Behind vine-covered walls on a modest hill overlooking Sunset Boulevard sits the decidedly immodest Chateau Marmont. The hotel was inspired by a French Gothic castle and, at 93, it is easily the oldest thing in Los Angeles that’s still considered sexy.

As a born-and-raised New Yorker without a driver’s license, I found the hotel the perfect place to park myself for a day of meetings in the era before Ubers and WeWorks and Soho Houses. I used to go there in the 2000s, back when I was a wedding planner. It was like a celebrity safari; stars would walk by, within arm’s reach. You could “do Los Angeles” without ever needing to move. I never could have afforded a room there, but I knew by reputation that at night it offered entertainment of a different sort: luxury and licentiousness and debauchery, unbounded by any rules.

In more recent years, I’ve returned to Los Angeles in a different career—as a screenwriter traveling on someone else’s dime. Naturally, I didn’t want to just take meetings at the Chateau; I wanted to stay there, to be a fly on the wall where the wild things were. Only I couldn’t.

I was told, in early 2021, that the hotel was not taking any new bookings. During the pandemic, a dispute between the owner and the staff had exploded, spectacularly. The hotel was now operating with a skeleton crew; employees were on strike, trying to organize a union. Even some celebrities were boycotting it.  

The debauchery the Chateau was known for came at a cost. After a massive round of pandemic-related layoffs, employees started talking, publicly, about what they’d experienced on the job, and the stories were gross. Allegations included maids being forced to handle used drug syringes, staff members being cajoled by poolside guests to lotion them up, sexts and slurs and relentless sexual propositions from colleagues or guests. (A spokesperson for the company told me that “the Chateau vigorously objects” to these allegations.)

The Chateau Marmont opened in 1929 and from its earliest days was known as a discreet playground for the rich and famous. “If you must get into trouble, do so at the Marmont,” the studio mogul Harry Cohn is rumored to have told his biggest stars. Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller made love there; Lindsay Lohan lived there; John Belushi died there.

In 1990, André Balazs purchased the property and began restoring it with his ex-wife. The son of academic Hungarian immigrants, Balazs made his fortune in biotech before turning his attention to nightlife and hospitality and opening a series of hotels and private clubs. “All good hotels tend to lead people to do things they wouldn’t necessarily do at home” is one of his widely quoted bon mots. The Chateau is known for catering to regulars, many of whom arrive precisely to do the kind of partying they wouldn’t do at home.

In many ways, the hotel operated like a very-high-end mom-and-pop enterprise, long functioning without corporate vultures lurking for earnings reports, in-house legal teams wringing their hands over the risk of litigation, or a fully functional HR department. Its last full-time HR director left in 2017 and was never officially replaced.

For years, the workers’ grievances racked up. In a major exposé, The Hollywood Reporter described complaints from housekeeping of short staffing and sordid parties to clean up after. Front-of-house workers said they’d experienced unwanted sexual advances from guests and colleagues alike. Ethnic slurs were reportedly hurled with regularity at Latino kitchen staff by management. Black and Latino employees said they had been back-burnered for the best shifts and promotions—allegations corroborated by their white colleagues. (In a statement to me, the spokesperson rejected all of these allegations and called them “unsupported.”)

Then, in March 2020, at the dawn of the pandemic, Balazs laid off all but nine of the hotels’ 259 employees—without severance or decent health benefits. Many had been in his service for years. Though I didn’t get to speak with Balazs directly, in a statement he said he saw the decision to cut down to a “‘caretaker’ staff” as necessary “because of the world-wide Covid 19 situation and my perspective of its likely duration.” The laid-off workers saw it differently. The move amplified murmurs about unionization, murmurs that grew louder that summer after Balazs announced to The Wall Street Journal a plan to convert the hotel into a private club, one served by staff with a “different skill set” from the old hotel workers’. Business publications interpreted this as a COVID-related pivot, but employees—and many others—speculated that it was an attempt to undermine the union effort. (The spokesperson told me that the private club was never “more than a concept.”)

A movie and a TV show were being filmed at the Chateau: Being the Ricardos and The Offer. Under pressure from Unite Here 11, the 32,000-member hospitality workers’ union that was representing Chateau employees, both moved production elsewhere. The celebrities were divided (despite the fact that most of them—Hollywood being a union town—belong to unions). Some, such as Amanda Seyfried and Issa Rae, boycotted the hotel. Others seemed oblivious or chose not to care; Jay-Z threw an Oscars after-party there last year, which celebrity scabs including Questlove and Rosario Dawson crossed a picket line to attend. (“I didn’t cross a picket line,” Dawson, under fire, later tweeted—apparently wanting people to know that she’d arrived so late to the party that most of the protesters had gone home.)

Reading about the employees’ grievances, I felt outraged on their behalf. But I was skeptical that unionization could transform their workplace. The Chateau is not a Holiday Inn; it’s a luxury boutique hotel. The Chateau doesn’t just offer rooms for guests to sleep in; it offers, as Balazs has put it, “experiences”—experiences that might, I suspected, be fundamentally at odds with a better environment for workers. Guests have been drawn to the Chateau over the decades less by the thread count in the bedding and the expansive wine list than by the seductions of a place that turned a blind eye to social transgressions.

In that Hollywood Reporter exposé, one regular anonymously described the Chateau as “this weird beast that kind of slipped by and shouldn’t exist as it is, but it does. But if you were to say, ‘It needs better HR and proper compliances and codes and egalitarianism at the door,’ it loses its touch.” When briefed on the staff’s troubles, a business associate of the hotel told the paper, “I’m reconsidering the Chateau through a totally different lens now. All of the talk of it being a ‘playground,’ of it exalting ‘privacy.’ It really was just a system that protected white men in power.”

In that light, the question for me became: Can debauchery and decency co-exist? Can luxury accommodate fair labor practices and still feel luxurious?

From personal experience, I had my doubts.

Owning a luxury service business of any kind can be ethically and emotionally challenging. It strains what you believe is acceptable behavior to tolerate at work, and what needs to be tolerated in order to turn a profit. I’ll never forget the first time I questioned the direction that my professional life had taken. I was underneath a princess-waist Vera Wang gown, helping my client hoist up the skirt so that she could pee, when I found myself at eye level with the words Meet Mrs. Cohen, written in cursive blue-Swarovski crystal across her underpants. I swallowed the moment, knowing that this service was the “above and beyond” that my clientele expected.

I had a harder time justifying this kind of dirty work when I had to ask other people to do it. Over the years, our staff members were told to, among other things, smoke cigarettes and exhale into brides’ faces (so the brides would not have to smoke themselves and ruin their lipstick), walk dogs, hold babies, dance with fathers/brothers/groomsmen, take shots, cover up infidelities, cover up relapses, buy alcohol, buy drugs, set off fireworks, and put out literal fires. There was verbal abuse, unwanted sexual advances, and wild, drunken accusations. (There were also some very nice people; you cling to the memories of the very nice people.)

Depending on my own exhaustion level, I heard staff members’ complaints with either horror or indifference. This was, after all, part of the job of being in “luxury hospitality.” My partner and I tried, as best as possible, to insulate our employees by adding behavioral clauses to our contracts: Thou shalt not curse at staff; thou shall not grope staff; thou shalt not force staff to smoke on your behalf.

But mainly, we did what people used to do in the good old days: We threw money at the problem. We would attempt to, within the bounds of profitability, make it worth our staff’s while to tolerate the abuse they endured while we kept saying yes to our clients’ whims. Because that’s what the luxury service business is all about.

But over the years, the rich got richer, and their behavior seemed to get worse. I began to wonder if hearing yes was no longer enough. Was knowing that the people who served you had to say yes an essential part of the fun?

André Balazs is very particular about his glassware—in particular, about whether the shatterproof glasses used near his pool feel as luxurious as real glass. I know this not because I’ve ever met or even spoken to Balazs, but because I have planned several lavish weddings for select clients to whom he would rent his former private estate in upstate New York. Through many people—his house managers, his personal chef, corporate executives from André Balazs Properties—Balazs made his preferences, opinions, and, in fairness, concerns for our clients’ happiness and satisfaction known. No detail was too small.

So when I heard, in December, that the hotel had struck a deal with the union, I knew that Balazs must have micromanaged every detail. But I was surprised when I read that the resulting contract was fairer and more generous than anyone in the luxury-hotel business could have imagined.

