The Review: "A Black Professor Caught in Anti-Racist Hell"

Vincent Lloyd uses the C-word. [The Review Logo]( Did someone forward you this newsletter? [Sign up free]( to receive your own copy. You can now read The Chronicle on [Apple News]( [Flipboard]( and [Google News](. In a recent essay in Compact with the luridly captivating title “[I Was a Black Professor Trapped in Anti-Racist Hell]( the Villanova University political theorist Vincent Lloyd describes his disturbing ordeal teaching a class hosted by the Telluride Association, a nonprofit devoted to “transformative education,” in 2022. (I’d never heard of Telluride, which offers courses to both high-school and college students, but as Lloyd notes, its alumni are impressive: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Gayatri Spivak, Stacey Abrams, Paul Wolfowitz, Francis Fukuyama …) Lloyd’s students were advanced high schoolers enrolled in Telluride’s six-week summer school. After George Floyd’s murder, Telluride’s summer seminars were redesigned; they would now be devoted exclusively to “Critical Black Studies” and “Anti-Oppressive Studies.” The topic of Lloyd’s course was “Race and the Limits of Law in America.” Lloyd had taught at Telluride before, in 2014. He loved the experience. Back then, he writes, the students had the evenings to themselves. But in 2022, evenings were spent in mandatory antiracism workshops. As Lloyd tells it, the students, under the influence of a college-aged workshop leader, “Keisha,” turned first on each other (two were expelled) and then on him. A month into the six-week program saw open revolt: “Each student read from a prepared statement about how the seminar perpetuated anti-Black violence in its content and form, how the Black students had been harmed, how I was guilty of countless microaggressions, including through my body language, and how students didn’t feel safe.” Telluride’s leadership refused to intervene when Lloyd asked them to, so, feeling that the atmosphere was poisoned beyond repair, he cancelled the remainder of the seminar. Although he had “always been dismissive” of the Columbia University linguist John McWhorter’s assertion that “antiracism is a new religion,” that summer, Lloyd says: I found antiracism to be a perversion of religion: I found a cult. From Wild Wild Country to the Nxivm shows to Scientology exposés, the features of cults have become familiar in popular culture. There is sleep deprivation. Ties to the outside world are severed. The sense of time collapses, with everything cult-related feeling extremely urgent. Participants are emotionally battered. In this weakened state, participants learn about and cling to dogmatic beliefs. Any outsider becomes a threat. Lloyd is a scholar of religion, and he knows perfectly well that the distinction between religion and cultism is problematic — “cults” are often just officially disapproved religions. For that reason, many religious-studies scholars prefer to talk about “new religious movements” instead. By refusing such tact — by using the C-word — Lloyd insists that the category “cult” has real analytic usefulness. Indeed, it might be especially useful in describing tendencies in organizations that aren’t normally thought of as religious. Cultishness, on this view, encompasses a suite of features that appear in all sorts of organizations, in variable configurations, and with variable levels of intensity. NEWSLETTER [Sign Up for the Teaching Newsletter]( Find insights to improve teaching and learning across your campus. Delivered on Thursdays. To read this newsletter as soon as it sends, [sign up]( to receive it in your email inbox. In Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism (2021), Amanda Montell offers a sort of linguistic-anthropological account of cults and the cult-like. Some of her examples, like the Kundalini yoga movement, are religious in a restricted sense — they involve their members in belief systems that make propositions about the spiritual world (religion, as the late anthropologist Melford E. Spiro put it in an influential though contested definition, is any “institution consisting of culturally patterned interaction with culturally postulated superhuman beings”). Others, like CrossFit, are religious only by analogy. But all exploit three rhetorical features: “us vs. them” statements, “loaded words,” and “thought-terminating clichés” (the last concept was coined in 1961 by Robert J. Lifton, a psychiatrist). Us vs. them statements (e.g., “America, love it or leave it,” or, paradigmatically, “You’re either with us or against us!”) need no explanation. Loaded words combine emotionally hyper-resonant symbolism with denotative imprecision; Montell gives the example of “American family values,” which conservatives use as a cudgel against diffuse enemies thought to be “inherently anti-American.” Thought-terminating clichés are in some ways the most interesting, the least obvious, and the most sinister. In Lifton’s words, they are formulas in which “the most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly selective, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed.” They can be deployed to neutralize skepticism toward a belief system or the interrogation of the social order, and they might take the form of banal folk wisdom (“everything happens for a reason”). Often both folksy and therapeutic, they are especially well-suited to psychodynamic manipulation. Montell gives the example of an upper-level official in a cultish organization telling a junior member with a valid complaint, “Why don’t you sit with that?” Lloyd’s experiences at Telluride enmeshed him in each of these rhetorical nets. A dichotomous tenet of some antiracism training is Ibram X. Kendi’s formula, “the opposite of racist isn’t ‘not racist.’ It is ‘antiracist,’” which could certainly be thought by critics to promote a binary, us vs. them mind-set. Lloyd writes that students imported rituals of approval and disapproval from their antiracist workshops into his seminar. “One student would try out a controversial (or just unusual) view. Silence. Then another student would repeat a piece of antiracist dogma, and the room would be filled with the click-clack of snapping fingers.” The jargon of the workshops draws heavily on loaded language like “transformative justice” and “harms,” words that are both evocative and vague. And Lloyd’s own attempts at wresting control back from Keisha were met with a thought-disrupting cliché meant to disable his agency. “She launched into a long speech about how I was ignoring the demands of a black woman.” (“Trust black women,” Lloyd writes, was one of the “dogmatic assertions” imbibed in the antiracism workshops.) As Lloyd sees it, the workshops at Telluride cultivated cognitive habits directly opposed to those required for a college seminar. Instead, they stocked students’ minds with slogans of the crudest sort: “All the hashtags are there, condensed, packaged, and delivered from a place of authority. The worst sort of antiracist workshop simply offers a new language for participants to echo — to retweet out loud.” What happened at Telluride is surely extreme. But when the history of higher education in our period is written, the penetration of the seminar room by the training program will deserve at least a chapter. Read Vincent Lloyd’s “[I Was a Black Professor Trapped in Anti-Racist Hell]( SUBSCRIBE TO THE CHRONICLE Enjoying the newsletter? [Subscribe today]( for unlimited access to essential news, analysis, and advice. The Latest THE REVIEW | REPORTING [Madeline Kripke Owned 20,000 Books, Some of Them Very Bawdy]( By Heidi Landecker [STORY IMAGE]( She had perhaps the largest personal dictionary collection in the world. It is certainly the most titillating. 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And for more on Powell, see my [newsletter]( from earlier this month. Write to me at len.gutkin@chronicle.com. Yours, Len Gutkin FROM THE CHRONICLE STORE [The Future of Advising - Buy Now]( [The Future of Advising]( Good advising is widely seen as central to student success, but it is one of the most misunderstood and under-supported divisions on campus. [Order your copy]( to learn how university leaders can improve advising systems to help close equity gaps, and ensure students effectively navigate their path to a degree. NEWSLETTER FEEDBACK [Please let us know what you thought of today's newsletter in this three-question survey](. This newsletter was sent to {EMAIL}. [Read this newsletter on the web](. [Manage]( your newsletter preferences, [stop receiving]( this email, or [view]( our privacy policy. © 2023 [The Chronicle of Higher Education]( 1255 23rd Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20037