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Alyssa S. @drsepinwall.bsky.social

Jill Lepore in the Chronicle. This is still so embarrassing. I don't know in what world 2014 was "miserable" because students held the power over Harvard profs, and it was worse then than now.

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.
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