Among the workers’ victories were a 25 percent wage increase for nontipped workers; a raise to $25 an hour for housekeeping within one year; health coverage for employees who work more than 60 hours a month; free legal services for employees with immigration, tenant, or consumer issues; and job-protection measures for immigrant employees with Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals or Temporary Protected Status. Union representatives called the package “unprecedented.” And the spokesperson told me that many of the laid-off workers have since returned to the hotel.

After years of acrimony, how had such a seemingly unbridgeable gap been closed?

Balazs has never had a choir boy’s reputation. The bachelor made headlines for years with his steady rotation of celebrity love interests. A 2020 Tatler article described his life as “deliciously naughty,” noting his dedication to delivering “excess” to his guests and his reputation for “outrageous flirting.” Perhaps too outrageous. The actor Amanda Anka accused him of groping her in 2014, after the opening of Horrible Bosses 2. After the incident, Anka’s husband, Jason Bateman, spat in Balazs’s face.

But Balazs was apparently shaken by his employees’ charges, especially of racial discrimination. He felt that they were fundamentally at odds with who he was.

“André’s lived a life committed to social justice from his college years and throughout his adult life,” Neil Getnick, a lawyer specializing in whistleblower representation and one of Balazs’s oldest friends, told me. Getnick serves as the business-integrity counsel for Balazs’s properties. He also represented Balazs at the bargaining table.

Getnick and Balazs met at Cornell in the late ’70s when Getnick, a law student, and Balazs, an undergraduate working at a student newspaper, together lobbied the university to divest from apartheid-era South Africa. The ’90s, Getnick told me, found him and Balazs collaborating again, this time with the Reverend Jesse Jackson to free the Kenyan political prisoner Koigi wa Wamwere—another Cornell classmate. Later, the two friends established a scholarship in Kenya with, Getnick said, the support of Congressman John Lewis. For a while Balazs was an investor in a New York nightclub called M.K.—“so called,” he said in an interview, “because we obtained the license on Martin Luther King Day.”

One day about a year ago, protesters outside the Chateau were joined by pastors and choir singers from nearby churches. Balazs, Getnick told me, found that “too much to bear,” and he went down to the picket line.

Pastor William D. Smart Jr., the president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference of Southern California, spotted Balazs, and approached him. He later told me about the conversation: “We said, ‘Everyone wants to talk to you and try to resolve these issues.’” Smart recalled Balazs responding, “Well, you don’t know me, but I’m not the guy that they’re painting me out to be.”

A meeting was arranged. Getnick, Balazs, and union representatives convened for the first time, with Pastor Smart serving as mediator. But negotiations stalled; there was no follow-up. Early on Pentecost Sunday, Smart sat down to write his sermon, and was moved to call Balazs.

He told me that he asked Balazs, “Where have you been? What’s going on? We started something; you’re not finishing it.” And Balazs replied, “Well, there’s no excuse,” and bingo: “He made the commitment on that Sunday call that he would meet; he would start the process.” Six months later, they had a deal.

This, Getnick said, “was not at all typical of how these negotiations would typically proceed.” Which, of course, is how you would expect something to go down at Chateau Marmont.

I would like to think that the agreement will serve as a model for other luxury businesses—and certainly the hotel industry is watching—but I’m skeptical. Yes, the dogged commitment of workers and organizers is what brought injustices at Chateau Marmont to light. But this happy ending ultimately depended on the whims of one very wealthy man. One who—luckily—happened to be a Boomer with a soft spot for clergymen, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Congress. Yesterday, Jeff Bezos wanted to be a media mogul; today, a sports impresario. This whole thing could have easily gone a different way.

I also couldn’t help wondering how much the contract will change workers’ experience on the job. They’re better-compensated; they have retirement benefits and other protections. But the agreement does little to shield them from entitled or inebriated guests. It did what I used to do: It threw money at the problem.

This morning at the Chateau there will still be vomit to clean up from last night’s rager. Tonight, or the next, there will still be ass grabs by Hollywood honchos. I’m not sure whether a great place for the wealthy can ever be a great place for those who serve them. In a business where the key word is yes, unions can police employers, but the whole point of a luxury experience is that no one polices the guests.

A few years ago, the novelist and short-story writer Lauren Groff reflected on what had launched one of the more sparkling literary careers of recent years:

When C. Michael Curtis pulled my short story “L. DeBard and Aliette” from the slush pile in 2005, I was in my first semester in graduate school at Madison. In the years since I’d graduated from college, I’d been a bartender and administrative assistant and had worked my brain and fingers raw, trying and mostly failing to write well on my own. In that time, I finished three and a half apprentice novels and countless short stories, none of which was very good. Finally, with the story that The Atlantic took, I had at last written a story that was not only good enough but good enough for Curtis’s sharp eye and exacting standards.

Groff went on: “My entire life as a writer unfolded from that moment of acceptance from C. Michael Curtis and The Atlantic, and the sheer luck of that snip in time feels holy to me.”

Mike Curtis, who died last week at the age of 88, was a member of The Atlantic’s staff for 57 years. The American literary empyrean is thickly populated with writers Mike discovered or nurtured. For good reason: Over his long career as an Atlantic editor—and as a teacher of writing at Harvard, MIT, Cornell, Tufts, Boston University, Bennington College, and, most recently, Wofford College, in Spartanburg, South Carolina, where he co-occupied the John C. Cobb Chair in the Humanities with his wife, the novelist Betsy Cox—Mike was a tireless champion of short fiction who loved nothing more than discovering new talent. “The best part of my job,” he once said, “is turning over all those rocks and finding a silver dollar now and then.”

During his long tenure at The Atlantic, Mike turned over a lot of rocks, and found a lot of silver dollars. Among the writers whose work that Mike was the first, or among the first, to discover and publish in a national magazine were Charles Baxter, Ann Beattie, Ethan Canin, Louise Erdrich, Rebecca Lee, Bobbie Ann Mason, Jay McInerny, James Alan McPherson, Tim O’Brien, John Sayles, Akhil Sharma, Elizabeth Stuckey-French, and Tobias Wolff. Mike also worked with plenty of established masters: A. S. Byatt and Saul Bellow, Raymond Carver and Cynthia Ozick, Alice Munro and Richard Ford, John Updike and Philip Roth, Richard Yates and Paul Theroux and Walter Mosley, Barth and Barthelme and Borges, and many, many others.

In 2002, Nic Pizzolatto, then a student in the M.F.A. program at the University of Arkansas, submitted two stories to The Atlantic. He came home one day to find a message on his voicemail—it was Mike Curtis saying that he liked the stories and was accepting them for publication. “I think at first I thought it was one of my friends, being an asshole,” Pizzolatto recalled. But the magazine published “Ghost-Birds” in the October 2003 issue and “Between Here and the Yellow Sea” in November 2004, and Pizzolatto embarked on a successful career as a novelist and television writer, eventually creating and writing the acclaimed True Detective series for HBO.

Ann Beattie recently described the role Mike played in her career:

When I first started to write fiction in the early 70s, the name C. Michael Curtis was interchangeable with Shining Star. He was one: someone to look up to because of his ability to spot emerging talent; an esteemed editor among editors; a man who shaped taste and followed through with writers, encouraging them in significant (and also thoughtful) ways. He really loved short stories, and he was responsible for helping along—really, for determining—the early careers of many young writers, in a genre that, pre-mass-MFA, had been faltering. I knew him as a person determined to re-energize the contemporary American short story—a dedication that was indispensable to its resurgence. He was such an astute reader, and, in his interactions with writers, a listener. Watchful. Helpful and kind. He just assumed that reading and writing were important, essential pursuits, and that it was his role to encourage things along, spreading the good word. In many senses, he was a true believer.

One of the first people Mike brought into The Atlantic after arriving at the magazine was a writing student at Syracuse University who, in the early 1960s, was contributing violent, bloody, sex-and-booze-saturated stories to a variety of university-affiliated publications. Mike pictured the writer, who went by “J. C. Oates,” as “a scruffy garage mechanic with a sour view of humanity, someone I wouldn’t want to meet on a dark night.” But he admired the writing and accepted one of Oates’s submissions, contingent on the author allowing Mike to cut the story by one-third. “In the Region of Ice,” whose author had dropped the initials and was now going by Joyce Carol Oates, was published in The Atlantic in August 1966, and was deemed the best story of the year by the O. Henry Collection, then the most prestigious garland in short fiction. In the ensuing decades, Mike published many stories by Oates, now one of the most influential voices in American fiction and herself a dedicated teacher.

