Today's minor Twitter kerfuffle:
Absolutely unbelievable.
Today was the day that David Austin Walsh, one of Twitter's premier leftists, complained that he can't get a job because he's discriminated against for being a white man. pic.twitter.com/fit6TTTT4f
— Noah Smith ???????????????????? (@Noahpinion) May 27, 2024
This is frustrating for a person with a numerical brain like mine. I'm curious about this, but I don't think the data exists to decide if there's anything to it. According to the Department of Education, here's the breakdown of assistant professors in 2022:
There are several problems with this:
- It's a count of all assistant professors, not just newly hired ones. Impact: probably small.
- I've excluded professors whose racial status is unknown, including nonresidents. Impact: hard to say.
- This is for all faculty, not 20th century American historians. Impact: could be large.
In other words, it's all but impossible to weigh in on this unless someone, somewhere happens to have collected the relevant data—which I doubt. And I'm not willing to accept anecdotal data because anecdotal data (aka "everyone knows") is routinely inflammatory and wrong.
Also, in case you're interested, slightly less than half of all assistant professors are men.
Anyone have ideas about how we might deduce racial information about the faculty in different academic areas? It wouldn't surprise me at all if the demographics of history departments are way different from, say, physics departments. But do we know?
UPDATE: Further research suggests that about 60-70% of new hires in American History are white. Details here.
Well, traditionally, white men whine a lot. Dr Walsh probably just isn't that good. Plus, he's dragged down by his inflammatory social media posts -- and by continuing to use Musk's Xitter.
Can't say for his reasons, but I have found it tough to leave it, when so many local news and government agencies refuse to move to alternatives.
It's almost as if everyone is hoping that eventually Musk will go away and things will be good again.
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I'm curious what he says that's inflammatory. Looks like his tweets are protected.
That's usually a reaction to other people finding out they're inflammatory.
True but there are lots of different ways to be inflammatory.
Well, being a downtrodden 'leftie' who can't get a job due to his race and gender was probably it.
Not much of a leftist let alone progressive if he can't manage simple solidarity or even anti-racism. Heck, it's against even neo-liberalism, no matter which definition you use, to believe in racist tropes.
@Crissa:
“Not much of a leftist let alone progressive if he can't manage simple solidarity or even anti-racism.”
Indeed. And I thank you for the honesty. Leftist antiracism is, by its own admission, a racist movement.
And I believe you are right, the man in question has probably realized that he’s more of a Liberal than a Leftist;
In other words, he’d prefer a country in which we’re judged on our merits (or character) and not by our immutable traits (such as the color of our skin).
And as more on the left come to realize the true racist nature of what you call progressivism, it will continue to lose adherents.
Racism has no future in this country; not even the type of racism that you evidently prefer. And thank god for that.
If you think having the same shot at jobs as any other race/gender has is 'racism', you've got something wrong in your head.
“And I'm not willing to accept anecdotal data because anecdotal data (aka "everyone knows") is routinely inflammatory and wrong.”
Ironic, since on Friday Kevin was willing to make inflammatory statements about how “lots of college students think Israel shouldn’t exist” based on secondhand anecdotes* of them protesting between October 2023 and today. With near zero evidence of them protesting Israel’s existence prior to October 2023… so weird that their supposed hatred for Israel’s existence just emerged in October. But I’m glad Kevin won’t accept inflammatory anecdotes on anything else but the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Preemptive “fuck you - die in a fire” to Atticus and his ilk, who will soon emerge like locusts with their “whataboutisms” and “so’s your uncle” bleating to devour all decency and good faith on this subject.
*unless Kevin is visiting college protests in Southern California now, any sense he has of “what college students think” is necessarily secondhand and anecdotal.
lol
...says the guy who supports a motorist who drove into a crowded crosswalk, threatened pedestrians, and then killed one. All after saying in the weeks before he was planning to do exactly that, and kill people!
Yeah, what a guy you are.
"It's a count of all assistant professors, not just newly hired ones. Impact: probably small."
