I received this email on February 1, 2022:
Hi Prof. Hicks,
I saw your Facebook post about Jordan Peterson’s resignation and noticed XX’s comment. While I’m uncomfortable speaking up publicly about it for fear of retaliation against me from my faculty peers, I did want to note that I recently had a chair of a search committee openly brag to me (and others in our department) about excluding all white men from their search. My understanding is that this field is about 70% white and 75% male, so we are talking about excluding a very significant proportion of candidates.
And beyond discrimination against white men, during that same search the finalists came down to an Asian woman, a black man, and a black woman. I was discussing the candidates with a member of the search committee after the final interviews and expressed that I felt that the Asian woman was the strongest candidate, to which the committee member replied that, “Yeah, but she checks the wrong diversity boxes.”
Perhaps XX simply feels that “virtually no chance” was too extreme of a characterization, but if anyone thinks that there isn’t an extreme barrier to white men (and other non-preferred groups) in academia right now, I think they are extremely misguided.
[Anonymous]
