Over the past two decades, in the name of “equity,” elite institutions moved to disassemble everything they had spent years building. Today, even many progressives admit that “Woke 1 was crazyyyy.” But we’re still living with the results—and in some ways only just beginning to see the extent of the wreckage.
One of the casualties has been the Telluride Association Summer Program. Started in 1954, the prestigious humanities program based in Ithaca, New York, annually invites a small class composed of some of the nation’s best high school students to come for an intensive series of college-level seminars.
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In recent years, however, the Telluride Association surrendered what had once been an ironclad commitment to open debate. It reoriented its mission to “anti-oppressive studies,” ignoring its responsibilities to keep its programs running even as its paid professional staff grew. Wrapped in the language of social justice, the dysfunction has become so obvious that next year, for the first time since their founding, the summer programs will be canceled.
Telluride was the ultimate nerd camp. The reward for getting through the gauntlet of essays, interviews, and (in earlier years) standardized test scores required for acceptance was the chance to spend five or six weeks with brilliant classmates and stellar faculty on the campus of Cornell University—and, yes, it made a very good line to add to college applications. Alumni include Paul Wolfowitz, Francis Fukuyama, Walter Isaacson, Reihan Salam, and, by some accident, me.
As with many graduates of the program, I counted my summer experience as one of the formative experiences of my life. I still recall the readings from one seminar on cultural anthropology: essays from Clifford Geertz on Bali and Umberto Eco on Humphrey Bogart and Casablanca. At least one student from my year went on to become a hedge fund manager; another, a professional Communist organizer; a third was a prolific inventor of kitchen equipment for cutting-edge chefs.
Over the past few years, however, the Telluride Association has lost its way. Amid the summer 2020 “racial reckoning,” for example, the organization gave members and staff copies of Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist. In September 2021, it published a self-flagellating statement that claimed its own programs, funded by an endowment that now exceeds $70 million, “reinforce and perpetuate white supremacy and anti-Black racism.” Henceforth, the association announced, it would offer two programs for high school students: one in “Critical Black Studies” and another in “Anti-Oppressive Studies.”
The results were disastrous. In a February 2023 Compact article titled “A Black Professor Trapped in Anti-Racist Hell,” Villanova professor Vincent Lloyd, who had taught in the program in 2014, chronicled the meltdown of his 2022 program. Telluride staff separated the Critical Black Studies students into a “fully ‘black space,’” including separate living arrangements. Lloyd’s “Race and the Limits of Law” seminar—part of the Anti-Oppressive Studies program—remained multiracial, though white and Asian students quickly learned “to shut up,” as Lloyd puts it.
Instead of giving students extra time for writing, thinking, and talking outside of class—as was the case when I attended—staff subjected Lloyd’s students to daily antiracism workshops led by a teaching assistant. Urged on by that assistant, the students boycotted their own seminar as insufficiently committed to fighting “anti-blackness.”
Other alumni and I hoped Lloyd’s article would lead to a course correction. I did not, I’m ashamed to say, go to other alums and try to make that happen; the only defense I can offer is that younger graduates, closer to their own high school and college experiences, have mainly run the Telluride Association.
There was no course correction. On the contrary, Telluride followed the usual pattern that plays out in institutions obsessed with ideological conformity and indoctrination: basic competence began to decline.
The Telluride Association’s substantial endowment was traditionally more than enough to fund separate seminars for high school juniors and (starting in 1993) sophomores, including housing for college members on several campuses. Over the past five years, it even hired new administrative staff: an executive director, a chief financial officer, and, last year, a full-time professional communications manager.
Now, the flagship program seems increasingly to run on a shoestring. This summer, the seminars at Telluride House on the Cornell campus, the traditional heart of the program, were canceled after two weeks amid a wave of staff departures, and students were sent home. (A separate program on the University of Maryland campus continued.) Cornell’s student newspaper covered the program’s neglect and disarray.
The chaos in the program became so acute that the organization found it impossible to ignore. In late September, the association announced in an unsigned statement that it would be canceling its high school program for next summer and that “every aspect” of the programs would be up for a comprehensive review. The statement makes a telling exception: the review will be “rooted in Telluride’s core values: antiracism, curiosity, democracy, community and transformation. . . . Those commitments are not under review.” Antiracism heads that list—a term of art representing exactly the kind of ideological prejudgment that sent the Telluride Association’s seminars spiraling in the first place.
I contacted the Telluride Association to ask why a program once devoted to broad intellectual engagement was now limiting itself to the ideologically inflected theme of “antiracism” and “anti-oppressive studies.” The board president at the time of this summer’s fiasco and the current executive director passed up the chance to comment; the communications director responded to my questions with a general statement reiterating the plans for a review.
It’s impossible to tell how serious the current Telluride Association board will be about its program review. One hopes that the organization is not too far gone to see the downsides of rigid indoctrination. In an email, Lloyd told me that “students can think more deeply about justice and end up better oriented toward justice by embracing the risks of intellectual life and self-governance.” Letting students think for themselves, he tactfully suggested, would have longer lasting effects than “more heavy-handed measures.”
The Telluride summer programs were once a place where some of the country’s top students could discuss deep questions about knowledge and justice without worrying about their academic transcripts. Somewhere along the line, though, a liberal devotion to debate turned into a progressive devotion to preapproved answers. As in much of academia, decisions made in the frenzy of the 2020 “awokening” are now revealing their full consequences.
Reversing those decisions will take a concerted effort to assess the ideas that got things to this point. I don’t know if organizations like the Telluride Association are willing to do that yet. One thing is clear: just restating the same ideologies in different terms won’t suffice.