Why do you think this makes little difference? The demographics of the existing workforce can differ drastically from the new hires.
To think it would make major difference would risk requiring holding a different viewpoint.
If he's got four years experience, he's not a new hire.
But why should it differ from the makeup of the general population?
The 4 years of experience he mentions are not in a faculty position. Normally it takes about 5 years (can be a bit more or less depending on the field) of post-PhD work before someone can have a strong enough CV to be competitive in a new assistant professor competition, and if he were to get one it would be considered a new hire.
Once someone is hired as an assistant professor it typically takes 5 years to be able to be promoted. So you can have a pool of say 1000 Assistant Professors (let's say 70% of them being White males), but over the last 3 years only 30% of the new hires each year being a White male.
By looking at the total there seems to be a big bias towards White males, but by looking at the actual new hires that bias is no longer present or actually the other way, it just hasn't been on for long enough to be reflected in the total pool of people in that position.
but it's only a 5 to 7 year delay. Of course turnover of tenured faculty is much much slower.
How do you have five years before being hired?
I'm clearly missing something.
For those who want a tenure track faculty position getting a PhD is just the mere minimum and on its own is nowhere close to enough.
He said he has +4 years post PhD. That means it's been +4 years since he got his degree. That time between degree and getting a faculty position is incredibly common (for most fields it is a bit on the short end unless you are a superstar).
He is currently doing Postdoctoral work , which is pretty much mandatory for anyone looking for a faculty position, and the fact he is already whinging despite being just 4 years (this despite his postdoc position being at Yale) tells me that he probably isn't all that great relative to his peers, or he wants to be given the superstar treatment without being one, so he is looking for easy excuses for his perceived failures.
He has zero years of experience since he hasn't landed a job.
He said four in his post!
Because assistant professors are overwhelmingly those early in their careers. They're all kind of new hires.
Because assistant professors is an inherently short term position. You either become associate/tenure or are let go.
You really have to screw up things or be very bad at the job to not be promoted and become tenured. It varies from discipline to discipline and univeristy to university but in most, anywhere from 60 to upwards of 90% of assistant professors get promoted to associate professors.
Not to mention that 5-7 years, the time normally given to do so, wouldn't be considered "short term" in pretty much any other field.
I don't know Drum's reason for thinking this likely has little impact, but my reason for thinking this is that comments like the one above have been made for decades, so there seems to be little reason to think that something has happened in the last couple of years that explains this.
I would love data, too. Anecdotally, I have experienced plenty of conversations in my university and at academic conferences suggesting that there are lots of jobs not particularly interested in hiring white males.
Going down to normal distribution versus the unusual high before, I guess white guys are just feeling like everyone else did.
Going down to normal distribution is definitely a thing here, but not the only thing. The other half of this numbers game, discussed below, is the huge squeeze on tenure-track slots, driven by demographics and cost-saving measures. And also driven by the fact we overproduce people with Ph.D.'s to a vast extent.
Of course it's a painful transition. I'm not saying we shouldn't do it, though.
We overproduce some PhDs that want to work in academia (e.g., historians, English professors) and underproduce others (e.g., petroleum engineers, artificial intelligence focused on remote sensing) where there is great difficulty in finding qualified academic-oriented PhDs. The latter can make more money in the private sector.
We massively overproduce petroleum engineers and almost all engineering disciplines. I doubt there is a shortage of AI engineers though certainly a shortage of large language model engineers. Inevitably happens in a field that had it's first success 2 years ago when it takes 4 years to produce a PhD.
A shortage of people who actually know how it works, perhaps.
Running algorithms isn't the same as designing them.
Not engineers with a BSc, engineers with a PhD who wish to work in academia. It has been ~10 years since I interacted much with the petroleum engineering folks, but at the time, they were effectively begging industry PhDs to come back and teach classes. They couldn't get qualified applicants for an effective faculty search. I doubt that has changed much but I could be wrong.
