I just finished an academic career that started in the period of “political correctness" and fetched up in “woke.” In the academia of 1990-2024, the qualifications for degree, tenure, and promotion were to a significant extent political: you were never going to make it if you expressed the wrong views, and the program was extremely detailed, including (especially) official vocabularies that every humanities and social science graduate student had to master. I think my own opinions and the way I expressed them limited or vitiated my career, and I'm not even on the right. It was a personal problem, and I'm still pissy about it.
But it was also a quality-of-research problem, a problem with regard to the proclaimed academic purpose of producing truth or knowledge, and even a problem of voice: everyone was required to sound pretty much the same. The pressure was immense, the grad students and junior profs were extremely anxious, and the quality of the research was compromised. The publications emerging from woke academia were conventionalized, mediocre, predictable, and also often directly factually questionable. What problems you could address, and how you could address them: these were fixed by truth-irrelevant, political, and social-pressure concerns.
Jill Lepore, you’d think, is above such worries. "She is the David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker," says Google in the second sentence. She's a woman and a mild leftist while also having a gold-plated CV. She's both as establishment as any professor could be and mounting a left critique of American history. If anyone was going to toboggan effortlessly down Mount Woke, it was her. And she did.
But still, she was anxious. She hedged her bets and held her tongue. She played it safe. And if she hadn’t, she might’ve been canceled and lost those gigs. Earlier this month, Lepore was interviewed by Evan Goldstein for the Chronicle of Higher Education. After Lepore bemoans the right-wing critique of the concept of “diversity” in a very PC way, the conversation goes like this:
Goldstein: I want to ask about something else in that New York Times interview. You said something changed for the worse at colleges, at least elite ones, beginning around 2014. The Harvard campus, you said, “became incredibly prosecutorial,” prone to episodes of “public shaming.” “Students started showing up, determined that their job in a classroom was to humiliate one another and possibly catch a professor in saying something that was a violation of what they believed to be a way you can speak, or a thing you can say about something.” How did you experience that shift?
Lepore: It was miserable. A lot of people left. People are still leaving. I don’t know what it was like as a student, though I certainly talked to a lot of students. As a member of the faculty, it was fairly devastating. I look back on that time with considerable shame at my unwillingness to really speak out. I spoke out a lot privately. I had a lot of dean-level conversations. There’s not a friend who didn’t hear me bitch about this pretty much constantly. Yet I did nothing about it. If I’d been drummed out, it would have been more miserable, but then I would have been able to leave. Leaving is something I thought a lot about doing.
Then she claims that one of her kids persuaded her not to quit, "which I intended to do that very day." I don't believe that she was that close to quitting. Also, I want her claim of "dean-level conversations" checked, and pointedly it's the sort of thing that will be impossible to check. (What are we going to do, interview all of Harvard's deans of the time? But “dean-level” is ambiguous.)
I note that though she talked to a lot of students, she has no idea what the students thought. That might be because no one on campus expressed themselves sincerely for years on end.
Lepore seems to be ashamed at her political/professional cowardice or compromises. But she's still working at Harvard. Anyway, this is an extraordinary admission. In a way it's brave if belated. I think people sometimes do wrong, and should be allowed their regrets. But I also think you ought to think about this every time you read anything that Jill Lepore writes. And then you should let it get you worried about the history profession, and the humanities as a whole. You should be concerned about the honesty and truthfulness of the academic talking heads who populate Ken Burns's The American Revolution.
Understand that Lepore's interpretations of America is entirely political, and often presented directly as interventions (from a mainstream left standpoint) in contemporary political debates, about diversity as well as many other things. One of Lepore's big projects, with grants and staffs etc., is compiling a history of attempts to amend the Constitution. Explicitly, this is in the service of the idea of amending the Constitution some more.
Lepore's history, at Harvard, in The New Yorker, in books, interviews, everywhere all the time, is about contemporary politics. But she’s, just as she says, too scared to say what she really thinks about contemporary politics. To find out what Lepore really thinks about anything, including the historical events she writes about, we’d have to be privy to her private conversations, though I'm not sure whom she could really talk to about these things.
Maybe Lepore's outrage at cancel culture in academia left her research untouched. But her research emerged in the same context, in the same institutions for the same purpose. What she was scared to say in public at Harvard are the kinds of things she'd be scared to say in a book or an interview (or was, until last week). The strategic tailoring of opinions for career advancement cannot plausibly leave the research untouched.
The mood on campus and elsewhere is floating right, hard. And Lepore’s floating with it. "I was always against it!" That makes me wonder about your overall sincerity, your courage, your honesty. And that in turn makes me wonder about your research.
With regard to Lepore's every assertion, you should be clear now that she takes whatever position is liable to help her career. She's been extraordinarily successful in this regard, and she's not the only one. I’d doubt even the sincerity of her claims (though deluding oneself is pretty easy) and I’d triple-check their factuality.
Every senior professor now is someone who "did not get drummed out." In most institutions, in most situations, that means they had, or professed, views that were widely accepted and are now widely discredited. The colleges where I worked appeared to be politically unanimous, in faculty meetings but also in journal publications. Many of the people didn’t really believe what they were saying or repressed their real views, a la Lepore (many of them whispered this to me privately, a la Lepore). But you can't tell who's who.
What you can tell is that the communal jargon is overwhelming in academic publications, and you can tell that many possible points of view have been eliminated from before the outset by factors having nothing to do with truth. The only way to indicate that your work’s really dedicated to truth would be to defy the consensus repeatedly at the risk of your career, reputation, friendships.
It's possible Lepore didn't realize that she was raising suspicions about her scholarly work. But it's not only her: you should cock an eyebrow at anything any professor has published over the last 15 years or so. What did they have to say that they believe to get the Ph.D.? What, to get tenure? What, to survive socially on campus and not be a pariah? What, to become a distinguished chair?
A massive gap has opened between what a professor says and what she believes. That compromises the value of the research and the teaching fundamentally.
—Follow Crispin Sartwell on X: @CrispinSartwell