Across six decades, Mike and his team of interns and editorial assistants sifted through thousands of stories each month. His correspondence was immense and never-ending, scrawled in the white space of the letters he received in a tight, nearly indecipherable hand. As Jane Rosenzweig, now the director of the writing center at Harvard, remembered:

When I started working as Mike’s assistant, in 1994, his first compliment was about how fast I could type (on the electric typewriter in my office)—not because he didn’t value my reading and critiquing skills, but because my typing speed allowed me to keep up with the enormous number of letters he wrote to authors who submitted their short stories to the magazine. Mike read everything with the same attention and interest—stories submitted by literary agents, stories sent directly to him by authors, stories pulled from the “slush” pile by interns. His personal replies to authors were legendary; I still meet writers who can quote verbatim what he said to them 25 years ago, both the praise and the criticism. He may have thought the story was “too long for what it accomplishes,” or “small,” or “engaging, but not for us,” but he encouraged those writers to try again, and many did—for decades. The letters were usually brief—just a sentence or two—but enough to remind an aspiring writer that someone was out there, waiting for their next story.

Tobias Wolff recalled Mike’s shrewd relentlessness in a task that required both judgment and endurance:

How many manuscripts came pouring through Mike’s mail slot every day? In the course of a week? A month? Hundreds, for sure. Yet whenever I spoke to Mike about writing, almost always on the phone, during editing sessions (we met only twice, and briefly), he warmed to the subject with the freshness of youth. And he brought that same freshness to our editing sessions. In truth, I couldn’t wear the man down, hard as I often tried, in my defense of a word or phrase or passage that I thought indispensable to my story, and that Mike did not. He wasn’t always right, but he was right most of the time.

Mike’s path to becoming an influential figure in American fiction was far from foreordained. He was indeed hard to wear down. Born in 1934, he experienced a Dickensian early childhood—a tumultuous and disrupted family life; stints in foster homes; boarding school starting at age 4; and high-school classmates who beat him up, at an Arkansas school from which almost no one went on to college and where he played on a basketball team that never won. Ralph Lombreglia, one of the writers Mike worked with for decades, recalled getting a rare glimpse into Mike’s past:

I first met Mike in the mid-1970s when I wrote to ask his advice about becoming a fiction writer. He invited me to the Atlantic offices where I arrived in a suit, tie, and London Fog raincoat with epaulets on the shoulders. I’ll always be grateful to him for not remembering that meeting. Later, whenever he bought one of my short stories, we had lunch together on Newbury Street, concluding with his favorite dessert, chocolate-covered ice cream bonbons. One of those lunches was particularly memorable. The story he was publishing concerned a woman raised in an orphanage despite having had two living parents. “You know,” he said, “your story is remarkably similar to my own life,” and went on to tell me that he was the illegitimate son of the prominent architect Ely Kahn. Mike’s mother had had a passing affair with him in the 1930s, but she “didn’t want a son around,” as he put it, and so he was abandoned to various boarding schools and foster homes. For years he’d known his father’s identity but never revealed it, even when he first met members of the man’s family. I told Mike that my own mother’s life was the basis of that story, and that I intended to expand it into a novel someday. My last letter from Mike, in 2018, began, “Finished your novel, all 576 pages of it.” His unsurprising advice was to cut it by half and send it back to him. I’m still in the middle of that rewrite. I assumed that Mike would be around forever.

From his inauspicious Arkansas high school, Mike eventually escaped to Cornell’s School of Hotel Management, in 1952. Browsing in the university library, he discovered the works of Franz Kafka. No more hotel management—he wanted to transfer to the liberal-arts college and become a literature major. He had to apply several times before administrators realized he was serious enough to admit. Soon, he was editing the literary magazine and working for the newspaper and rooming with an engineering major and aspiring writer named Thomas Pynchon. His other roommate was the folk singer and novelist Richard Fariña, who would go on to write the 1966 cult classic Been Down So Long It Looks Up to Me. (Fariña would later marry Joan Baez’s sister Mimi; Pynchon served as best man.)

After graduation, in 1956, Mike briefly worked at the Ithaca Journal and at Newsweek before returning to Cornell for a doctorate in political science. He was unsure whether he should pursue a career at the CIA or as a journalist. But he kept his hand in literature, writing fiction for campus literary magazines and composing poems, one of which won an American Academy of Poets Prize. In 1961, when Peter Davison, The Atlantic’s longtime poetry editor, came to Cornell with Anne Sexton to do a reading, Mike pressed some poems into his hands. Davison ended up accepting three of them for publication. He also offered Mike a summer job reading the fiction slush pile. This led to a phone call in the spring of 1963 from the magazine’s top editor, Edward Weeks, asking if Mike would come to Boston and take a job as a junior editor. Mike was about to take his comprehensive exams en route to securing his Ph.D. But, as he recalled in a 1984 interview with The Missouri Review, “I had been in grad school for four years and my wife was about to have a baby and I’d been in Ithaca for twelve years and it was time to leave. So I said yes, took a leave of absence from grad school, and came to The Atlantic.” That leave of absence never ended. “In those days The Atlantic had no masthead and we really didn’t have titles in any formal way. I came as an assistant to the editor. I was there for five weeks before I ever saw Mr. Weeks. In fact, I feared he might not even know I was there.” An older editor, Charles Morton, took Mike under his wing, and he soon developed a portfolio editing both fiction and nonfiction, especially pieces on sports, religion, and the social sciences.

In 1966, Weeks was succeeded as editor in chief by Robert Manning. In his memoir, The Swamp Root Chronicle, Manning recorded that among the editors he inherited was “a young Cornellian named C. Michael Curtis [who] had a sharp ear and a clear eye for promising new short story writers as well as a good grip on the many social issues with which the magazine concerned itself. Mike was a shy and complicated fellow whom the vicissitudes of childhood had afflicted with a stutter that magically disappeared when he taught creative writing at nearby colleges … or when he held a good hand at the poker table.”

In time left over after editing, teaching, and family, Mike applied himself to pickup basketball. He played at YMCAs and writers’ conferences all over the country. He wasn’t tall, and after age 50 he wore rec specs and a bulky knee brace that he used as a weapon when posting up in the paint. But he was an ardent competitor—nickname: “Bear”—who could score layups over taller defenders using crafty spin and whose passing was crisp and creative; unalert teammates were liable to take a hard no-look pass to the nose or the back of the skull. He refused to let advancing infirmity keep him off the court, playing regularly deep into his 80s. The writer Ethan Canin remembered those games:

He pretty much gave me my start as a writer, picking me out of a slush pile that only a person like him would have bothered to read, let alone conscientiously. And then for the next thirty years fighting the good fight, always pushing literary fiction, always pushing young writers. But what I remember most about Mike was the way he played basketball. Rumor had it that in his prime he’d been a Golden Gloves boxer, and he certainly played that way. He showed up on the court with a piece of hardware around his knee that looked like the spurs from a Roman chariot. And it turns out he was in basketball as he was in life—always pushing, always pushing.

Mike possessed both stoicism and a sly wit. The wit emerged from what appeared, deceptively, to be a placid and dry demeanor, and it made itself known like an ambush in his letters and lectures. A mischievous tone sometimes took on an edge. For years, a letter Mike wrote in 1989 hung on the walls of The Atlantic’s offices. A frustrated aspiring contributor who had had his submissions rejected many times had written in to say that he’d heard rumors that the magazine used five different forms of rejection letters for different situations. Mike responded:

The persistent rumors are quite true, though modest in their assessment of our protocols. We have, in fact, many more than five different kinds of rejection slips. One slip, for example, is sent in response to all stories about household pets. Another is used to reject stories about troubled academic couples traveling in Europe (still further distinction is made between stories in which the warring couple is restored in their affection for each other by the spectacle of alien hearts at play and stories in which the more justifiably aggrieved of the pair comes at last to his/her senses and cuts short what promises to become a damaging drift into self-degradation).