AI-remote sensing PhDs are in such high demand that it is nearly impossible to find a postdoc with these skills. The PhD candidates get offers as soon as they publish their first paper.
Even in my quantitative adjacent field, most of the PhDs do not even list academia as their first choice and everyone that I have known has gotten a job. Mostly this is because they can make more money in the private sector, can better select where they live, or do not want the grind of academic life.
This is obvious to anyone in academia, especially in the past 5 years. Noah is a progressive and so by definition what you say is common can't be happening.
White male historian here who has run a hiring committee pretty much every year for the last decade. The problem with people like Walsh is they are applying to jobs that exists in their heads, not one that is actually there. We are a large urban teaching college in Texas. We have hired three , four white women, a south Asian women, a black man, and two white men. When I hire I am looking for someone who can teach, who can work with students and can engage in institutional service, and in not full of themselves. The least important thing is someone's mind blowing scholarship the innerworkings of the 1928 anarchist convention. The typical dude out of grade school is going to write a cover letter all about how great their scholarship is and not pay attention to what the job actually is for 90% of academic jobs on the market, teaching and working with students. They worked with an adviser who got that R1 back in 1981 and only knows who to prep someone for that market. But that market is gone.
After looking a thousands of CVs for academic historians in the last decade, in general women end up doing way more service in graduate school and early in their career. They do more mentorship with undergraduates in their early career, they focus more on their teaching. So while 75 to 85% of our applicants are men, our finalists are often 60% to 75% female. The three men we hired, the two white men we hired, had backgrounded that emphasized working for students, they had the best teaching demo in that search and more thoughtful interview, and so they got hired. That simple. I will note however, that what used to happen, before I took over ,is that 12/13 of the faculty at my college were white guys like me. So 20 years ago guys like Walsh would get hired, because schools just hired the white dude with the best name on their degree regardless of if they could do the job. Unsurprisingly our outcomes were horrible, students tried to avoid taking history classes. That has changed and now the system seems unfair to guys like Walsh.
Thanks for bringing us up to date. The research institutions still exist, and still focus on scholarship, I would expect, right? AND, that is a shrinking category even so, I would expect.
Yes, but is going to be even worse for Walsh. The 20th century American political historian line at the RI was filled years ago. Walsh is basically waiting for his adviser to die to get that spot. If you are going to create a new line you are not going to create a another 20th century American line. because you already did that years ago. We added two Mexican American history lines since we are in Texas and Mexican Americans are a huge part of our enrollment and not surprisingly we hired ended up hiring two Mexican Americans. Even if I was just running a 20th century political search and two candidates were totally equal and one could ALSO do 20th century Mexican American history that is the person I would hire. I could get better enrollment which would boost our budget and justify another line.
So we've a mismatch--those educating aspiring professors represent a different demographic distribution than the students the aspiring professors will have to teach.
It will take another x years for the two distributions to reach a reasonable balance.
x= 30?
For?
I think the most important fact in this conversation is recognizing that we produce far more people with Ph.D.'s in many fields, including history, than there are teaching jobs at universities.
The second point is if two candidates seem otherwise roughly equal, yes, the hiring committee will prefer the black woman to the white man. This makes the numbers game pretty grim if you are a white male in those fields.
In his book “The Graduate School Mess,” Leonard Cassuto describes the anachronistic practice of training PhDs for nonexistent academic jobs as “minting expired passports.” Even in the STEM fields, a shrinking minority of PhDs get tenure track academic positions.
When has it not been this way? I remember in the 90s listening to English PhD students griping about the lack of academic jobs and thinking "Why should anyone care?". Has there ever been a conspiracy to hide the fact that PhDs from the humanities are massively overproduced? I doubt it. In my mind, he's another whiner but now his ilk have a new reason to whine.
There was an essay I read back then saying PhD's should be cabbies. Those in politics could take the UN and embassy runs. Economics? Business districts. History? Do the touristy history runs.
You might want to look up the word "anachronistic."
