A Cruel Summer at Cornell – Tablet Magazine
Eight years after this car ride, in a recent article titled A Black Professor Trapped in Anti-Racist Hell, an instructor named Vincent Lloyd detailed his summer teaching a seminar for high schoolers on Anti-Oppressive Studies. As he tells it, the first day was sunny and full of hope. The students were curious, playful, and excited, having made it through the gauntlet of a 3% acceptance rate into the Telluride Association Summer Seminar to receive an all-expenses-paid scholarship to spend six weeks taking a college-level seminar at Cornell.
By the fourth week, the students had stopped smiling. They learned to stay silent in discussions and cede their speaking time to the least privileged classmates. They voted two other classmates out of the program. And they put the professor himself on trial for a long list of offenses, from using harmful body language to misgendering Britney Griner. A month into the program, they d learned that participation was conditional, intellectual freedom was overrated, and the world was so broken it could never change.
In 2015, as a combat boot-wearing, poetry-writing high schooler, I was one of those students. Back then, it was called the Telluride Association Summer Program (TASP). TASPers would live in an intense, self-governed community devoted to democracy and discussion. The promotional materials sung of values like intellectual vitality, interpersonal awareness, and communal responsibility. Most TASPers ended up at prestigious universities, especially Ivy League schools, before fanning out into politics, academia, the sciences, and the arts. Telluride alumni included neoconservative theorist Francis Fukuyama, Democratic politician Stacey Abrams, and Nobel laureate physicist Richard Feynman.
Back then, I didn t know many people who went to Ivy League colleges. My parents cared a lot about education, but they both came from immigrant families in which fancy schools were not an aspirational priority. My father, a fierce believer in public education, enrolled my brother and me in our upstate New York public school, which had 800 kids per grade, semi-frequent heroin scandals, and hypersuccessful sports teams to which the district devoted most of its energy. I wanted to become a writer, so I joined the school newspaper, which was helmed by a 10th-grade English teacher known for refusing to assign reading and spending three-quarters of every editorial meeting displaying photos of her husband s antique sailboat. I resigned after two meetings and proceeded to run into her each week when, as president of the Environmental Club, I d take out the cafeteria recycling and find her smoking behind the dumpsters.
I considered myself an intellectual trapped in a provincial prison, from which only an elite educational institution could liberate me. I fantasized about attending either Columbia or Yale, where I would join a progressive political group, take gender studies classes, and do all the other liberal academic things my school simply didn t offer. Reading through TASP s website, I was seduced by its promises a thoughtful community, where, for once, I d be surrounded by free-thinking academics and learning from leaders whom I deeply admired.
Two months after I applied, I got an email that I was a semifinalist and needed to report for an interview with a program alumnus. My mom dropped me off at the local Panera, where the interviewer was alread
This one kinda broke my heart. I was the fortunate recipient of a spot in the 1974 TASP at Cornell and then accepted a scholarship at Telluride House at Cornell where I got my A.B. (as they’re called at Cornell). TASP changed my life, for better and who knows, probably in some ways for worse. I hadn’t realized the programs have been cancelled. I usually throw away newsletters from Telluride as they have become too painful to read. Something thoroughly woke has been substituted for TASPs. Something rare and good in the world has died. Very sad.
H/t PC.