Other slips are used for war stories, for stories about adolescents involving college (or high school) chums who finally realize the truth of their relationships, or any story in which one character is a fish. We have a special stock and ink for stories about children who have been abandoned or abused by one or both parents, and for whom the memory has become particularly acute as the child, now an adult, reflects upon the neediness of his/her own child/children. Still other rejection slips are earmarked for stories which make use of anthropomorphism, women who suddenly develop male sexual characteristics, or automobiles that talk back.

We have rejection slips for retired professionals, for children under the age of 14, for writers who hold political office, and for academics who have been told by friends they ought to submit manuscripts to The Atlantic.

We have rejection slips for stories sent simultaneously to more than one magazine, for writers who use only one name (usually a vegetable or mineral), for fiction manuscripts sent as proof that anyone can do better than the author of a recent Atlantic story, and for writers who say they will renew their subscriptions to this magazine only if we will publish their fiction.

We also have a special rejection letter for writers who are more wedded to the possibilities of language than to the niceties of convincing narrative. That is the letter you are reading at this moment.

When The Atlantic was based in Boston, Mike and his family would host lively annual softball games and picnics at their home in Concord and then in Littleton, Massachusetts, where children of staff would play alongside the sheep he kept in the summer, in lieu of having to mow the lawn. Inevitably a basketball game would also break out at the hoop on the garage or across the street. Those were family occasions, and children were never shy around Mike. Tobias Wolff remembers:

One day my wife heard my then-5-year-old son, Michael, talking to someone upstairs, yet she knew he was alone up there. She found him with the telephone in his hand, gabbing away. It was Mike on the other end. He’d called to discuss a story, but was happy to talk to my boy instead. He was laughing when I took possession of the phone. Well, why not? It was surely more fun than listening to me plant my flag on some needless adjective.

Decades of reading more than 10,000 short stories a year in search of the dozen or so that The Atlantic could actually publish that year infused Mike with a deep belief in the importance of fiction to culture, and a kind of impish wisdom about the writing life.

On handling disappointing news from editors: “Take your rejection slips and cover a wall with them. I did that when I was in college. I became fascinated by the different paper colors and typefaces and probably sent work to magazines I otherwise wouldn’t have, except that I wanted to get copies of their rejection slips.”

On what a short story can accomplish: “The value of short fiction lies, perhaps, in its capacity to ignite uncertainty and mindfulness into our lives, as well as to remind us of the perceptiveness and artfulness of the storytellers among us.”

Mike leaves behind six anthologies of short fiction, including Contemporary New England Stories (1992), Contemporary West Coast Stories (1993), God: Stories (1998), and Faith: Stories (2003); five Atlantic National Magazine Awards for fiction, along with many more finalist nominations; and the C. Michael Curtis Short Story Book Prize, which awards $5,000 and publication to a debut book of short fiction by writers living in the South.

He is survived by his wife, the novelist and poet Betsy Cox; his brothers, Ben Curtis and Andrew Curtis; his son Hans Curtis; his daughter, Hilary Curtis Osmer; his stepdaughter, Elizabeth Morrow; his stepson, Michael Cox; and five grandchildren—D. J. Osmer, Jack Morrow, Nate Morrow, Caroline Cox, and Andrew Cox. His oldest son, Christopher Curtis, died in 2013. He is also survived by hundreds of writers whose careers he launched or nurtured; by the thousands more whose work he gave the respect of serious attention; and by a republic of letters enriched by his having contributed to it with such dedication for so long.

A few years ago, the novelist and short-story writer Lauren Groff reflected on what had launched one of the more sparkling literary careers of recent years:

When C. Michael Curtis pulled my short story “L. DeBard and Aliette” from the slush pile in 2005, I was in my first semester in graduate school at Madison. In the years since I’d graduated from college, I’d been a bartender and administrative assistant and had worked my brain and fingers raw, trying and mostly failing to write well on my own. In that time, I finished three and a half apprentice novels and countless short stories, none of which was very good. Finally, with the story that The Atlantic took, I had at last written a story that was not only good enough but good enough for Curtis’s sharp eye and exacting standards.

Groff went on: “My entire life as a writer unfolded from that moment of acceptance from C. Michael Curtis and The Atlantic, and the sheer luck of that snip in time feels holy to me.”

Mike Curtis, who died last week at the age of 88, was a member of The Atlantic’s staff for 57 years. The American literary empyrean is thickly populated with writers Mike discovered or nurtured. For good reason: Over his long career as an Atlantic editor—and as a teacher of writing at Harvard, MIT, Cornell, Tufts, Boston University, Bennington College, and, most recently, Wofford College, in Spartanburg, South Carolina, where he co-occupied the John C. Cobb Chair in the Humanities with his wife, the novelist Betsy Cox—Mike was a tireless champion of short fiction who loved nothing more than discovering new talent. “The best part of my job,” he once said, “is turning over all those rocks and finding a silver dollar now and then.”

During his long tenure at The Atlantic, Mike turned over a lot of rocks, and found a lot of silver dollars. Among the writers whose work that Mike was the first, or among the first, to discover and publish in a national magazine were Charles Baxter, Ann Beattie, Ethan Canin, Louise Erdrich, Rebecca Lee, Bobbie Ann Mason, Jay McInerny, James Alan McPherson, Tim O’Brien, John Sayles, Akhil Sharma, Elizabeth Stuckey-French, and Tobias Wolff. Mike also worked with plenty of established masters: A. S. Byatt and Saul Bellow, Raymond Carver and Cynthia Ozick, Alice Munro and Richard Ford, John Updike and Philip Roth, Richard Yates and Paul Theroux and Walter Mosley, Barth and Barthelme and Borges, and many, many others.

In 2002, Nic Pizzolatto, then a student in the M.F.A. program at the University of Arkansas, submitted two stories to The Atlantic. He came home one day to find a message on his voicemail—it was Mike Curtis saying that he liked the stories and was accepting them for publication. “I think at first I thought it was one of my friends, being an asshole,” Pizzolatto recalled. But the magazine published “Ghost-Birds” in the October 2003 issue and “Between Here and the Yellow Sea” in November 2004, and Pizzolatto embarked on a successful career as a novelist and television writer, eventually creating and writing the acclaimed True Detective series for HBO.

Ann Beattie recently described the role Mike played in her career:

When I first started to write fiction in the early 70s, the name C. Michael Curtis was interchangeable with Shining Star. He was one: someone to look up to because of his ability to spot emerging talent; an esteemed editor among editors; a man who shaped taste and followed through with writers, encouraging them in significant (and also thoughtful) ways. He really loved short stories, and he was responsible for helping along—really, for determining—the early careers of many young writers, in a genre that, pre-mass-MFA, had been faltering. I knew him as a person determined to re-energize the contemporary American short story—a dedication that was indispensable to its resurgence. He was such an astute reader, and, in his interactions with writers, a listener. Watchful. Helpful and kind. He just assumed that reading and writing were important, essential pursuits, and that it was his role to encourage things along, spreading the good word. In many senses, he was a true believer.

One of the first people Mike brought into The Atlantic after arriving at the magazine was a writing student at Syracuse University who, in the early 1960s, was contributing violent, bloody, sex-and-booze-saturated stories to a variety of university-affiliated publications. Mike pictured the writer, who went by “J. C. Oates,” as “a scruffy garage mechanic with a sour view of humanity, someone I wouldn’t want to meet on a dark night.” But he admired the writing and accepted one of Oates’s submissions, contingent on the author allowing Mike to cut the story by one-third. “In the Region of Ice,” whose author had dropped the initials and was now going by Joyce Carol Oates, was published in The Atlantic in August 1966, and was deemed the best story of the year by the O’Henry Collection, then the most prestigious garland in short fiction. In the ensuing decades, Mike published many stories by Oates, now one of the most influential voices in American fiction and herself a dedicated teacher.