Tgis is perhaps not the best data, but it perhaps lets us scale:
https://www.quora.com/How-many-applicants-are-there-for-a-typical-professors-position-at-a-university
so if we accept that there are 100 applicants for every position, then the normal chance of being hired is 1%.
Let us assume that all positions only go to white men, this rises to 1.3%. Hardly a noticeable increase anecdotally.
What we don't have is the racial makeup of the applicants. We can state that minorities are under represented in doctoral programs.
What I think this crude analysis suggests is:
- the hiring decisions even if they are practicing affirmative action will have. minuscule effect on the effective chance of a white male being hired
What I sense is that:
- it is visibly easier for a minority to be hried to fill the limited slots held by minorities
so it feels like a major reduction in the opportunities for white males by comparison even though the actual odds vary minimally.
Of Cours this model suggests that the real problem is minorities are under represented in the doctoral programs. If they filled out the ranks of minority doctoral degree holders then everyone would be equally disadvantaged.
But that does not seem to fit the desired narrative..
I think your 1% is not quite the right way to think about it, since each year there are, say, 10 openings in different universities to which all of those 100 applicants apply.
In my field I think we have about 1500 or so Ph.D.'s a year, and likely about 10,000 - 15,000 faculty in American institutions, so maybe 300 or 400 get hired into faculty positions each year, though most not in R1 universities. A guess, as I don't know of any national statistics for this.
" We can state that minorities are under represented in doctoral programs." Asians are over represented in PhD programs. Only under-represented minorities are under represented. But that is as interesting as saying black is black.
Are schools gutting their social science depts?? I have read complaints about it. Also have read that small colleges are struggling.
Record number of Ph.D.'s being awarded:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2024/02/05/number-of-doctoral-degrees-awarded-in-us-rebounds-to-all-time-high/?sh=2c60c4cd5d55
Decreasing number of tenure track positions:
https://universitybusiness.com/tenured-faculty-in-steady-decline-while-part-time-and-graduate-workers-rise-per-report/
Granted not all Ph.D's want to work in academia. But I'll there are lots of people like Walsh of ALL racial/ethnic backgrounds.
Also, I have a friend who worked for several years as an adjunct faculty making peanuts before he was hired for a tenure track position (at a different university). I wonder if Walsh has tried that or it's tenure track or nothing?
Even for adjunct faculty hires, they won't pick one they feel will walk out mid-semester.
Something he should keep in mind is that a degree in 20th Century American History will have far fewer options (and most of them in the USA), than say a degree in Chemistry or other STEM field, and not just within the USA but also abroad.
Even in those much more broadly applicable degrees the vacancies are few and far between, so most PhD graduates will never get a faculty position regardless of their race. Here he is competing in an even smaller field.
Given the source cited provides data not only for 2022, but 2021 and 2020, at least one sanity check of that assumption could be made by looking at the changes.
Perhaps the demand for teachers in a
uselessdecreasingly popular field like history is not what it used to be?Correct me if I'm wrong but the subtext of your post appears to be "history is useless, also I'm a moron".
+1
Demand for PhD historians is, and should be, much lower than demand for PhD scientists or engineers. But that is a far cry from saying history is useless. That's the kind of thing Trump would say.
I doubt history is becoming decreasingly popular as it has been unpopular for 50 years.
It's more likely that both this guy and Noah Smith are idiots than anything else.
It's the law of small numbers.
Talk about junior professor hires generally? The numbers aren't large but maybe you can infer something if you have them.
Talk about junior professors of USA history? The numbers are so small that large percentage variations or inconsistencies may be without statistical significance. Again, this is if you have the figures.
Current race baiting in Melbourne (State of Victoria, Australia) is about Sudanese youth. Annually Victoria has about 13,000 youth offenders. The steady decline in that number is significant.
A year with over 500 Sudanese origin offenders had them over represented. Last year with figures was less than half and Sudanese origin underrepresented. But on such low numbers the conclusions are probably worthless, even if policing weren't demonstrably prejudiced against dark skinned young people.
