telluride association vincent lloyd

I heard them ask critical questions about difficult texts. We need to feel the urgency of this question, but we also need to develop the sensibilities and virtues that can allow us to suitably respond. They always did the work. Did Keisha lecture to them all day? I want a world free of domination. I am no stranger to anti-racism workshops: I have participated in many of them, and I have facilitated them myself. Vincent Lloyd is a Black professor at Villanova . 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. Please make sure your computer, VPN, or network allows The students ended with a demand: In light of all the harms they had suffered, they could only continue in the class if I abandoned the seminar format and instead lectured each day about anti-blackness, correcting any of them who questioned orthodoxy. I hope we can drill down on what specifically went wrong and why. With those fond memoriesand with excitement at the prospect of revisiting thorny questions about race after the national conversation had changed so much because of Black Lives MatterI reached out to Telluride to explore teaching the seminar again. The new programs help students understand and analyze structures of power, such as race, gender, and class, in both academic seminars and through the same democratic community experience Telluride has offered for nearly 70 years. From Wild Wild Country to the Nxivm shows to Scientology exposs, the features of cults have become familiar in popular culture. Ibram X. Kendhi: The book that exposed anti-Black racism in the classroom. In addition to the seminar, the students practiced democratic self-governance: They lived together and set their own rules. (Id 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 ) After George Floyds murder, Telluride redesigned its summer seminars, which would be devoted exclusively to Critical Black Studies and Anti-Oppressive Studies. Lloyds students were advanced high schoolers enrolled in Tellurides six-week summer school. Conor Friedersdorf: The paradox of diversity training. 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. Conor Friedersdorf: Early on, you distinguish your essay from other laments about woke campus culture, and the loss of traditional educational virtues. Given your academic scholarship and varied work on behalf of social justice, no one can credibly claim that youre reflexively hostile to efforts that get coded as woke. Yet you believe that something went terribly wrong in your seminar. The second and the third day, you will be frustrated. Telluride Association also respects the academic freedom of our faculty, staff and students. When this practice is occasioned by carefully curated textsnot exclusively great books, but texts that challenge each other and us as they probe issues of essential importancea seminar succeeds. There are two dozen lectures I could give about Wilderson, each putting this text in a different light, but I want to share with you the information you want, in dialogue with the insights that you bring.. We feel confident that the experience will prepare them to lead and serve in their communities, as it has done for so many students before. Telluride Association is committed to more effective and active supervisory involvement in supporting faculty, factotums, and students to prevent such conflict in the future. I am a black professor, I directed my universitys black-studies program, I lead anti-racism and transformative-justice workshops, and I have published books on anti-black racism and prison abolition. Women Do Higher Eds Chores. It is certainly the most titillating. Our programs are designed to support students intellectual curiosity and democratic self-governance. While we encourage open communication among faculty, students, and factotums, decisions about the seminar are made by the faculty. If the seminar is slow food, the anti-racist workshop put on by college-age students is a sugar rush. They alleged: I had used racist language. There are forms of anti-Black racism of which we are not aware circulating around people and institutions. The dozen participants in this summer program were spending almost every hour of every day together, I was almost the only outsider they were encountering, and I was marked as a threat. We are noticing and responding to anti-Black racism in health care, the economy, real estate, the prison system, policing, and in many other domains. Vincent Lloyd is a Black professor at Villanova University, where he directed the Black-studies program, leads workshops on anti-racism and transformative justice, and has published books on anti-Black racism, including Black Dignity: The Struggle Against Domination. Since the first week, I had not spotted one smile. Behind the woke label are powerful new visions of justice, new ways of imagining a world free of domination. Keisha was tasked by Telluride with serving as a teaching assistant in my class and organizing workshops for the students in the afternoon. He'll tell the full story in the podcast, but essentially his class was destroyed from within . Each subsequent intervention is also incomplete, and also gets things wrong. Long before this article was published, Telluride Association was already putting additional supervisory staff, trainings, and procedures in place to improve our support structure for future