By now you’ve probably read our Emma Pettit’s exposé chronicling the self-destruction of Pomona College’s English department. The short version: A former chair of the department, Aaron Kunin, was found guilty, by a college disciplinary procedure, of retaliating against an English professor, Valorie D. Thomas, over a series of byzantine disputes involving funds and curricula. (Thomas, who is Black, alleged that Kunin, who is white, had violated antidiscrimination rules.) He challenged that conclusion in court and was exonerated. The drama is in the details.
I want to home in on what might seem like an ancillary aspect of this story but which strikes me as something like its secret heart. That’s the “Innerlight Method” training session, which Thomas had requested $2,400 to attend.
What is Innerlight? “The Innerlight Method™ is a groundbreaking energy therapy system for intuitive and highly sensitive adults and children,” according to its developer’s website. “It balances subtle energy systems to facilitate the body’s ability to heal itself.”
Many readers will agree with Tyler Austin Harper’s judgment, on the podcast he hosts with Jay Caspian Kang, that asking your department to fund face time with your guru “is totally insane.” Insane, maybe, but not necessarily surprising. “This kind of New Age thinking,” Harper went on, “has totally colonized academia to a point that is totally bananas to me. You will hear so many people in HR and academic spaces talk in these woo mystical terms about ‘energy’ and ‘realignment’ and ‘soul healing.’ … This was the thing in this article that triggered me, because every time I hear someone talk like this in academia, which is all the time, my own soul shrivels up a little bit.”
Since retiring from Pomona, Thomas herself has joined the ranks of the gurus; she runs a counseling practice “informed by decolonialism, intuitive inquiry, somatics, mindfulness, traditional and indigenous esoteric knowledge.” (She is also an expert in “equine somatics": “We interact with horses on the ground who are willing to collaborate to enhance our learning.”) The merger of the jargon of the therapeutic, New Age spirituality and identitarian politics is one of the odder legacies of the New Left — one that, at least on campus, abides.
Its tributaries are many. Most respectably, there’s the consciousness-raising exercises of second-wave feminism, which the great sociologist of religion Robert N. Bellah understood long ago to involve a complex interface between politics, religion, and the therapeutic. “Women’s Liberation,” he wrote in the edited volume The New Religious Consciousness (1976), “has raised rather fundamental questions about the relation of human beings to the universe. Perhaps, some have said, the suppression of goddess worship since the Iron Age has been deeply pathological. … A return of the long-repressed feminine side of consciousness could lead, some have argued, to a new, simpler, more celebrative, more natural way of life.”
