> Should I tell Daniel about the colleague I’d spoken with just a few weeks earlier, who’d told me, with much frustration and a touch of anger in his voice, that he was getting out of academia because he’d concluded that it is now virtually impossible for a white male to get a tenure-track position in his field? This young man had finished his PhD and published a book. He had applied for scores of tenure-track jobs, but had finally concluded he was not likely to get one. “Picking me,” he explained, “won’t do anyone any good. It won’t help the institution show that it is combatting racism, and it won’t allow any of the members of the hiring committee to assuage their white liberal guilt.” Shortly thereafter, this colleague took a non-academic job as a computer programmer.
There are several things that I notice in this paragraph. The first is that the underlying claims deserve to be analysed with the same rigor that Daniel applied in creating his spreadsheet. If, for example, the chances of a Black male getting a tenure-track position are even lower than that of a White male getting one, then however low the absolute values, one could make a coherent argument for affirmative action. Without the data I can't judge the situation any better than just forming a personal opinion.
The claim that it's virtually impossible for a White male to get a tenure-track position is undoubtedly true (for a not completely unreasonable definition of "virtually"), that is by design and has nothing to do with race. It has everything to do with academia's business model in extracting maximum surplus from grad students and non-tenured faculty. For example, ACOUP (that some HN readers will be familiar with) talks about how terrible the grad student experience is in the humanities [1], and others have likened academia to a drugs gang [2], which I think was also posted on HN when it came out. Tenured positions are in very short supply by design, and subscribers to ACOUP's newsletter can read the author's regular updates on his attempts to get a tenured position (so far with no luck). Some of these are public in his "Fireside Friday" threads.
Also, the bar for a tenured position (or even tenure-track position) is much higher than "had finished his PhD and published a book". Generally in STEM, being able to obtain grant income and produce a steady stream of not-too-terrible publications are the table stakes.
One of the problems why, as the article mentions, "I’d seen plenty of searches in which members of the hiring committee went out of their way to try to hire persons of color" but many of these searches still fail, is that there might be structural problems in the pipeline before you come to the tenure-track decisions, that means PoC are much less likely to get a PhD in the subject in the first place. If this could be shown with the same rigour as Daniel did to demonstrate affirmative action later on in the pipeline, then there are many other motives than "white liberal guilt" for affirmative action later on.
There are several things that I notice in this paragraph. The first is that the underlying claims deserve to be analysed with the same rigor that Daniel applied in creating his spreadsheet. If, for example, the chances of a Black male getting a tenure-track position are even lower than that of a White male getting one, then however low the absolute values, one could make a coherent argument for affirmative action. Without the data I can't judge the situation any better than just forming a personal opinion.
The claim that it's virtually impossible for a White male to get a tenure-track position is undoubtedly true (for a not completely unreasonable definition of "virtually"), that is by design and has nothing to do with race. It has everything to do with academia's business model in extracting maximum surplus from grad students and non-tenured faculty. For example, ACOUP (that some HN readers will be familiar with) talks about how terrible the grad student experience is in the humanities [1], and others have likened academia to a drugs gang [2], which I think was also posted on HN when it came out. Tenured positions are in very short supply by design, and subscribers to ACOUP's newsletter can read the author's regular updates on his attempts to get a tenured position (so far with no luck). Some of these are public in his "Fireside Friday" threads.
Also, the bar for a tenured position (or even tenure-track position) is much higher than "had finished his PhD and published a book". Generally in STEM, being able to obtain grant income and produce a steady stream of not-too-terrible publications are the table stakes.
One of the problems why, as the article mentions, "I’d seen plenty of searches in which members of the hiring committee went out of their way to try to hire persons of color" but many of these searches still fail, is that there might be structural problems in the pipeline before you come to the tenure-track decisions, that means PoC are much less likely to get a PhD in the subject in the first place. If this could be shown with the same rigour as Daniel did to demonstrate affirmative action later on in the pipeline, then there are many other motives than "white liberal guilt" for affirmative action later on.
[1] https://acoup.blog/2021/10/01/collections-so-you-want-to-go-... [2] https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2013/12/11/ho...