Several readers sent this article which clearly describes a real phenomenon, although I’m skeptical 2014 is the relevant start date, although the “Great Awokening” circa 2011 certainly accelerated an existing trend (2014 was also, perhaps not coincidentally, the year the online philosophy profession went crazy). But the article does adduce some striking numbers:

White men may still be 55 percent of Harvard’s Arts & Sciences faculty (down from 63 percent a decade ago), but this is a legacy of Boomer and Gen-X employment patterns. For tenure-track positions—the pipeline for future faculty—white men have gone from 49 percent in 2014 to 27 percent in 2024 (in the humanities, they’ve gone from 39 percent to 21 percent)…. 

At Berkeley, white men were 48.2 percent of faculty applicants in the Physical Sciences—but just 26 percent of hires for assistant professor positions. Since 2018, only 14.6 percent of tenure-track assistant professors hired at Yale have been white American men. In the humanities, that number was just six out of 76 (7.9 percent)….

This remedial action can take many forms. Berkeley commissioned regression analyses to identify which quasi-legal strategies would produce the fewest number of white male job offers. At Dartmouth, the Mellon-to-postdoc program provided ten tenure-track positions for “new hires with a demonstrated commitment to addressing racial underrepresentation in their disciplines.” None were white men. …

Back in 2016, Brown had pledged to double faculty diversity within six years. “There is significant work to do in the coming months and years to implement the Diversity and Inclusion Action Plan,” Provost Richard Locke, himself a white male Boomer, said at the time. A diversity representative was installed on every job search committee. The Office of Institutional Equity and Diversity reviewed all hiring advertisements as well as faculty short and long lists (in tenure-track hiring, the longlist is a collection of potential candidates, and the shortlist is a selection of the most qualified to consider for the interview phase). 

To give a sense of what this meant on the ground: In 2022, there were 728 applicants to tenure-track jobs in the humanities at Brown, 55 percent of whom were men. At every stage of the process the male share was whittled down. The long list was 48 percent male, the short list 42 percent. Only 34 percent of candidates who made it to the interview round were male—and only 29 percent of the jobs were ultimately offered to men. A similar dynamic played out in the social sciences: 54 percent of the 722 applicants were men; 44 percent of the shortlist was male, and just 32 percent of job offers were tendered to men; in the physical sciences, women were 23 percent of applicants, but received 42 percent of job offers.

Ethan made it to the final interview round at Brown. After a long back-and-forth with the search committee—a sign, he believes, of internal dissension—he lost out. “They wanted everything through the prism of race,” Ethan recalled. “Unless you place [race] squarely at the center of your research, you’re vulnerable, especially if your identity doesn’t fit the desired profile.”

Of the men who managed to pass through Brown’s gender gauntlet, almost none are white. Since 2022, Brown has hired forty-five tenure track professors in the humanities and social sciences. Just three were white American men (6.7 percent)…. 

At Berkeley, as recently as 2015, white male hires were 52.7 percent of new tenure-track faculty; in 2023, they were 21.5 percent. UC Irvine has hired 64 tenure-track assistant professors in the humanities and social sciences since 2020. Just three (4.7 percent) are white men. Of the 59 Assistant Professors in Arts, Humanities and Social Science appointed at UC Santa Cruz between 2020-2024, only two were white men (3 percent). 

This is familiar to everyone who isn’t pathologically dishonest, although the numbers certainly make it concrete. American apartheid, and prevailing sexism, excluded Blacks and women from the academy for decades. The attempt to remediate the effects of American apartheid in particular–affirmative action, before it devolved into “diversity” blather–entailed preferential treatment of Black candidates. The attempt to remediate the effects of sexism and sexual harassment entailed preferential treatment of female candidates. Because academic hiring is generally a zero-sum game, this meant that white and male candidates were disadvantaged.

Sometimes this also meant that the Black and/or female candidates were finally treated fairly. Other times it meant that white male candidates who would have prevailed in a race- and gender-neutral hiring process were deprived of academic careers, or academic careers commensurate with their accomplishments. The latter were human beings too, with aspirations and career goals that were not realized. No one knows what the right balance between remediation and fairness to current candidates is, but articles like this one certainly suggest that we are reaching a new tipping point. Together with the Trump Administration’s unambiguous assault on racial preferences in admissions and hiring, my guess is that the era of “diversity” preferences is coming to an end, although it won’t end without many lawsuits to come I expect since the academy’s addiction to “diversity” blather is quite strong.