programs. let's all pretend i don't look like an egg in this oneThis is only my opinion - I don't work with the Telluride Association; this is based on my own observat. I invited them to think about the reasoning of both sides of an argument, when only one side was correct. Lloyd writes that students imported rituals of approval and disapproval from their antiracist workshops into his seminar. Such is democratic life. A seminar takes time. Last summer, I found anti-racism to be a perversion of religion: I found a cult. Telluride is governed and largely run by program alumni who volunteer their time to further the goals of the association. We are unable to fully display the content of this page. It was clear to me the situation was getting out of control, and after the students left my house, I reached out to the Telluride Association to share my concerns. All the hashtags are there, condensed, packaged, and delivered from a place of authority. Library Website And thats the tricky part: We need to take seriously the insights of social movements, but those insights are not self-evidentnot to movement participants and not to outsiders. For a half century, we were comfortably multiculturalists, celebrating the variety of peoples, each with their own tasty food and colorful clothes, each facing their own sorts of struggles which we can support, but ultimately all part of the shared life of a community, institution, or nation. Twelve high-school students had been chosen by the Telluride Association through a rigorous application processthe acceptance rate is reportedly around 3 percentto spend six weeks together. Over the years, faculty from many leading US universities have taught for the program. Class ended. As we prepare for our 2023 summer programs, we look forward to welcoming a new class of thoughtful, curious, self-motivated, and community-minded students to benefit from the programs rigorous academic and democratic education. As you note, Young activists who have the capacity to dream a world without domination are instead, at times, demanding more diversity bureaucrats, more diversity trainings, and more ideological policing. Why are such approaches wrong turns? facilitate students self-governance, democratic, and community processes. By the second week of the seminar, the two white students were effectively silent. Summer 2014 & 2022, Instructor, Telluride Association Summer Program/Seminar . In 1993, at the height of US multiculturalism, Telluride began offering a new stream of seminars focusing on race and difference and aimed at underrepresented students. In the language of the anti-racism workshop, a harm becomes anything that makes you feel not quite right. The students began the summer excited about the six-week seminar, called Race and the Limits of Law. But soon, they moved to expel two of their classmates from the program amid political disagreements. Montell gives the example of an upper-level official in a cultish organization telling a junior member with a valid complaint, Why dont you sit with that?, Lloyds experiences at Telluride enmeshed him in each of these rhetorical nets. You reject their radicalism and lovingly defend the seminar format, where specific words, phrases, arguments, and images from a text offer essential friction for conversation, even as you grant that it is time-consuming and frustrating, and that participants inevitably get a lot wrong along the way. But I witnessed them learning. We stand behind our staff team, who are asked to facilitate students self-governance. They realized this summer was bumpy not just in our seminar, but across the program. Enter Keisha. One student would try out a controversial (or just unusual) view. She launched into a long speech about how I was ignoring the demands of a black woman, and how I had made the space unsafe for black students. We greatly respect Dr. Lloyd's academic expertise and his contribution to our summer seminars. At its best, talk of the pervasiveness of anti-Black racism is pointing toward that tragic sensibility. Two of the Asian-American students remained active (the ones who would soon be expelled), but the vast majority of interventions were from the three black students. I heard them ask critical questions about difficult texts. Sometimes that management involves co-opting movements themselves, effectively getting activists to make demands that serve the interests of the status quo. In our programs, we ask students to self-govern and take an unusual level of responsibility for their own education. But perhaps the implosion of my Telluride seminar suggests that this final step, centering blackness, tempts the US elite, and particularly US elite educational institutions, to take a step too far, a step into incoherenceor worse. We note that have not received any request from Dr. Lloyd, his articles publisher, or any other publishers who have picked up the story to fact-check or comment on the article at any point to date. Vincent Lloyd is a progressive, black academic. Silence. The two queer students, one Asian and one white, were entirely silent. Then all nine remaining students entered, each carrying a piece of paper. Subscribe Episode details Comments The seminar cant be sustained, at Telluride or in the university itself, if we understand it as something you enter when you feel like it, stay in as long as your beliefs go unquestioned, and leave