The Contract of Reason
A dialogue at Harvard
Scene: A chilly April afternoon. Office windows rattle slightly in the breeze off the Charles River. We’re inside the Barker Center at Harvard, where two professors sit in the common room they’ve used for decades as a kind of private refuge. Afternoon sun shines off the wood-paneled walls and the framed portraits of stern-faced men in cravats.
Characters:
Professor Eli Kaufman – A 67-year-old political philosopher, known on campus for his lectures on the Enlightenment and the Federalist Papers. Always dressed in pressed corduroy, tie slightly askew. Still writes with a fountain pen. Models himself on Isaiah Berlin, but secretly reads de Beauvoir.
Professor David Okoro – 52, Nigerian-born cultural theorist and historian of race and empire. Stylish in a crisp linen suit, even in Cambridge spring. Keeps a dog-eared copy of The Wretched of the Earth in his leather satchel but quotes Marx with affectionate irony. Once turned down a media offer from PBS because he "didn’t want to become a mascot."
Kaufman (pouring coffee):
Did you read the piece in The Atlantic, Am I Still Allowed to Tell the Truth in My Class? Great title. Terrible omen.
Okoro (grinning):
I did. And yes, I remember when you got in trouble for assigning Locke without a trigger warning. What was it again—“epistemological colonialism”?
Kaufman (smirking):
And this from a student who spelled “sovereignty” with a Z. Anyway, you know then that the piece is linking to Charles Mills’ The Racial Contract—in other words, you’re in for a ride. Remember the opening line of that tome: “White supremacy is the unnamed political system that has made the modern world.”
Okoro (nodding):
He doesn’t bury the lede.
Kaufman:
No. He buries history and philosophy. He takes a real thing—white dominance—and retrofits it into the metaphysical cause of everything. As if Enlightenment thought was just a clever ruse for racial hierarchy.
Okoro (thoughtfully):
It’s the boldness that seduces people. Mills gives the whole architecture a villain. But yes, I agree—it’s a story told too cleanly. History was never that tidy. And it’s dangerous when our theories start sounding like theology.
Kaufman (sipping):
Or like Trump. That’s the irony. The Right wants to erase race from the record. Charles Mills wants to write it over the whole chalkboard. Either way, we lose the argument.
Okoro:
And we lose the chalk.
Professor Kaufman laughs and they pause a moment. The wind rattles the window again. A pigeon lands on the sill and stares in like an undergraduate waiting for office hours.
Okoro (grinning):
I remember you defending Larry Summers when I first got here. I still have the bruises from that debate. But this one’s different. You can feel it in the air—students scanning syllabi for microaggressions, colleagues afraid to speak without disclaimers. And now these executive orders. It’s grotesque.
Kaufman:
These Trump orders on race and gender are anti-intellectual thuggery—absolutely. But what worries me more is that they’ve found fertile ground. People are tired of being told they’re oppressors for quoting Aristotle.
Okoro (lowering his voice):
Last semester, one of my advisees filed a grievance because I said not all disparities are necessarily injustices. She said I was undermining “the lived experience of racialized embodiment.”
Kaufman (raising an eyebrow):
And here I thought you were the lived experience.
Okoro (dryly):
Apparently not. I’m a bourgeois liberal sellout now. You should’ve seen the committee chair try to explain it without laughing.
Kaufman:
That’s the moment, isn’t it? When even we—who’ve spent years critiquing the system—start looking over our shoulders. When “truth” becomes suspect unless it bleeds. I despise Trump’s orders, but the response from the academy is... self-immolation in slow motion. We’re entering the third period of the French Revolution when Madame Reason is called oppressive.
Okoro (quietly):
Our own Reign of Terror? So what do we have left after reason? Vibes?
Kaufman:
Ha! Vibes were called “virtue” back then. What did Robespierre say, “Virtue, without which terror is disastrous; terror, without which virtue is powerless.”
Look—I’m not saying we go back to pretending liberalism was colorblind. But we shouldn’t pretend that it’s reducible to color, either. The whole point of liberal thought is that it can correct itself.
Okoro (nodding):
It’s a flawed contract. But it’s a contract that can be read. Argued. Amended. Charles Mills wants to tear it up. Trump wants to set it on fire. But maybe the answer is to pick it back up—ink stains, marginalia, and all—and keep reading.
A moment of quiet. The pigeon flaps off.
Kaufman (after a long pause):
You know, I had a student last year—bright kid—who said to me, “Professor, all your talk of reason and liberty—it just feels so... white.” And I said, “Try going against it sometime, and without using it.”
Okoro (smiling faintly):
You always did like a good line.
Kaufman (shrugging):
I recycle.
They sit a moment longer. Outside, students begin to cross the quad for evening classes. The light is thinning. The bell in Memorial Church sounds five.
Okoro (standing, gathering his bag):
Well. I suppose we’d better keep telling the truth. Until someone finally calls security.
Kaufman (chuckling):
They already did last week. You missed it.
They exit. The door swings shut behind them, quietly.