Across six decades, Mike and his team of interns and editorial assistants sifted through thousands of stories each month. His correspondence was immense and never-ending, scrawled in the white space of the letters he received in a tight, nearly indecipherable hand. As Jane Rosenzweig, now the director of the writing center at Harvard, remembered:

When I started working as Mike’s assistant, in 1994, his first compliment was about how fast I could type (on the electric typewriter in my office)—not because he didn’t value my reading and critiquing skills, but because my typing speed allowed me to keep up with the enormous number of letters he wrote to authors who submitted their short stories to the magazine. Mike read everything with the same attention and interest—stories submitted by literary agents, stories sent directly to him by authors, stories pulled from the “slush” pile by interns. His personal replies to authors were legendary; I still meet writers who can quote verbatim what he said to them 25 years ago, both the praise and the criticism. He may have thought the story was “too long for what it accomplishes,” or “small,” or “engaging, but not for us,” but he encouraged those writers to try again, and many did—for decades. The letters were usually brief—just a sentence or two—but enough to remind an aspiring writer that someone was out there, waiting for their next story.

Tobias Wolff recalled Mike’s shrewd relentlessness in a task that required both judgment and endurance:

How many manuscripts came pouring through Mike’s mail slot every day? In the course of a week? A month? Hundreds, for sure. Yet whenever I spoke to Mike about writing, almost always on the phone, during editing sessions (we met only twice, and briefly), he warmed to the subject with the freshness of youth. And he brought that same freshness to our editing sessions. In truth, I couldn’t wear the man down, hard as I often tried, in my defense of a word or phrase or passage that I thought indispensable to my story, and that Mike did not. He wasn’t always right, but he was right most of the time.

Mike’s path to becoming an influential figure in American fiction was far from foreordained. He was indeed hard to wear down. Born in 1934, he experienced a Dickensian early childhood—a tumultuous and disrupted family life; stints in foster homes; boarding school starting at age 4; and high-school classmates who beat him up, at an Arkansas school from which almost no one went on to college and where he played on a basketball team that never won. Ralph Lombreglia, one of the writers Mike worked with for decades, recalled getting a rare glimpse into Mike’s past:

I first met Mike in the mid-1970s when I wrote to ask his advice about becoming a fiction writer. He invited me to the Atlantic offices where I arrived in a suit, tie, and London Fog raincoat with epaulets on the shoulders. I’ll always be grateful to him for not remembering that meeting. Later, whenever he bought one of my short stories, we had lunch together on Newbury Street, concluding with his favorite dessert, chocolate-covered ice cream bonbons. One of those lunches was particularly memorable. The story he was publishing concerned a woman raised in an orphanage despite having had two living parents. “You know,” he said, “your story is remarkably similar to my own life,” and went on to tell me that he was the illegitimate son of the prominent architect Ely Kahn. Mike’s mother had had a passing affair with him in the 1930s, but she “didn’t want a son around,” as he put it, and so he was abandoned to various boarding schools and foster homes. For years he’d known his father’s identity but never revealed it, even when he first met members of the man’s family. I told Mike that my own mother’s life was the basis of that story, and that I intended to expand it into a novel someday. My last letter from Mike, in 2018, began, “Finished your novel, all 576 pages of it.” His unsurprising advice was to cut it by half and send it back to him. I’m still in the middle of that rewrite. I assumed that Mike would be around forever.

From his inauspicious Arkansas high school, Mike eventually escaped to Cornell’s School of Hotel Management, in 1952. Browsing in the university library, he discovered the works of Franz Kafka. No more hotel management—he wanted to transfer to the liberal-arts college and become a literature major. He had to apply several times before administrators realized he was serious enough to admit. Soon, he was editing the literary magazine and working for the newspaper and rooming with an engineering major and aspiring writer named Thomas Pynchon. His other roommate was the folk singer and novelist Richard Fariña, who would go on to write the 1966 cult classic Been Down So Long It Looks Up to Me. (Fariña would later marry Joan Baez’s sister Mimi; Pynchon served as best man.)

After graduation, in 1956, Mike briefly worked at the Ithaca Journal and at Newsweek before returning to Cornell for a doctorate in political science. He was unsure whether he should pursue a career at the CIA or as a journalist. But he kept his hand in literature, writing fiction for campus literary magazines and composing poems, one of which won an American Academy of Poets Prize. In 1961, when Peter Davison, The Atlantic’s longtime poetry editor, came to Cornell with Anne Sexton to do a reading, Mike pressed some poems into his hands. Davison ended up accepting three of them for publication. He also offered Mike a summer job reading the fiction slush pile. This led to a phone call in the spring of 1963 from the magazine’s top editor, Edward Weeks, asking if Mike would come to Boston and take a job as a junior editor. Mike was about to take his comprehensive exams en route to securing his Ph.D. But, as he recalled in a 1984 interview with The Missouri Review, “I had been in grad school for four years and my wife was about to have a baby and I’d been in Ithaca for twelve years and it was time to leave. So I said yes, took a leave of absence from grad school, and came to The Atlantic.” That leave of absence never ended. “In those days The Atlantic had no masthead and we really didn’t have titles in any formal way. I came as an assistant to the editor. I was there for five weeks before I ever saw Mr. Weeks. In fact, I feared he might not even know I was there.” An older editor, Charles Morton, took Mike under his wing, and he soon developed a portfolio editing both fiction and nonfiction, especially pieces on sports, religion, and the social sciences.

In 1966, Weeks was succeeded as editor in chief by Robert Manning. In his memoir, The Swamp Root Chronicle, Manning recorded that among the editors he inherited was “a young Cornellian named C. Michael Curtis [who] had a sharp ear and a clear eye for promising new short story writers as well as a good grip on the many social issues with which the magazine concerned itself. Mike was a shy and complicated fellow whom the vicissitudes of childhood had afflicted with a stutter that magically disappeared when he taught creative writing at nearby colleges … or when he held a good hand at the poker table.”

In time left over after editing, teaching, and family, Mike applied himself to pickup basketball. He played at YMCAs and writers’ conferences all over the country. He wasn’t tall, and after age 50 he wore rec specs and a bulky knee brace that he used as a weapon when posting up in the paint. But he was an ardent competitor—nickname: “Bear”—who could score layups over taller defenders using crafty spin and whose passing was crisp and creative; unalert teammates were liable to take a hard no-look pass to the nose or the back of the skull. He refused to let advancing infirmity keep him off the court, playing regularly deep into his 80s. The writer Ethan Canin remembered those games:

He pretty much gave me my start as a writer, picking me out of a slush pile that only a person like him would have bothered to read, let alone conscientiously. And then for the next thirty years fighting the good fight, always pushing literary fiction, always pushing young writers. But what I remember most about Mike was the way he played basketball. Rumor had it that in his prime he’d been a Golden Gloves boxer, and he certainly played that way. He showed up on the court with a piece of hardware around his knee that looked like the spurs from a Roman chariot. And it turns out he was in basketball as he was in life—always pushing, always pushing.

Mike possessed both stoicism and a sly wit. The wit emerged from what appeared, deceptively, to be a placid and dry demeanor, and it made itself known like an ambush in his letters and lectures. A mischievous tone sometimes took on an edge. For years, a letter Mike wrote in 1989 hung on the walls of The Atlantic’s offices. A frustrated aspiring contributor who had had his submissions rejected many times had written in to say that he’d heard rumors that the magazine used five different forms of rejection letter for different situations. Mike responded:

The persistent rumors are quite true, though modest in their assessment of our protocols. We have, in fact, many more than five different kinds of rejection slips. One slip, for example, is sent in response to all stories about household pets. Another is used to reject stories about troubled academic couples traveling in Europe (still further distinction is made between stories in which the warring couple is restored in their affection for each other by the spectacle of alien hearts at play and stories in which the more justifiably aggrieved of the pair comes at last to his/her senses and cuts short what promises to become a damaging drift into self-degradation).

Other slips are used for war stories, for stories about adolescents involving college (or high school) chums who finally realize the truth of their relationships, or any story in which one character is a fish. We have a special stock and ink for stories about children who have been abandoned or abused by one or both parents, and for whom the memory has become particularly acute as the child, now an adult, reflects upon the neediness of his/her own child/children. Still other rejection slips are earmarked for stories which make use of anthropomorphism, women who suddenly develop male sexual characteristics, or automobiles that talk back.

We have rejection slips for retired professionals, for children under the age of 14, for writers who hold political office, and for academics who have been told by friends they ought to submit manuscripts to The Atlantic.

