The Reason White Male Academics Can’t Get Jobs
1st June 2024
As a youngish white male historian, stuck in a university system that tends to deem your race and sex as a problem inherited from history, what can you do to make your already slim chances of getting a permanent academic job yet more wraith-like? Based on this week’s case study — a hapless Yale University postdoctoral researcher called David Austin Walsh — the answer seems to be: engage in a frustrated social-media rant about how you’re struggling to find a tenured job, and then in a moment of madness add a reference to preferential hiring practices working against your being white and male.
But why stop there? To create even better conditions for career destruction, make sure that — like Walsh — you have hitherto impressive progressive credentials, having just published a monograph putatively connecting US conservatism to racism and fascism. (Only last week Walsh authored a New York Times op ed to advertise said book, alleging that “a generation of young Republican staff members appears to be developing terminal white nationalist brain”.)
For luck, combine your rant about the difficulty of getting a job as a “white dude” with showboating about personal accomplishments and popularity, and the claim that you are better qualified than many of those to whom you have lost out in the past. In doing all this, you will have gifted envious fellow academics the means and opportunity to ruin you reputationally, while pretending to be striking a blow in the name of anti-racism. Meanwhile, a gleeful conservative commentariat will goad and mock you for being a self-loathing sap, for whom the subservient pose did not work in any case.