On the sunny first day of seminar, I sat at the end of a pair of picnic tables with nervous, excited 17-year-olds. Twelve high-school students had been chosen by the Telluride Association through a rigorous application process—the acceptance rate is reportedly around 3 percent—to spend six weeks together taking a college-level course, all expenses paid.

The group reminded me of the heroes of the Mysterious Benedict Society books I was reading to my daughter: Each teenager, brought together for a common project, had some extraordinary ability and some quirk. One girl from California spoke and thought at machine-gun speed and started collecting pet snails during the pandemic; now she had more than 100. 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. In addition to the seminar, the students practiced democratic self-governance: They lived together and set their own rules. 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.

Four weeks later, I again sat in front of the gathered students. Now, their faces were cold, their eyes down. Since the first week, I had not spotted one smile. Their number was reduced by two: The previous week, they had voted two classmates out of the house. And I was next.

Each student read from 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 didn’t feel safe because I didn’t immediately correct views that failed to treat anti-blackness as the cause of all the world’s ills.

This might be just another lament about “woke” campus culture, and the loss of traditional educational virtues. But the seminar topic was “Race and the Limits of Law in America.” Four of the 6 weeks were focused on anti-black racism (the other two were on anti-immigrant and anti-indigenous racism). I am a black professor, I directed my university’s black-studies program, I lead anti-racism and transformative-justice workshops, and I have published books on anti-black racism and prison abolition. I live in a predominantly black neighborhood of Philadelphia, my daughter went to an Afrocentric school, and I am on the board of our local black cultural organization.

Like others on the left, I had been dismissive of criticisms of the current discourse on race in the United States. But now my thoughts turned to that moment in the 1970s when leftist organizations imploded, the need to match and raise the militancy of one’s comrades leading to a toxic culture filled with dogmatism and disillusion. How did this happen to a group of bright-eyed high school students?

The Telluride Association maintains a low profile, even in higher-education circles, but it has played an important role in shaping the US elite. Its alumni are ideologically diverse: queer theorist Eve Sedgewick and postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivak (its first female member), Georgia politician Stacey Abrams and journalist Walter Isaacson, neoconservatives Paul Wolfowitz and Francis Fukuyama (who served on Telluride’s board). Launched by mining entrepreneur L.L. Nunn in 1911, a few years before he founded Deep Springs College, Telluride aims to cultivate democratic communities among high-school and college students. It runs houses near Cornell and the University of Michigan, where students receive scholarships, govern themselves, and incorporate intellectual life and service work into their residential communities. In 1954, Telluride started its high-school summer program.

Over the years, faculty from many leading US universities have taught for the program. Courses have changed with the times: “Conflicting Ideals of Communism and Democracy” was taught in 1956; the philosopher Robert Nozick taught “Philosophical Conceptions of Liberty” in 1965, and in more recent years topics have included “Gods and Heroes of the Celts and Vikings,” “Public Poetry in a Digital World,” “Literatures of the Security State,” and “Freedom Summer.”

In 2014, I taught “Race and the Limits of Law” for Telluride’s Ithaca location. The first few days were exactly like my 2022 seminar: Students came with extraordinary abilities; they asked probing questions; and they were sometimes awkward. Then, as the six weeks went by, I could see the students forming bonds with each other and with me, and I could see their commitment to the course. They always showed up on time. They always did the work. My daughter turned 1 during the seminar, and not knowing anyone in town, we had the students over to the house we were staying at for her birthday party.

I happened across the Telluride website six years later and was surprised to see my picture, from the birthday party, on the front page. With those fond memories—and with excitement at the prospect of revisiting thorny questions about race after the national conversation had changed so much because of Black Lives Matter—I reached out to Telluride to explore teaching the seminar again. (Telluride seminars are co-taught; my seminar was taught with my wife, a lawyer and indigenous-studies professor.)

In the wake of the George Floyd protests, a group of black Telluride alumni pressured the association to examine the racism that, they claimed, was baked into the organizational culture. “We have all experienced anti-blackness within the association and through its programs,” their open letter said. The result was a redesign of the summer seminars: Telluride would now offer only “Critical Black Studies” and “Anti-Oppressive Studies” seminars. The former would “seek to focus more specifically on the needs and interests of black students.” The seminar I taught—“Race and the Limits of Law”—would be classed with the latter.

In this, Telluride continued a pattern of tracking liberal values as they evolved. It offered courses on race since the 1950s, and the Ithaca house was known as “the most liberal living unit on campus” in the 1970s because of its relatively early acceptance of Jewish, black, and female students. 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. 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 incoherence—or worse.

At the Cornell location, students live in the same house while participating in two different seminars. 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 2022, however, I was told that the “Critical Black Studies”