‘Sexual Life of Colonialism’ Professor Denied Tenure at Harvard | The American Spectator

A prominent gender studies professor at Harvard University has been denied tenure, leaving faculty “shaken,” according to the Harvard Crimson.

By her colleagues’ account, Durba Mitra — who specializes in the study of female sexuality in India — had been a standout professor. Her work was even “field-changing” and of “clear global significance and impact.”

Highlights from her supposedly globally significant career include an essay on “Critical Perspectives on the SlutWalks in India,” a course that contemplated “queer desires,” and a volume of a feminist journal she edited on female “rage.” Not to be forgotten is Mitra’s “multimedia exhibit” titled “Solidarity! Transnational Feminisms Then and Now.”

Her magnum opus, for which she received several awards — including the Bernard S. Cohn Book Prize from the Association of Asian Studies — is titled Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought. In an interview, Mitra spilled that she uses the book to “make visible a complex edifice of knowledge that saw racialized ideas of women’s sexual deviancy as the primary way in which one could think and write about Indian society.”

Last semester, Mitra taught Harvard’s best and brightest a course that promised to “cover many forms of sexuality, including interracial relationships between colonizer and colonized peoples.” The course was titled “Sexual Life of Colonialism.” (RELATED: Once Upon a Time at Harvard)

“In this course,” the description reads, “we will investigate the role of colonialism and neocolonialism in racial imaginations of gender and sexuality and how these histories shape contemporary understandings of LGBTQ politics, reproductive and sexual rights, and anti-colonial resistance around the world.”

The description further posited that the course would explore “marginalized, queer, and trans sexualities” in “colonial and postcolonial spaces,” including in “West Asia, South Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa.” (RELATED: Francesca Gino and the Rot at the Heart of Elite Academia)

Other courses taught by Mitra include “Feminist Theory: The Body as Archive,” “Feminist and Queer Theories of Difference,” and “Who Run the World? Feminism in the Age of Empire.”

Mitra’s allies insist that her work is some of Harvard’s best.

“On every axis, she has gone above and beyond,” said Harvard history professor Maya R. Jasanoff.

“The depth of the research and the fidelity to the sources and the way that she’s able to pull insights out of reading her archival materials, both along and against the grain — it’s really extraordinary,” said Kirsten A. Weld, also a history professor at Harvard.

And yet, Harvard decided that it was done with Mitra and denied her tenure. She will be required to depart the university within a year’s time. Furthermore, her class that was scheduled for this semester, “Feminist Theories of Difference,” has been canceled. At Harvard, 30 percent of applicants are denied tenure, meaning that Mitra is in the minority. (RELATED: Let Colleges Fail: Use Creative Destruction)

Harvard’s decision is a promising sign that the reign of woke academic silliness is headed toward its end. Perhaps a few years ago, “Sexual Life of Colonialism” would have come across as daringly avant-garde, but today Harvard can’t peddle that kind of nonsense without looking foolish.

The decision is especially hopeful given that Mitra seems to have played the role of a woke academic exceedingly well: She’d published a book with Princeton University Press and had another one set to be released next year, she had been recognized as a “Favorite Professor” three times, she had been awarded with numerous prizes and fellowships, and she’d written numerous journal articles. (RELATED: Harvard’s Sacred Cash Cows)

“In twenty-three years at Harvard and fifteen as a tenured professor, I have seen a lot of tenure cases,” history professor Mary D. Lewis told the Harvard Crimson this week. “While there have been other denials I was sorry to hear about, I have never been at such a total loss to explain Harvard’s decision.”

Of course, it’s hard to believe that Mitra’s colleagues found her work to be good enough to justify awarding her tenure, let alone that they found her contemplation of colonial Indian women’s sexuality to be relevant or grounded in reality. But it does seem that, within the making-up-weird-stuff world of the leftist university, she played her role well.

Set against Harvard’s war with President Donald Trump over its entrenchment in leftist ideology, as well as widespread public backlash over higher education’s radicalism, the tenure denial suggests Harvard is trying to step away from the most extreme progressivism, or that it is at least attempting to keep its professors within the bounds of what can be justified as remotely useful for society. (RELATED: Trump v. Harvard: Battle of the Heavyweights)

Of course, there’s a lot we don’t know here. Perhaps the tenure committee found that Mitra’s book, though published with Princeton University Press, is terrible. Or maybe it simply decided that it didn’t want to have to go through a publicity nightmare every time the name of Mitra’s next course came out.

Whatever the case may be, the Women, Gender, and Sexuality department is certainly interpreting her tenure denial as politically motivated. Its chair, Jocelyn Viterna, said, “In this context of closing the women’s office, the LGBTQ office, and in the context of Brown capitulating on understandings of gender, it’s hard not to imagine that a tenure decision about a star scholar in the WGS program would not have also been influenced by this political moment.”

Mitra’s tenure denial follows another indication that the university may be sidelining its Women, Gender, and Sexuality department. This spring, Harvard blocked the department’s effort to hire C. Riley Snorton, an expert in “transgender histories.”

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