We have rejection slips for stories sent simultaneously to more than one magazine, for writers who use only one name (usually a vegetable or mineral), for fiction manuscripts sent as proof that anyone can do better than the author of a recent Atlantic story, and for writers who say they will renew their subscriptions to this magazine only if we will publish their fiction.

We also have a special rejection letter for writers who are more wedded to the possibilities of language than to the niceties of convincing narrative. That is the letter you are reading at this moment.

When The Atlantic was based in Boston, Mike and his family would host lively annual softball games and picnics at their home in Concord and then in Littleton, Massachusetts, where children of staff would play alongside the sheep he kept in the summer, in lieu of having to mow the lawn. Inevitably a basketball game would also break out at the hoop on the garage or across the street. Those were family occasions, and children were never shy around Mike. Tobias Wolff remembers:

One day my wife heard my then-5-year-old son, Michael, talking to someone upstairs, yet she knew he was alone up there. She found him with the telephone in his hand, gabbing away. It was Mike on the other end. He’d called to discuss a story, but was happy to talk to my boy instead. He was laughing when I took possession of the phone. Well, why not? It was surely more fun than listening to me plant my flag on some needless adjective.

Decades of reading more than 10,000 short stories a year in search of the dozen or so that The Atlantic could actually publish that year infused Mike with a deep belief in the importance of fiction to culture, and a kind of impish wisdom about the writing life.

On handling disappointing news from editors: “Take your rejection slips and cover a wall with them. I did that when I was in college. I became fascinated by the different paper colors and typefaces and probably sent work to magazines I otherwise wouldn’t have, except that I wanted to get copies of their rejection slips.”

On what a short story can accomplish: “The value of short fiction lies, perhaps, in its capacity to ignite uncertainty and mindfulness into our lives, as well as to remind us of the perceptiveness and artfulness of the storytellers among us.”

Mike leaves behind six anthologies of short fiction, including Contemporary New England Stories (1992), Contemporary West Coast Stories (1993), God: Stories (1998), and Faith: Stories (2003); five Atlantic National Magazine Awards for fiction, along with many more finalist nominations; and the C. Michael Curtis Short Story Book Prize, which awards $5,000 and publication to a debut book of short fiction by writers living in the South.

He is survived by his wife, the novelist and poet Betsy Cox; his brothers, Ben Curtis and Andrew Curtis; his son Hans Curtis; his daughter, Hilary Curtis Osmer; his stepdaughter, Elizabeth Morrow; his stepson, Michael Cox; and five grandchildren—D. J. Osmer, Jack Morrow, Nate Morrow, Caroline Cox, and Andrew Cox. His oldest son, Christopher Curtis, died in 2013. He is also survived by hundreds of writers whose careers he launched or nurtured; by the thousands more whose work he gave the respect of serious attention; and by a republic of letters enriched by his having contributed to it with such dedication for so long.

This article is a collaboration between The Atlantic and ProPublica.

Jonathan Cox faced an agonizing decision. He was scheduled to teach two classes this past fall at the University of Central Florida that would explore color-blind racism, the concept that ostensibly race-neutral practices can have a discriminatory impact. The first, “Race and Social Media,” featured a unit on “racial ideology and color-blindness.” The second, “Race and Ethnicity,” included a reading on “the myth of a color-blind society.” An assistant sociology professor, Cox had taught both courses before; they typically drew 35 to 40 undergraduates apiece.

As recently as August 2021, Cox had doubted that the controversy over critical race theory—which posits, among other things, that racism is ingrained in America’s laws and power structure—would hamstring his teaching. Asked on a podcast what instructors would do if, as anticipated, Florida restricted the teaching of CRT in higher education, he said that they would need to avoid certain buzzwords. “What many of us are looking at doing is just maybe shifting some of the language that we’re using.”

But a clash with state law seemed inevitable, once Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, proposed what he called the strongest legislation in the nation against “the state-sanctioned racism that is critical race theory.” Last April, DeSantis signed the Individual Freedom Act, also known as the “Stop Woke Act,” into law. It bans teaching that one race or gender is morally superior to another, and prohibits teachers from making students feel guilty for past discrimination by members of their race. And it specifically bars portraying racial color-blindness—which the law labels a virtue—as racist. A DeSantis spokesperson, Jeremy Redfern, told me in an email that the law “protects the open exchange of ideas” (italics in the original) by prohibiting teachers from “forcing discriminatory concepts on students.”

Jonathon Cox on the University of Central Florida campus (Tara Pixley for The Atlantic and ProPublica)

Whatever one thinks of critical race theory, the state’s interference limits the freedom of professors who are experts in their fields to decide what to teach their students. Cox worried, not without reason, that the law effectively banned him from discussing his ideas in class, and that teaching the courses could cost him his livelihood. Cox, who is the only Black professor in the sociology department, will not be considered for tenure until this fall. His salary was his family’s only income while his wife stayed home with their baby.

[Read: Just wait until you get to know DeSantis]

A month before the fall 2022 semester was set to start, he scrapped both courses. Students scrambled to register for other classes. “It didn’t seem like it was worth the risk,” said Cox, who taught a graduate course on Inequality and Education instead. “I’m completely unprotected.” He added, “Somebody who’s not even in the class could come after me. Somebody sees the course catalog, complains to a legislator—next thing I know, I’m out of a job.”

Cox’s decision, along with another professor’s cancellation of a graduate course because of a similar anxiety, created an unusual gap in the sociology curriculum at UCF. Located in Orlando, UCF is Florida’s largest university, with almost 69,000 students.

Cox’s department chair, Elizabeth Mustaine, said she went along with the professors’ wishes because “I thought, I’m not going to stress anyone out about this. It’s crazy.” Still, she added, “it’s an absolute tragedy that classes like this get canceled.” Of the 39 courses offered this past fall by a department that specializes in the study of human society, none focused primarily on race.

In just over two years, critical race theory has gone from a largely obscure academic subject to a favorite bogeyman for Republican candidates. Activists such as Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, conceived of targeting CRT to foment a backlash against measures enacted following George Floyd’s murder in May 2020. At that time, Rufo told me in an email, “school districts across the country suddenly started adopting ‘equity statements,’ hiring ‘diversity and inclusion’ bureaucrats, and injecting heavily partisan political content into the curriculum.” Black Lives Matter and the left were riding high, said Rufo, who denies that structural racism exists in America. In our email exchange, Rufo described “the fight against critical race theory” as “the most successful counterattack against BLM as a political movement. We shifted the terrain and fought on a vector the Left could not successfully mobilize against.”  

The anti-CRT campaign quickly expanded from sloganeering to writing laws. Seven states, including Florida, have passed legislation aimed at restricting public colleges’ teaching or training related to critical race theory. Those laws face impediments. On November 17, 2022, a federal judge temporarily blocked enforcement of the higher-education provisions of Florida’s Individual Freedom Act. “The First Amendment does not permit the State of Florida to muzzle its university professors, impose its own orthodoxy of viewpoints, and cast us all into the dark,” Judge Mark Walker wrote. The DeSantis administration filed a notice of appeal on November 29, and is seeking to stay the injunction pending that appeal. The Eleventh Circuit, where most of the judges are Republican appointees, will hear the appeal, with briefs to be filed in the next few months, and oral arguments potentially this coming summer.

Additionally, with DeSantis’s landslide reelection—after a campaign in which he repeatedly denounced “woke” education—and Republicans gaining a supermajority in both chambers of the state’s legislature, they are likely to look for new ways to crack down on CRT and what they perceive as higher education’s leftist tilt. And at the federal level, conservatives are drafting a “potential suite of executive orders in 2024,” in case the next presidential election goes their way, to “disrupt the national network of left-wing ideological production and distribution,” according to Rufo.

It’s easy to dismiss the conservative crusade against critical race theory as political theater without real consequences. But most colleges and universities offer social-science and humanities courses that address racial inequality and systemic racism, and the anti-CRT laws are already having repercussions for people who teach or take these classes in red states. Moreover, the push against CRT is hitting academia after decades of declines in the proportion of professors protected by tenure, meaning that most faculty members are not in positions secure enough to resist political pressure. Now, forced to consider whether they face any legal or career risk, some are canceling courses or watering down content, keeping quiet rather than sharing their expertise with students.