when you become uncomfortable. Then, as Lloyd later recounted in an essay for Compact Magazine, the remaining students read 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 didnt feel safe because I didnt immediately correct views that failed to treat anti-blackness as the cause of all the worlds ills., Before, he had quickly rejected the linguist and social commentator John McWhorters argument that anti-racism is a new religion. It happened that on the last day of the anti-blackness week, I had invited the students over to my home, where we would talk for a couple hours about the reading (a selection from Frank Wildersons Afropessimism) and then share a meal. Read: Why not take a Black studies class? Lloyd: The students and I agreed about political principles. In their transformative-justice workshop, my students learned to name harms. This language, and the framework it expresses, come out of the prison-abolition movement. Vincent Lloyd is professor and director of the Center for Political Theology at Villanova University and author of Black Dignity: The Struggle Against Domination. The topic of his course was Race and the Limits of Law in America.. Each intervention in a seminar is incomplete, and gets things wrong. They had learned, in one of their workshops, that objective facts are a tool of white supremacy. This past summer was the first year of our rechartered TASS program. Madeline Kripke Owned 20,000 Books, Some of Them Very Bawdy, Ron DeSantis and the Specter of Lynne Cheney. Saddest of all, for me, was hearing what the black students said. Last summer, Lloyd wrote, I found anti-racism to be a perversion of religion: I found a cult.. It is difficult and sometimes painful to sort through the varied rhetorics and practices of a movement and to see what hews most closely to the struggle against domination that is a movements foundation. tutor and support students with the reading and writing assigned by faculty in seminar. To the question How do we know which institutions and norms to conserve and which are better abolished and replaced? the conservative answers, We usually cannot know. It falls short. I had repeatedly confused the names of two black students. Telluride Association's Summer Seminar (TASS) work focuses on the study of history, politics, and cultural experiences of people of African descent through two areas of studies: critical Black studies and anti . Board and supervisory staff were not aware of the seriousness of disagreements between faculty and factotums until late in the seminar, which we regret. Vincent Lloyd is an associate professor at Villanova who has written a number of books including some on anti-blackness and prison abolition. A white girlthe one with all the snailspunctuated their point: Keisha speaks for me: She says everything I think better than I ever could.. The black students certainly had interesting things to say and important connections to make with their experiences and those of their family members, but a seminar succeeds when multiple perspectives clash into each other, grapple with each other, and developand that became impossible. That requires working together to root out systems of domination, some on the surface but many deeply ingrained in our world. From the initial transformative-justice workshop, students learned to snap their fingers when they agreed with what a classmate was saying. We can each be formed best if we take advantage of our differing insights to push each other, over time, again and again. In the mid-20th century, there was little awareness of homophobia, for example. Students at Telluride experienced two styles of learning next to each other, but also two different cultures. I saw their writing improve. It is tempting to add: Such is life. For that reason, many religious-studies scholars prefer to talk about new religious movements instead. And I was next. Telluride Association | 579 followers on LinkedIn. Anti-Black racism is the closest we get to a paradigm of domination. More puzzlingly, I see them denouncing institutions and authority figures as racist one moment, then demanding in the next moment that those same institutions or leaders start marshaling their authority more coercively (much as your students denounced your supposed racism, then insisted that you assert more control over their discussions). A girl from a provincial school in China had never traveled to the United States but had mastered un-accented English and was in love with E.M. Forster. We see this crystal clear in the paradoxes that I encountered: The experience was supposed to be organized around a transformative justice, rather than a punitive model, yet the community managed to expel two of its members. I saw them use complex concepts in thoughtful ways. We will continue to review and improve our procedures, especially with regards to identifying potential faculty/factotum conflicts earlier so they can be addressed effectively and constructively. Telluride Association is pleased to announce the launch of the Telluride Association Summer Seminars in the summer of 2022. But now my thoughts turned to that moment in the 1970s when leftist organizations imploded, the need to match and raise the militancy of ones comrades leading to a toxic culture filled with dogmatism and disillusion. Each week we read one court decision, one literary text (a novel, memoir, or short-story