply contestable political doctrines as moral dogma. You can see the results throughout Tyler’s story: classism, utter contempt for locals, exaggerated self-importance, ordinary disputes transformed into battles of good and evil, and politicized administrators remarkably skilled at weaponizing elite ideology against their own institutions. Tyler’s piece is both testimony and warning. There are excellent university presidents trying to right the ship, but too many faculty organizations and professional associations still seem to believe the ideology was never the problem—it simply wasn’t imposed consistently enough. We need to document what happened and build institutions less vulnerable to another episode like it. Because this was never some weird, isolated campus disaster. It spread into journalism, science, philanthropy, corporations, K–12 education, government, and politics. It damaged the credibility of the institutions we depend on to tell us what is true. A society that loses faith in its knowledge-producing institutions eventually loses something more important than the reputation of its universities: its ability to see the world as it is.