“When you implement a law like this, you’re asking professors to leave out things that clearly happen or have happened in the past,” Grace Castelin, a UCF undergraduate who plans to introduce a resolution in the student senate condemning the law, told me. “It’s making us more ignorant in this generation and generations to come.”

Students on the Florida State University campus (Tara Pixley for The Atlantic and ProPublica)

Fearful that legislators will retaliate by cutting their budgets, few top university administrators have publicly criticized the laws, which put institutions as well as individual teachers at risk. Indeed, UCF Provost Michael Johnson told faculty last July that the university would “have to take disciplinary action” against any faculty member who repeatedly violated the Individual Freedom Act, because it couldn’t afford to lose a “catastrophic amount”—$32 million—in state funding linked to graduation rates and other metrics. (Johnson declined an interview request.)

Other states have left professors similarly undefended. In Tennessee, which passed a law much like Florida’s, the provost of the state university’s flagship Knoxville campus made clear to professors that the administration wouldn’t necessarily help them. If they were sued under the law, Provost John Zomchick told faculty, Tennessee’s Republican attorney general would decide whether the university would represent them in court. “People freaked out,” said Anne Langendorfer, a senior lecturer at UT Knoxville and the president of a union for campus workers at the state’s public universities.

A university spokesperson, Kerry Gardner, said that the attorney general makes the final decision in “any situation” where individuals are sued in their capacity as university employees. Administrators “wanted to be fully transparent about how the process works,” while assuring faculty that “we will take every step to defend them,” Gardner said. Zomchick, she added, “does not agree with the view of some faculty” that the law “infringes on the First Amendment or academic freedoms.”

With uncertain support from above, most full and associate professors at least enjoy the protection of tenure, which shields scholars whose insights or research are politically unpopular. Tenured professors can’t be fired without cause and a hearing by their peers. Other faculty typically work on contracts, which the university can decide not to renew without specifying a reason.

Some tenured professors in Florida have resisted anti-CRT pressure. The historian Robert Cassanello, the president of the UCF chapter of United Faculty of Florida, was comfortable becoming a plaintiff in one of the lawsuits contending that the Individual Freedom Act violates free speech. Cassanello, who keeps a life-size cutout of Karl Marx in his office window, told me that he’s less threatened by the law than his untenured colleagues are.

Robert Cassanello, a tenured history professor at UCF, became a plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging a state law that restricts the teaching of critical race theory. (Tara Pixley for The Atlantic and ProPublica)

By contrast, Juan Salinas, an assistant sociology professor at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville, declined to be a plaintiff. “For me to stick my name out, I didn’t feel comfortable,” Salinas said. “If I had tenure, I would be more active.”

But even having tenure didn’t feel like “adequate protection” to Scott Carter, the other UCF sociologist who scrapped a course on race in the fall semester. “It’s very sad for students,” Carter told me. “They won’t get the experience of hearing from scholars on contemporary race relations.”

[David French: Free speech for me but not for thee]

Perhaps the surest indication that tenure helps safeguard critical race theory and other controversial curricula is that conservatives are trying to jettison it. In 2021, Georgia’s public-university system made firing tenured faculty easier. After the University of Texas’s faculty council adopted a resolution last February supporting professors’ right to teach critical race theory, Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick called for abolishing tenure for new hires at the state’s public universities. Last April, DeSantis signed a bill authorizing reviews of tenured professors every five years.

The tenure divide has a racial dimension. At many state universities, tenured faculty are overwhelmingly white. Untenured faculty are more likely to be people of color. In the fall of 2018, 7.4 percent of full professors and 10.9 percent of associate professors—the two ranks most likely to be tenured—were Black or Hispanic, compared with 11.8 percent of assistant professors and 17 percent of instructors, lecturers, and others, according to the American Association of University Professors. Women are also disproportionately concentrated in untenured positions.

Besides having less job security than their tenured colleagues, many untenured faculty have less say in which courses they teach. One visiting assistant professor of sociology at an Oklahoma university, who requested anonymity to speak about her workplace, specializes in gender research; her dissertation was on urban women’s experiences with menstrual practices in Kathmandu, Nepal. She wasn’t familiar with critical race theory. But after Oklahoma in 2021 banned “any orientation or requirement” in higher education “that presents any form of race or sex stereotyping or a bias on the basis of race and sex,” she found herself assigned to teach a course on racial and ethnic relations.

“I have consistently seen this course taught by nontenured professors,” she told me. “That’s been the trend,” perhaps because of “tenured professors not wanting to do the dirty work.”

Universities themselves helped create the vulnerability that conservatives are exploiting, saving money—and, in the case of public institutions, offsetting budget cuts—by shifting to a less tenured teaching force. Tenured professors have declined from 39 percent of faculty in 1987, the earliest year for which comparable figures were available, to 24 percent in 2020, according to an AAUP analysis of federal data. There has been a corresponding increase in the proportion of what are known as contingent faculty, who aren’t tenured or on a path to it—instructors, lecturers, teaching faculty who don’t do research, and adjuncts—from 47 percent in 1987 to 67 percent in 2020. The remaining 9 percent are tenure-track faculty like Cox. Two of Florida’s youngest public universities—Florida Gulf Coast University and Florida Polytechnic University, which opened in 1997 and 2014, respectively—do not currently grant tenure at all.

This past fall, Florida Gulf Coast’s social-and-behavioral-sciences department offered one race-focused course, “Race and Culture.” The former FGCU sociologist Ted Thornhill had stirred conservative protests by teaching courses on “Racism and Law Enforcement” and “White Racism,” and by founding a Center for Critical Race and Ethnic Studies. Since Thornhill left in June 2022 for a tenure-track post in the Pacific Northwest, no one has been teaching those courses. (Another instructor is scheduled to teach “Racism and Law Enforcement” this summer.) The university refashioned the center to focus on “the Study of Race, Gender, Ethnicity, and Culture,” dropping the word critical.

“I knew it had a short life expectancy,” Thornhill told me.

FGCU President Michael Martin said that the center was renamed not to appease conservatives but to encompass groups such as Latinos, Native Americans, and Jews. Still, Martin acknowledged that academia has become “overly politicized,” and that Florida “has been out in front of some of this.”

In the past, when academic freedom was threatened, tenure proved to be one of its most effective defenses. During the McCarthy era, when tenured professors were accused of having Communist sympathies, “their institutions had to go through the motions of a formal investigation,” the historian Ellen Schrecker wrote in No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism & the Universities. “Non-tenured teachers had no such rights.” The Cornell physicist Philip Morrison, an ex-Communist who remained politically active, “could not be quietly dropped from the faculty” in the early 1950s, at the height of the Red Scare, because he had tenure, and he was eventually promoted to full professor.

Shantel Buggs teaches a class at Florida State’s College of Social Sciences and Public Policy. (Tara Pixley for The Atlantic and ProPublica)

The sociologist Shantel Buggs is hoping to become a rarity: a tenured Black woman in Florida State’s College of Social Sciences and Public Policy. In 2021, the college had one tenured Black woman. Overall, it had two tenured Black faculty and 59 white faculty.

The daughter of two Marines, Buggs was the first college graduate in her family. She has won teaching awards, published book chapters and articles in refereed journals, developed new courses, and helped establish an anti-racism task force on campus. When UCF offered her a tenured associate professorship in 2021, Florida State gave her a raise to stay.

“Your work is powerful, timely, and extremely socially relevant, and you have quickly gained national recognition in your areas of expertise,” Buggs’s department chair at Florida State, Kathryn Tillman, wrote in 2021. Tillman also called her a “fantastic teacher and mentor.”

As the Individual Freedom legislation was being enacted, Buggs detected a subtle recalibration of her prospects. In April 2022, Buggs told me, Tillman urged her to take advantage of a COVID-19 extension and delay her candidacy for tenure by a year. Buggs protested. “I thought it was unfair that I be asked to wait to go up for promotion in this political climate because what I teach and what I research will place a target on me,” she said. But she agreed, she said, after Tillman expressed concern that higher-ups might deem her publication record insufficient for tenure. (Tillman told me via email that she can’t comment on personnel issues.)

One course that Buggs had developed and taught was “Critical Race Theory.” She last offered it in the spring of 2021. The following September, she learned that it was the only Florida State course listed on the Critical Race Training in Education website, which has been featured on Tucker Carlson Tonight and describes CRT as a “radical ideology” that challenges “the very foundations” of American democracy. Buggs discovered that the website was a project of something called the Legal Insurrection Foundation.