collection), and three pieces of historical and cultural analysis, with each genre adding new layers and complications to our understanding of race in general, and Blackness in particular. Then he had an unsettling experience while teaching a group of high-school students as part of a highly selective summer program that is convened and sponsored annually by the Telluride Association. Lloyd appealed to the Telluride Association, which "didn't feel comfortable intervening" out of respect for the "democratic self-governance of the student community." The seminar was. In the U.S. and probably beyond, we are at a turning point in how we understand racial diversity. It grew out of Black-student struggles in the late 1960s and early 1970s, themselves born of the civil-rights movement and anti-war protests. No one sent written work. In cases like anti-Black racism, we do need policy fixes that are overbroad to correct for past wrongs, but we also need to put particular emphasis on attending to the diversity and complexity of Black experience. We believe the article includes some substantial mischaracterizations and inaccuracies, including but not limited to his characterization of the programs factotum team and his description of the dismissal of two students. To pick and choose is to err in ways that do more harm than good. At our best, we enter the fray by listening to each other and complementing and challenging the insights of our fellows. For questions, please contact Amina Omari at executive.director@tellurideassociation.org. The result was a redesign of the summer seminars: Telluride would now offer only Critical Black Studies and Anti-Oppressive Studies seminars. Institutions know they have racist habits and know they need to change, but they are very awkward in formulating responsesand they are always looking for shortcuts. I think we all do. This past Friday, we learned of an article by Dr. Vincent Lloyd, a faculty member at one of our 2022 Telluride Association Summer Seminars, expressing his dissatisfaction with his teaching experience. We greatly respect Dr. Lloyds academic expertise and his contribution to our summer seminars. 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. The seminar is a training ground. She then announced that she would take the students back to their house without eating the lunch I had waiting for them. The instructor gentlyideally, almost invisiblyguides discussion toward what matters. Telluride Associations mission is to provide students with educational experiences in critical thinking and democratic community. In a recent book, John McWhorter asserts that anti-racism is a new religion. Understand the big ideas and provocative arguments shaping the academy. Students ought to regard one another as equalsthey are equals and deserve the equal dignity of being treated that way. They also shared student feedback and requests with the professors, as they were trained to do. Because of time constraints, we could not discuss the incident in detail, but Vincent wrote an outstanding piece about it for Compact that deserves your attention. Any outsider becomes a threat. Lloyd: Social movements are messy, and this is especially true for those movements led by youth and those led by people who have suffered a great deal. At the Cornell location, students live in the same house while participating in two different seminars. I decided that the only way to continue was if the Telluride leadership would intervene, reminding the students that the seminar was part of a larger organization with values and norms, and that I was contracted to teach a college-level seminar, understood in the ordinary sense of that term. But I witnessed them learning. Once javascript and access to those URLs are allowed, please refresh this page. While leading a summer seminar last year at the Telluride Association entitled "Race and the Limits of Law in America," Vincent found himself accused of the very forms of anti-racism his course was designed to interrogate. Others are sites of political action which require deferring to authority and exercising discipline. or subscribe. Founded in 1911 by Lucien L. Nunn, Telluride Association is a nonprofit organization that creates and fosters unique educational opportunities. Eventually, I acceded. I thought that those experiences could open public conversations about important dynamics. As I was beginning the seminar, sitting on the grass in my backyard, Keisha interrupted: I think you should start with a lecture offering context for this reading and telling us the main points. I reminded the class of the seminar format, of the reasons for it, and of the snippets of pedagogical theory we had read and discussed together, exploring the value of the seminar. We deeply value learning environments that support open discussion, differing opinions, and productive debate. A dichotomous tenet of some antiracism training is Ibram X. Kendis formula, the opposite of racist isnt not racist. It is antiracist, which could certainly be thought by critics to promote a binary, us vs. them mind-set. Though the process can sometimes be difficult, we believe the experience of democracy is valuable even when it is challenging. This was a challenging and unusual situation with unique features that we believe are unlikely to be replicated in the future. Their number was reduced by two: The previous week, they had voted two classmates out of the house. 