Academia goes full doublethink

And it's upsetting

The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. - George Orwell, 1984

There was a dustup on social media yesterday that perfectly highlights the ironic situation academia is in right now.

A man by the name of David Austin Walsh found himself in a position not unlike the one I was in for the past several years.

He writes:

All of this is obvious. No honest person can say that the desk isn’t stacked against majority group members (read: white dudes) on the academic job market right now. It’s common knowledge. (If you’re in doubt, just as anyone who has served on a hiring committee within the last four years.)

However, like the Emperor’s new clothes, it’s something that’s only spoken about in private: behind closed doors, in hushed tones, and on encrypted text threads.

And here’s the thing: I don’t think this unfair, on a cosmic scale. You could make a case that minorities have been deprived of a fair shot at success in academia for a long time, so a corrective is warranted. If we want to have more diverse faculty going forward, we need to prioritize hiring diverse faculty. That means fewer white men. It’s self-evident.

And so, while these events partly caused me to walk away from a lifelong dream of being a professor, I’ve made peace with them.

What is upsetting, by contrast, is that, despite the obvious, many people still appear to be insisting this isn’t happening.

The line I hear over and over again is, “Well, if the deck is stacked against you, then how do you explain all the white people on university faculty?”

Here’s a UT Austin professor adopting that logic:

Here’s renowned journalist Nicole Hannah Jones (lead author of the 1619 Project at the New York Times) taking the same approach:

Here’s a professor at George Washington University's School of Media and Public Affairs taking the same logic:

This line of thinking makes perfect sense…until you think about it for two seconds. That’s when you’ll realize that statistics on the racial makeup of existing faculty say nothing about how much hiring committees are weighting the scale in favor of diversity candidates now.

And so here’s what’s so ironic: academia is simultaneously tilting the scales in favor of certain candidates and pretending it’s doing no such thing.

The implication, of course, is that for someone like me, or for David Austin Walsh, the fault is, as Shakespeare says, “not in our stars, but in ourselves.”

“The reason you didn’t get a faculty job,” academia seems to be saying, “is because of your own deficiencies. You just weren’t good enough. You probably didn’t apply to the right places. You should just wait till next year.”

“Don’t complain,” it goes on to say. “Don’t speak up, don’t mention the obvious.”

And here’s the thing—people do it. The coercive forces are just too strong. Deviate from it and create the appearance of someone who is working against justice.

It was exactly this sort of thinking that caused David Austin Wallace to retreat back into his ideological corner. Faced with banishment, he begged forgiveness:

A “breech of solidarity.” Solidarity, in this case, of course, meaning enforced groupthink, with big stakes.

How embarrassing.

How relatable.

Again, the effort to instill more diversity in academia is not a bad thing. But we should at least be honest about its consequences. To do otherwise offends both sanity and dignity.

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. - George Orwell, 1984