History is one of those disciplines that has far more Ph. D. students than professor-jobs. Which explain that so many historians earn their bread as journalists, music critics or what not.
Anybody entering a career in history (including the complainer above) must be fully aware of this fact. Complaining about it is like complaining about the weather. Blaming black people for it is self indulgent and plain wrong.
The combined history faculties across the country are probably too small a group to allow statistically significant judgement of systemic anti-white racism (if such a thing even exists), i.e. to compute a probability that the racial composition is in fact other than random.
"History is one of those disciplines that has far more Ph. D. students than professor-jobs." That's true of every discipline.
"...Blaming black people for it is self indulgent and plain wrong."
Why assume he is blaming black people? He has two handicaps being white and being male. Being male may be the bigger problem. White women are probably taking more of his preferred jobs than black men.
Oh, the humanity.
"In 2021, 8% of PhDs awarded to US citizens were given to Black researchers, which is less than the 12% of the US population that is Black. In 2022, 2,647 African Americans earned doctorates from US universities, which was the highest number ever recorded. However, this is still less than half of the percentage that would be achieved if racial parity in doctoral awards was achieved"
Doesn't break it down enough.
By 1920 women were earning 34% of Bachelors degrees and blacks were not even going to college. By 1970 41% of bachelors were earned by women
One thing Drum has not considered is the disadvantages blacks face in elementary and high school education. He mentions that black kids under perform whites in certain subjects (like math and the sciences) but doesn't think forward to what that means when those same kids are applying to colleges and universities 8 years later!! It seems natural to me that blacks would represent a smaller portion of todays PhD's. They are still playing catch up with early education
White women OTOH were given the same early education that white men were.
There's still much that needs to be done
"It's a count of all assistant professors, not just newly hired ones. Impact: probably small." It's generally impossible to be an assistant professor for more than 5 years. You either become an associate professor or are terminated.
Lawyers Guns and Money has run several posts over the years about the decline of history teaching in American universities, complete with gloomy predictions that it will be completely eliminated in the foreseeable future. Even if that's unduly pessimistic, it seems to be a shrinking discipline with a corresponding absence of employment opportunities.
It seems to me that Kevin just doesn’t appear to grasp the potential ramifications of this issue:
“I'm curious about this, but I don't think the data exists to decide if there's anything to it.”
Let’s just imagine for a moment that such data existed. If it validated the concerns of the tweet in question, that would form the basis for such an ungodly number of lawsuits that I’m uncertain how much of higher education would even survive.
So, just to be clear: the Leftist, or “progressive,” ideology of “antiracism” explicitly promotes racism. It is unambiguous on this point. If you are an “antiracist,” you’re promoting racism.
Perhaps you have an argument to support your position, but your position, nevertheless, is an embrace of racism.
Ibram Kendi, author of How to be an Antiracist, is explicit on this point when he states that the remedy for past discrimination is present and future discrimination.
Kendi’s antiracism insists on a form of so-called equity that mandates equal racial outcomes. And there is no possible way to achieve such a goal without illegally considering race (along with other immutable traits) in hiring decisions.
This is the racist ideology behind DEI. And pretty much every Liberal college or university has established a DEI administration to enact antiracism’s illiberal agenda.
That much is well known. So why aren’t we already knee deep in lawsuits? No doubt that’s a complex question. But one factor would be proof. In other words: data.
If and when the kind of data that Kevin is looking for becomes available, or is found through legal or other means, the results could reshape our society.
Did kevin not consider that idea when he casually mentioned that such data didn’t seem to be readily available?
APS keeps data on the physics side.
Minorities are generally at a disadvantage getting into elite universities due to financial issues and substandard secondary education. Academic positions today are highly competitive (more applicants than positions), and it is hard for an applicant to stand out. While they face greater challenges in their training, it is possible the few minorities who make it may (or may not) have an advantage at this point competing against the sea of white male applicants. In any case white male is still the "hot ticket" when choosing your parents and gender.
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