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. Weve reviewed our records and endeavored to answer these questions to the extent possible, without exposing individual students to any additional scrutiny. The sense of time collapses, with everything cult-related feeling extremely urgent. In Compact Magazine ( https://compactmag.com/article/a-black-professor-trapped-in-anti-racist-hell), he writes dishonestly about a disastrous Telluride seminar that was hijacked by a TA named Keisha, who turned his students against him and accused him of being anti-black. Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time. I trust the energy and creativity of young people leading social movements to imagine a more just future. plan student activities such as field trips, guest lectures, extracurricular activities, and a student public speaking program. As Lloyd sees it, the workshops at Telluride cultivated cognitive habits directly opposed to those required for a college seminar. For more information about the Associations history and programs, see our website at www.tellurideassociation.org. I was guilty of countless microaggressions., Telluride continued a pattern of tracking liberal values as they evolved., The seminar form pulls against the form of the anti-racism workshop., Two of the Asian-American students would be expelled from the program., I had used racist language. All non-black people, and many black people, are guilty of anti-blackness. share student feedback and requests about the seminar with faculty. Contemporary American mass culture blends many of the elements of what was once considered lowbrow with the dutiful, striving, effortful qualities of middlebrow. In the, Pederasty goes unquestioned, a unicorn is masturbated, and one dinner includes , For 25 years, the Supreme Court declined to hear another suit challenging affirmative action in higher education. In the. It was an idea I quickly dismissed. Young activists who have the capacity to dream a world without domination are instead, at times, demanding more diversity bureaucrats, more diversity trainings, and more ideological policing. Instead of participating in a summer community of 32 high-school students, my group was to be a community of 12 (that would dwindle to nine by the time of the mutiny). Vincent is a professor at Villanova University where he directed the Black Studies Program, leads workshops on anti-racism and transformative justice, and has published books on anti-black racism, including "Black Dignity: The Struggle against Domination".Now, Vincent is one of those rare guests with whom I have profound disagreements on the topic of race, but . Dismissal decisions are not made by students, but by multiple levels of staff and Board, and only after a thorough review process. I dont know. For a 17-year-old at a highly selective, all-expenses-paid summer program, newly empowered with the language of harm, there are relatively few sites at which to use this framework. Twelve high-school students had been chosen by the Telluride Association through a rigorous application processthe acceptance rate is reportedly around 3 percentto spend six weeks together taking a college-level course, all expenses paid. javascript and allows content to be delivered from c950.chronicle.com and chronicle.blueconic.net. Those first few days, the students were exactly what you would expect, at turns bubbly and reserved, all of them curious, playful, figuring out how to relate to each other and to the seminar texts. What happened: Vincent Lloyd, professor director of Africana Studies at Villanova University and author of Break Every Yoke: Religion, Justice, and the Abolition of Prisons, wrote an essay about his experience as "a black professor trapped in anti-racist hell." 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 your radical students saw it, their peers, their teacher, and the format of their seminar were infected with racism, thus the call to end the seminar and demand a new approach. They promised to investigate. We are talking about anti-Black racism in a much more sophisticated way today than we were even 10 years ago. In 2014, participants in the two seminar groups lived their lives together seamlessly outside of the seminar, exploring Ithaca and the Cornell campus, eating and laughing together, and setting up a system to govern their community together. In this case, it appears that student feedback led to strong disagreement between the faculty and factotums about how best to meet students needs. If you have any other questions, please contact Amina Omari at executive.director@tellurideassociation.org. The justice claims coming out of social movements in the last decade reject this framework. And by way of wrapping up our back-and-forth, could you suggest a better alternative? (Telluride seminars are co-taught; my seminar was taught with my wife, a lawyer and indigenous-studies professor.). My body language harmed them. Students continually voiced their desire to find practical actions to help change the world, but after four weeks, they had learned to say that anti-blackness is so foundational, the world could never change. We find this in our families, with bosses at work, with politicians, and systemically: Patriarchy, racism, and colonialism are all systems of domination.

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