The term insurrection alarmed her. Anxious that she might be trolled or harassed, Buggs was receptive in May 2022 to another Tillman request—to change the name of the course. Tillman told me that she and Buggs had discussed whether another title would help avoid “potential misperceptions about the course’s intent. Together, we agreed to give it a try.” The course, which Buggs plans to teach in the upcoming semester, was relisted as “Sociology of Race and Ethnicity.”

The purpose of the Critical Race Training in Education website is to “document what students can expect at a particular campus,” according to William Jacobson, a Cornell University law professor and the president of the Legal Insurrection Foundation. Jacobson told me that, because he had criticized the Black Lives Matter movement, Cornell alumni petitioned to have him fired, a faculty statement denounced him, and a student group called for boycotting his courses. “Considering what I have gone through, I am very sympathetic to left-leaning faculty who come under attack, but it also is clear that the overwhelming campus cancel culture is from the left towards the right, not the other way around,” he said.

A Florida State spokesperson told me critical-race-theory scholars should have no concern that their specialty will hurt their tenure chances. But Katrinell Davis, the director of the university’s African American Studies program and the only tenured Black woman in the college of social sciences, says she is “saddened” by Buggs’s predicament. “Her trajectory as a scholar may be impacted” by the Individual Freedom Act, “and because of the doubts that might arise around the value of CRT,” Davis told me.

For her part, Buggs said she is open to leaving Florida for another state where she can teach critical race theory without legal consequences, but she doesn’t want to. “I have enjoyed working here,” she told me. “I’m a stubborn person. I don’t want to give DeSantis the satisfaction.”

Buggs also worries that the political climate is rubbing off on students. In the past year or two, Buggs said, some students have begun to “ding” her in evaluations as judgmental or biased. Last spring, one called her a “misandrist”—a man-hater. “Part of what pissed me off is, he got an A,” she said. She has added a disclaimer provided by the faculty union to her syllabi: “No lesson is intended to espouse, promote, advance, inculcate, or compel a particular feeling, perception, viewpoint, or belief.”

Other untenured teachers at Florida State are tweaking their pedagogy. When the doctoral candidate Taylor Darks taught a section of Buggs’s “Race and Minority Group Relations” course this past fall, she invited students to suggest questions for discussion—but told me that she generally weeded out queries that mentioned “white privilege.” And Tyler McCreary, an assistant geography professor, made what he calls a “strategic adjustment” in his fall 2022 honors course on environmental justice. For a class project on a pipeline in northern Canada that affects Indigenous people, McCreary told me he’s been “much more cautious of not just critiquing the development but making sure to include the company’s perspective.”  

McCreary, who is up for tenure this year, has also shifted his teaching method from lecturing to class discussion. He wants to avoid complaints under another new Florida law that allows students to record professors’ lectures for evidence of political bias. The law doesn’t apply to class discussion, because students must consent to be recorded.

Florida State students protest outside a Tallahassee speech by Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA. (Tara Pixley for The Atlantic and ProPublica)

Parked one October afternoon on the Florida State campus was a minibus covered in graffiti of various political persuasions. One commentator had scrawled “Socialism Sucks,” only to have another cross out “Sucks” and replace it with “Is Sexy.” Outside, a field rep for Turning Point USA, a conservative campus network, invited passersby to a speech by the group’s founder, the talk-show host Charlie Kirk. Turning Point USA, which has spent millions of dollars through its advocacy and political arms backing Donald Trump and candidates he endorsed, has what it calls a “watchlist” dedicated to “unmasking radical professors.”

The minibus was intended to signify Kirk’s opposition to censorship. But when I asked him at his talk that night in Tallahassee’s civic center whether he supports laws restricting the teaching of critical race theory, he said he does, and that it’s not a free-speech issue. “It’s a matter of curriculum, right?” he said. “Should we teach the flat-Earth theory in physics, right? Should we teach bloodletting in biology? … There are some ideas that are so reprehensible and provably wrong, they shouldn’t be anywhere close to an academic environment.” (Kirk bridles at the very notion of systemic racism: In his talk, he referred to the aftermath of George Floyd’s death as “Floydapalooza, when we decided to destroy our entire country around a lie that America is systemically racist, which of course we’re not; we’re the least racist country ever to exist in the history of the world.”)

[Ibram X. Kendi: There is no debate over critical race theory]

Kirk’s denial of systemic racism is at odds with the experience of students half a mile away, across the railroad tracks, at the public, historically Black Florida A&M University. Founded in 1887, and located since 1891 on a former plantation, FAMU has long been slighted by the state. When Nathan B. Young, the school’s president from 1901 to 1923, supplemented its agricultural and vocational programs with liberal arts, state officials feared that too much learning might make Black students dissatisfied with manual labor, and dismissed him. After World War II, hoping to avoid desegregating white law schools, Florida opened a law school at FAMU. In 1966, the state prohibited FAMU from enrolling a new law-school class, and transferred funding to Florida State, which wanted its own law school. FAMU’s law school reopened in 2002 in Orlando, where it wouldn’t compete with Florida State’s.

This past September, a group of FAMU students sued the state of Florida, accusing it of discriminating by underfunding FAMU compared with traditionally white schools. Among the disparities cited: In 2015, the state moved the almost $13 million budget for a joint FAMU–Florida State engineering college from FAMU’s general operating revenues to a separate line under Florida State’s authority. (A Florida State spokesperson said that presidents of both universities had agreed to the shift.) Also, the lawsuit says, linking funding to measures such as four-year graduation rates hurts FAMU and other universities that primarily serve low-income students.

In November, the state moved to dismiss the lawsuit, contending that the benchmarks used to determine funding are “wholly neutral,” and that the goal is to “reward institutions who have better student outcomes,” not to “diminish the performance of historically black institutions.”  

In contrast to Florida State’s lush, impeccably maintained campus, FAMU’s shows signs of neglect, including cracked walkways and rusted pipes. Interviewed on campus, plaintiffs in the lawsuit described more indignities: beds with broken frames, a dormitory infested with rats and cockroaches, computers so old that current professors had used them when they were undergraduates.

One of those plaintiffs, FayeRachel Peterson, a first-year graduate student in chemistry, told me that some of the labs she worked in as a FAMU undergraduate lacked vital equipment. She and her classmates frequently had to finish their lab work at Florida State. “FAMU tries its best to give us what it can with what’s given to them,” she said. “What’s given to them is less than what’s given to others.”

Another student, Nyabi Stevens, a third-year psychology major, told me that the state’s treatment of FAMU illustrates the importance of discussions that the Individual Freedom Act is trying to silence. “That’s what the lawsuit is about—pointing out the systemic racism we see,” she said. “I came to an HBCU so I can learn about my history. I am very proud to be in the lawsuit and be a voice for people who don’t have a voice.”

A student on the Florida A&M University campus, in Tallahassee (Tara Pixley for The Atlantic and ProPublica)

UCF students who wanted to learn about critical race theory this past fall had few options. Not only had the three sociology courses been canceled, but an anthropology course on racism was nixed because not enough students signed up for it.

tuOne course that did survive has “flown under the radar,” Christian Ravela, an associate humanities professor, told me. His 18 students learned “how color-blindness has become the dominant racial ideology” and examined the anti-CRT movement, including the Individual Freedom Act, he said. Ravela received tenure in 2022. If he hadn’t, “I would have been most likely to just request to cancel the course.”

The preliminary injunction against the Individual Freedom Act pleased untenured faculty who teach critical race theory, but it hardly allayed their concerns. “There is still an ongoing battle,” Jonathan Cox, the UCF professor, told me. “It seems just as likely that if a more conservative appeals judge reviews this, they will simply reinstate the law. Regardless, DeSantis and his conservative majority in the Florida legislature will probably continue working to keep this law and others in place.”

After canceling his two fall courses on race, Cox has committed to teaching “Race and Ethnicity” in the semester that’s about to begin. His wife has returned to work, so the family could get by on her income if he were to lose his job. Beyond that, he said, “I just decided, I’m not going to run from it. This is what I teach. This is what I study. There’s tremendous value in students learning about these things.”

Kirsten Berg contributed research to this article.